THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 19, 1995 TAG: 9510190378
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF AND WIRE REPORT
LENGTH: Long : 313 lines
Who is he, what is he, and will he run?
The answers to the first two questions are gradually being sketched out. But only Gen. Colin Powell can answer the third one.
The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has been flirting with a run for the presidency, says he'll make up his mind soon after he winds up his nationwide book tour Friday with two stops in Norfolk.
Powell will sign copies of his autobiography, ``My American Journey,'' at Norfolk Naval Base and a downtown bookstore.
If he decides to go for the presidency, he has said it will be as either a Republican or an independent.
With polls showing that he enjoys enormous popularity, Powell has become the political man of the moment on his 23-city tour.
His book sheds little light on his political views. But in interviews since the book came out, Powell has staked out a centrist blend of positions on a variety of issues.
Even in a country inured to hype, the amount of attention lavished on Powell has been phenomenal. Running through almost all the coverage so far is a hail-the-conquering-hero tone.
As his stature continues to grow, a revisionist campaign is emerging against him. It seeks to cast doubt on his status as a Persian Gulf War hero: because he raised options oth er than sending troops to Kuwait and because Saddam Hussein is still in power.
These critics also disparage Powell with the ultimate Pentagon put-downs: that he was a ``reluctant warrior'' too hesitant to commit troops to war, and a ``political general,'' or desk-jockey who got where he is by skillfully plying the bureaucratic waters of Washington, not commanding troops in the field.
Questions also are being raised about the less-than-zealous investigation Powell conducted into reports of atrocities in Vietnam in 1968 when he served there in the aftermath of My Lai; and about his role in the Iran-Contra affair, for which he was given pointed, but little-noticed, criticism by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.
Even as the scrutiny of Powell intensifies, a fundamental question overrides all others: Is America prepared to elect a black man president?
``It's a fascinating question,'' Powell said in a recent interview. ``I have had a number of black friends come to me, very prominent people, and they've said, `Colin, don't fool yourself. At the end of the day, when they go into that booth, they won't be able to do it.' I'm less sure. As I've traveled around the country, I have had positive reactions in New York and San Francisco, but just as positive in . . . Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi. In fact, as I run into people who encourage me to run for office, some of the strongest encouragement I get is from white Southerners. . . . So I come to the conclusion that it is possible. It is possible for a person of color to be elected president.''
Colin Luther Powell was born 58 years ago in Harlem, the younger of the two children of Luther Theophilus Powell and Maud Ariel McKoy, who had married after emigrating separately from Jamaica in the early 1920s. The elder Powell worked as a shipping clerk in the garment district. His wife was a seamstress.
Colin Powell was a below-average student in high school and at City College of New York, where he pulled a C-minus average and majored in geology because it was easy. But then he joined ROTC and found he was a good soldier. ``The uniform gave me a sense of belonging, and something I had never experienced all the while I was growing up,'' Powell writes. ``I felt distinctive.''
So he joined the Army in 1958. Stationed at Fort Devens, west of Boston, in November of 1961, Powell had a blind date with Alma Johnson, a graduate student at Emerson College. They courted until the summer of 1962, when Powell received orders for Vietnam. Alma said she doubted she'd be waiting for Powell when he returned, so he asked her to marry him, and she accepted.
Powell was to be part of a group of American military advisers to the South Vietnamese army that would bring the U.S. contingent to more than 11,000. He read up on Vietnam and the U.S. mission, and before he left was preaching the domino theory to friends, gung ho. He arrived in Saigon on Christmas morning 1962, and soon plunged into the jungles. Before long, he found himself torching the crops and thatched huts of suspected Viet Cong.
``However chilling the destruction of homes and crops reads in cold print today,'' Powell writes in his book, ``as a young officer, I had been conditioned to believe in the wisdom of my superiors, and to obey. I had no qualms about what we were doing. This was counterinsurgency at the cutting edge.''
After a posting at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, Powell was sent back for a second tour of duty in Vietnam in July 1968, as deputy chief of staff for operations at Americal Division headquarters in Chu Lai.
In November, a helicopter he was riding in crashed. Despite having a broken ankle, Powell made it out, then went back to rescue his commanding officer and others from the burning chopper. He was awarded the Soldier's Medal for bravery in noncombat situations, to go with a Purple Heart he'd received during his first tour when a spike from a booby trap pierced his foot.
That December, Powell was asked to look into allegations made in a letter written by a soldier in the Americal Division, Spec. 4 Tom Glen, who had completed his tour of duty the previous month. The letter, addressed to Gen. Creighton Abrams, asserted that Americal soldiers had routinely been involved in murdering and torturing Vietnamese civilians. It alleged that members of the Americal Division ``for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.''
The letter made no reference to specific dates or places where atrocities had been committed, though Glen was apparently aware that eight months earlier, in March 1968, an Americal platoon led by 1st Lt. William Calley Jr. had murdered 347 men, women and children in what would become known as the My Lai massacre.
Glen's letter to Abrams was forwarded to Powell, who was ordered to look into the matter and report back to Americal's adjutant general within three days. Powell's memo to the adjutant general, dated Dec. 13, 1968, criticized Glen for not coming forward earlier, and for not providing enough specific examples to support the charges he was making.
``Although there may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians'' and prisoners of war, ``this by no means reflects the general attitude toward the division,'' Powell wrote. ``In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.''
In the interview, Powell said he had heard nothing of My Lai at the time, and thought the Glen letter was ``not investigable'' because it lacked specifics. Asked if he should have interviewed Glen, Powell said: ``I just don't know. I mean, Glen was now home. Maybe someone should have interviewed him. But remember, we are at the end of the food chain at this point, and I'm running a division. All I'm doing is responding to the headquarters. . . . Whether somebody in MACV (headquarters) or somewhere should have interviewed Glen, I just don't know.''
Four months later, in April 1969, a team of investigators from the Army Inspector General's Office looking into My Lai showed up and asked Powell, who was custodian of the journals that recorded the daily activities of Americal troops, to search the journals for any sign of an engagement in which a large number of people had been killed. Powell did, and discovered what was apparently the first written evidence of the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968.
In his book, Powell does not mention the Glen letter and devotes two of 618 pages to My Lai. He concludes that it was ``an appalling example of much that had gone wrong in Vietnam. . . . The troops became numb to what appeared to be endless and mindless slaughter. . . . The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.''
Returning home in the summer of 1969, Powell decided to polish his resume by earning an MBA from George Washington University, then was asked to apply for the prestigious White House Fellow program. He spent most of the next 20 years in Washington, thereby acquiring the ``political general'' label.
Some critics have accused Powell of misrepresenting himself as the hero of the Persian Gulf War, since he didn't initially lead the charge in the internal policy debates over whether to commit half a million U.S. troops to the mission of driving Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
According to his book, Powell basically played the role of broker, advising President Bush on what his options were. He said he did recommend keeping alive the prospect of an offensive but also laid out two other options: using U.S. forces already on the ground in Saudi Arabia to contain any further Iraqi aggression, and waiting for economic sanctions to work. Bush decided containment and sanctions were inadequate, and chose the offensive.
Powell still defends the way the war ended, with the Iraqi army routed in Kuwait but Saddam Hussein still in power. He noted that the mission authorized by the United Nations was the liberation of Kuwait, not marching on to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam.
``It's a legitimate criticism to say that we could have killed more, we could have destroyed more tanks,'' Powell said in the interview. ``But was the Iraqi army in Kuwait killed as an entity that is occupying Kuwait, and never again to rise to its level of prominence? I think I can make a case, yes, it was killed. The Iraqi army of today has about 25 divisions in it. Pre-gulf war it was 60-something. . . . I'm also reasonably sure that Saddam Hussein will pass. . . . He's going to go at some point, and when he's gone, then people can take a look and see whether or not it all worked out or didn't work out. I think history will be kind to the decision.''
Powell sees nothing wrong with being called a ``reluctant warrior,'' saying that a top military officer should be reluctant to commit troops to battle until other options fail.
``I once did an editorial board with a very large press organization out in California,'' Powell recalled, ``. . . and somebody threw a question at me and said, `How come you're not a hawk?' I said, `Look, I'm not paid to be a hawk, or a dove. I'm paid to be senior military adviser for the secretary of defense and the president and the other members of the NSC. My job is to give the best military advice on how to accomplish a political objective, in the most effective, efficient way possible. I shouldn't be out there looking for wars. . . . We have had a history . . . where we weren't reluctant enough to get involved in things, without knowing what the hell it was all about. So I won't apologize for it.''
Powell is of the post-Vietnam military school that says there should be no more gradualism, no more involvements without clear political goals, and that ``decisive force'' should be committed to a battle with firm time limits. He strongly opposed U.S. intervention in Bosnia (``We do deserts, not mountains'') because most, or all, of those requirements were missing.
Powell's involvement with the Iran-Contra affair, while peripheral, was pointedly criticized by Special Prosecutor Walsh in his final report. Both Powell and his boss at the time, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, were on record as opposing the plan by Robert McFarlane, then the national security adviser, to send TOW missiles to Iran as an opening to supposed moderates there. But Reagan approved it, so Powell was the man who arranged the transfer of 4,000 TOW missiles to the CIA, which then sent them to Iran.
Powell was questioned by congressional investigators about whether Weinberger kept a diary. Powell said he did not, but alluded to notes Weinberger had kept regularly. Questioned later by the special prosecutor, Powell referred to the notes as a diary, something Walsh's staff seized on as a contradiction. Walsh's final report concluded that Powell's testimony was ``at least misleading. . . . While Powell's prior inconsistent statements could have been used to impeach his credibility, they don't warrant prosecution.''
In his book, Powell indicates he simply misspoke, and did not mean to imply that the notes he saw Weinberger take amounted to a diary. He called Weinberger's indictment by Walsh on perjury and obstruction charges ``a disgrace.'' He said Weinberger was ``quibbled to death by an out of control independent counsel.''
Powell says he is comfortable being classified as either a moderate Republican or a conservative Democrat. He said he voted for John Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and George Bush in 1988 and 1992. He said he couldn't recall whether he voted for Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey in 1968, but ``probably'' voted for Nixon over George McGovern in 1972.
What kind of a campaign would Powell run?
If his speeches on the lecture circuit are any indication, his chief platform would be a values-based message personified by his own life story as Exhibit A of the virtues of hard work, perseverance, discipline and education. And then there would be the Army as a model. Powell's favorite story when he talks to a crowd is about the black soldier who, asked by Sam Donaldson on the eve of the gulf war if he was afraid, gestured toward his buddies and said: ``I'm not afraid because I'm with my family.''
``That story never fails to touch me or the audience,'' Powell writes in the book. ``It is a metaphor for what we have to do as a nation. We have to start thinking of America as a family. We have to stop screeching at each other, stop hurting each other, and instead start caring for, sacrificing for, and sharing with each other.''
Still to be explained: how the Army's hierarchical model would be transferred to civilian life where people don't have to take orders.
Powell says he thinks the so-called ``Powell phenomenon'' is less a commentary on him than it is a failure of Democratic and Republican leaders. He said ``channel-surfing'' voters who ousted Bush in 1992 and elected a Republican House of Representatives in 1994 are ``not finished. They're still sort of searching, searching for . . . some people say a knight on a white horse. Maybe a knight on a black horse!'' MEMO: Staff writer Bill Sizemore contributed to this report from The Boston
Globe.
ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
U.S. GOVERNMENT ARCHIVE PHOTOS
Powell
[B&W photos]
Powell
POWELL'S CAREER
1968 - Powell was asked to investigate reports of U.S. atrocities
in Vietnam, including the My Lai massacre. Critics say his
investigation was less than zealous.
1972 - Powell entered the prestigious White House Fellow program.
He spent most of the next 20 years in Washington, acquiring the
``political general'' label.
1984-86 - Powell was the top military aide to Defense Secretary
Caspar Weinberger during the Iran-Contra affair. Special Prosecutor
Lawrence Walsh's final report concluded that Powell gave misleading
testimony about it.
1990-91 - During the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, Powell
didn't lead the charge to send troops to Kuwait. But critics say he
has misrepresented himself as a war hero.
POWELL IN NORFOLK ON FRIDAY
Gen. Colin Powell will make two book-signing appearances in
Norfolk Friday as he wraps up a nationwide tour promoting his
autobiography, ``My American Journey.''
11 a.m. to 1 p.m.: Navy Exchange, Norfolk Naval Base. Only
authorized customers of military exchange stores will be allowed
entry. One book-signing per customer; no books will be
personalized.
3 to 5 p.m.: Prince Books and Coffeehouse, 109 E. Main St. Two
book-signings per customer; if demand is heavy, the limit could be
cut to one. No books will be personalized.
Powell also will be available to the media at 10:45 a.m. at the
Navy Exchange. Members of the media must sign up by 9 a.m. to
attend.
POWELL ON THE ISSUES
When Gen. Colin Powell began flirting with the idea of running
for president, he hadn't given Americans a clue to where he stood on
the issues. But as he has toured the country promoting his
autobiography, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has
expressed views in a number of areas. Here's what he has revealed so
far:
ABORTION: Supports abortion rights, but not federal funding of
abortions.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Praises goals but opposes quotas or
preferences that go beyond guaranteeing equal treatment and access.
Says affirmative action helped him rise in the Army.
BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT: Supports.
CRIME: Supports death penalty. Supports three-strikes laws
``putting away'' people who commit three felonies.
ENTITLEMENTS: Says Social Security, Medicare and other
entitlements should be on the table when trying to rein in deficit.
Says growth in Medicare costs must be controlled, and would consider
higher contributions from recipients.
FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY: Would review need for each department in
government, exempting only Defense, State and Treasury from having
to justify their existence.
GUN CONTROL: Supports gun control, including registration or
waiting periods.
HEALTH CARE: Opposes universal health care.
IMMIGRATION: Opposes social services to illegal immigrants but
says government has some responsibility for their children. Favors
social services for legal immigrants and continuing to grant U.S.
citizenship to children born in the United States, regardless of
parents' legal status. Favors tougher border controls.
PRAYER IN SCHOOLS: Opposes organized prayer in schools but would
not stand in the way of a ``quiet moment'' during which children may
or may not pray.
TAXES: Would consider a tax increase as a way to reduce the
deficit. Supports a reduction in the capital gains tax.
WELFARE: Says denying additional cash benefits to women on
welfare who have more babies would end up penalizing children.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY COLIN POWELL by CNB