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You don't hear much about Colin Powell these days. A man who until recently was featured routinely in the daily news and once courted by both political parties as Presidential timber now passes his time quietly in private life. Like an inactive volcano he is still there, quiet but respected for the power he could wield if he chose.
Karen DeYoung, a senior editor and foreign policy reporter at the Washington Post, examines Powell's life in fascinating detail in this book. She does her best to get inside his head and explain some of the puzzling aspects of his personality. When you turn her final page, you know an awful lot about Colin Powell as a person and about his career path, but whether you truly understand what makes the man tick is hard to say. In important respects he remains an enormously respected enigma.
DeYoung covers the early stages of Powell's military career in workmanlike detail, but inevitably her main focus, dominating the last half of her 523-page text, details his four-year tenure as George W. Bush's Secretary of State and his involvement in the run-up to the Iraq war.
The obvious questions abound: What was his attitude toward the Iraq venture? Did he try to derail it? Why did he not resign when his counsel was ignored? Why did he reject the idea of running for President himself? Is he in any sense blameworthy for the unfortunate turn of events in Iraq? If he is not, who is?
DeYoung's portrait of Powell, buttressed by an impressive amount of research, shows us a man trained in the military virtue of loyalty, not by nature an activist firebrand, convinced that persuasion and diplomacy must be tried before guns are fired, utterly repelled by down-and-dirty politics --- and caught in the middle of fierce ideological brawls without the means or temperament to make his own views prevail. Her account of the "catfights" among Bush's advisers is not pretty. Powell himself, unwillingly caught up in the crossfire, comes across as noble yet often ineffectual.
DeYoung's book amplifies some of the points made in Powell's own 1995 memoir, MY AMERICAN JOURNEY --- but back then the big question was simply, "Is Colin Powell a Democrat or a Republican?" Powell himself then seemed unsure and craftily did not answer the question in his book. Eventually he decided he was "about 55% a Republican" --- but when in 1996 the pressure on him to run for President demanded an answer, Powell and writer Joseph Persico actually drafted two speeches, one saying "yes," the other "no" and virtually up to the last minute Powell was not certain which one he would give, comparing his vacillations to the back-and-forth of a windshield wiper. One factor in his decision not to run was his wife's revulsion at the idea. Another was his genuine liking for President Clinton. A third was the idea that not since McClellan ran against Lincoln had a general run against his commander-in-chief.
When Bush asked him to become Secretary of State in 2000, Powell knew he was ready for the job, but he soon found himself taking heavy fire from the cabal of hard-right conservatives who seemed to be directing Bush's thinking and cutting Powell out of the decision-making process. The two main villains, in DeYoung's view, were Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney pushed hard for the Iraq campaign while Powell warned the President about its cost and evident dangers; Rumsfeld lobbied for a smaller, more mobile and high-tech army against Powell's famous doctrine of "overwhelming force."
DeYoung describes a virtual war to the death between Powell's State Department and Rumsfeld's Defense Department for control of the Iraq campaign. It was a struggle that State largely lost, but Powell, ever the loyalist even to a President about whom he had grave reservations, stayed on and kept battling.
When Bush was re-elected, Powell was ready to quit but never raised the issue himself. The axe fell via a phone call, not from Bush but from his Chief of Staff: Bush "wanted to make a change." Powell, diplomat to the end, made no public fuss. When he went to the Oval Office for his farewell visit, he felt that Bush did not know why he was there.
Karen DeYoung has done about as good a job as anyone could of explaining Colin Powell to the public. The Powell volcano is still quiet. If DeYoung is right, it will doubtless never erupt again. He has vowed never to write a tell-all book, but DeYoung has tried to do that for him.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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