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Falling on His Sword</font size>
<font size="4">Colin Powell's most significant moment turned out to be his lowest</font size></center>
Washington Post
Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page W12
ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2004, eight days after the president he served was elected to a second term, Secretary of State Colin Powell received a telephone call from the White House at his State Department office. The caller was not President Bush but Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and he got right to the point.
"The president would like to make a change," Card said, using a time-honored formulation that avoided the words "resign" or "fire." He noted briskly that there had been some discussion of having Powell remain until after Iraqi elections scheduled for the end of January, but that the president had decided to take care of all Cabinet changes sooner rather than later. Bush wanted Powell's resignation letter dated two days hence, on Friday, November 12, Card said, although the White House expected him to stay at the State Department until his successor was confirmed by the Senate.
After four long years, Powell had anticipated the end of his service and sometimes even longed for it. He had never directly told the president but thought he had made clear to him during the summer of 2004 that he did not intend to stay into a second term.
There had been public speculation as the election drew near that the president might ask the secretary of state to reenlist, at least temporarily. Powell was still the most popular member of Bush's team, far more popular with the public than the president himself. Senior Powell aides were convinced that the secretary anticipated an invitation to stay, and they were equally certain that he intended to accept. The approaching elections in Iraq, hints of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the rumored departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a principal Powell nemesis, made the next six months look like a rare period of promise for diplomacy.
The president himself made no contact with Powell after Card's call. For two days, the only person at the State Department Powell told about it was his deputy and friend of decades, Richard Armitage. Powell dropped off his resignation letter, as instructed, after typing it himself on his home computer. (The White House later pointed out a typo and sent it back to be redone.) Loath to reveal either surprise or insult, he used the letter to claim the decision to leave as his own.
"Dear Mr. President:" he wrote. "As we have discussed in recent months, I believe that now that the election is over the time has come for me to step down as Secretary of State . . . effective at your pleasure."
He was pleased, Powell said, to "have been part of a team that launched the Global War Against Terror, liberated the Afghan and Iraqi people, brought the attention of the world to the problem of proliferation, reaffirmed our alliances, adjusted to the Post-Cold War World and undertook major initiatives to deal with the problem of poverty and disease in the developing world. In these and in so many other areas, your leadership was the driving force of our success."
AFTER HIS DEPARTURE FROM THE STATE DEPARTMENT IN JANUARY 2005, Powell traveled the lecture circuit, making paid speeches on leadership and U.S. foreign policy to corporate boards and industry conventions. He never spoke publicly about the specific circumstances of his resignation as secretary of state except to say, when asked, that Cabinet reshuffles were normal at the end of a four-year mandate, and that his departure had been a "mutual decision" between him and the president.
He artfully brushed aside inquiries about the many published accounts of deep ideological schisms that had rent Bush's national security team throughout the first term and the private humiliations he reportedly had endured at the hands of powerful colleagues.
Audiences often asked about his public role in promoting and defending what many now consider to be the most ill-advised act of Bush's presidency: the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Powell usually offered a tepid defense, allowing only that he wished there had been more troops committed to the war and its aftermath, and a better plan to rebuild the country.
Powell had thrown his considerable personal and professional reputation behind the administration's charges that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, and posed an imminent threat to the United States. In a crucial speech to the United Nations Security Council six weeks before the invasion was launched, he had single-handedly convinced many skeptical Americans that the threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was real.
But the war had gone sour almost from the moment U.S. troops rolled triumphantly into Baghdad two months later. Powell's credibility had been seriously undermined when the weapons he cited as the main justification for invasion turned out not to exist.
No one in his legions of admirers wanted to believe that Powell had been duped by the White House -- or, worse yet, that he had knowingly betrayed the nation's trust. Many assumed that he had privately argued against such a clearly misguided adventure and been overruled.
In fact, Powell had never advised against the Iraq invasion, although he had warned Bush of the difficulties and counseled patience. He had no reason to resign over Iraq, he told questioners. But the larger mystery of his tenure as the nation's chief diplomat, fourth in line for succession to the presidency, remained.
When Bush selected Powell as his secretary of state in December 2000, it was seen as a stroke of political genius that instantly assuaged concerns at home and abroad about the president-elect's conspicuous lack of foreign policy experience. As national security adviser to one president and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under two more, Powell had helped guide the nation through the end of the Cold War and had brought the military to victory in the Persian Gulf War. By the time he retired from the Army as a four-star general in 1993, he was a national icon of wise leadership -- the "most trusted man in America," according to polls.
Yet Powell had constantly found himself on the losing side of regular ideological combat inside the Bush administration, particularly against Rumsfeld and the powerful vice president, Dick Cheney, over Iraq and a host of other foreign policy issues. Though Powell had scored some victories, the rumored humiliations had been real. He had been purposely cut out of major foreign policy decisions more than once, and his advice often had gone unheeded or been only grudgingly accepted by the president. Why hadn't he resigned?
The easy answer had the virtue of truth: Soldiers didn't quit when they disagreed with the decisions of their commanders. The fact that he had been out of uniform for nearly a decade was irrelevant to Powell; he would be a soldier until he drew his last breath.
AS TEXAS GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH BEGAN HIS CAMPAIGN FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN 1999, Powell's initial impression was that Bush was "still getting his sea legs" on foreign policy and national security issues. Powell knew "Sonny," as he referred to him, only in passing, and his private preference was for another Republican candidate: Arizona Sen. John McCain, a fellow military officer and Vietnam veteran.
But Powell had served in the administration of Bush's father and considered himself part of the extended Bush family, with the personal loyalty that kinship entailed. "It wasn't as if I was a stranger, or that anybody had to worry or could imagine that I would not be for Sonny when the time came," he later reflected. He wrote a $1,000 check to McCain and contributed an equal amount to Bush.
Worried that Powell would outshine their candidate and suspicious of his Republican credentials, Bush's handlers ignored him for most of the campaign -- even as they regularly implied to the media that the respected general was a behind-the-scenes member of the governor's brain trust. Once McCain was vanquished in the Republican primaries and Bush began a head-to-head battle against Democrat Al Gore, the campaign hinted that Powell would accompany Bush on fact-finding trips overseas and would become his secretary of state. But no one on the Bush team ever approached Powell about such a trip, and there was no substantive discussion of a Cabinet position.
Powell later recalled that the only conversations he and Bush had had about foreign affairs came just weeks before the election, in the back seats of cars between events on the four days they had campaigned together that fall. He had no memory of an explicit invitation from Bush to serve in his Cabinet. Once the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Florida recount officially over in early December, Powell later said, "It just sort of happened as it was assumed to happen."
On December 16, three days after Gore conceded defeat, Powell flew to Bush's ranch in Texas to be unveiled as his first Cabinet nominee.
Powell and Cheney stood on either side of the president-elect as he read from prepared remarks to reporters gathered in a Crawford school auditorium. Turning to Powell, Bush invoked Harry Truman's tribute to his own iconic secretary of state, retired Army general George Marshall: " ' He is a tower of strength and common sense. When you find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them.' I have found such a man." When reporters later asked Bush about tears they had seen in his eyes, he replied that it was an emotional moment because "I so admire Colin Powell -- I love his story."
THE SECRETARY OF STATE SAW THE PRESIDENT FREQUENTLY, THOUGH RARELY ALONE. Powell found Bush better-spoken and more thoughtful in private than his public posturing as a rough-hewn, plain-spoken Texan would indicate, although he found Bush's fidgety impatience irritating, along with his tendency to interrupt everyone, from his Cabinet officers to visiting heads of state. While the president publicly praised the secretary's abilities and stature, their relationship remained stiff and formal.
Powell insisted to disbelieving aides that Bush listened to, and even acted on, his advice. "The president has good instincts . . . an instinctual grasp" of issues, he often told them. But he usually followed with an acknowledgment that Bush "has got these rough edges -- his cowboy, Texan rough edges -- and when he gets them exposed, there are other people who know how to use them" to their advantage.
Time and time again during the administration's bumpy first year, Powell had seen Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney intervene to nudge a willing Bush away from moderation and diplomacy, and toward a hard line on foreign policy issues from North Korea to the Middle East. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, their attention turned sharply toward Iraq, and by the following summer it was clear that the administration was headed toward war with Saddam Hussein.
Powell found little evidence to support thinly veiled White House suggestions that Hussein had had a hand in the September 11 attacks. But he saw no reason to doubt the CIA's assessment, fervidly promoted and expanded upon by Cheney and the Defense Department, that the Iraqi leader had stockpiles of chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, which he was ready to hand over to terrorists bent on destruction of the United States.
Powell's own war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 had been fought with half a million U.S. troops, broad foreign support and a U.N. mandate. He believed the decision to invade was Bush's to make, but that international backing was essential for both political and military success. In August 2002, he succeeded in convincing Bush -- for once, over Cheney's objections -- that there would be no multinational support unless the administration first visibly tried to tame Hussein without war.
It took five months for Powell's efforts at the U.N. Security Council to craft a solution short of war to reach the point of collapse, caught in the crossfire of administration intransigence, international mistrust of Bush's justification and motives, and Hussein's perfidy. As the Pentagon's war plans were completed and March 2003 was secretly set as the internal deadline for invasion, Bush still found himself with little foreign support and an uncertain American public.
"We've really got to make the case" against Hussein, Bush told Powell in an Oval Office meeting in late January, "and I want you to make it." Only Powell had the "credibility to do this," Bush said. "Maybe they'll believe you." It was a direct order from his commander in chief, and it never occurred to Powell to question it.
He was told that the case had already been put together by the White House, and he assumed that with a little tweaking he could turn it into a speech that would fit his voice and style. He was taken aback on Tuesday, January 28, when he received the bulk of the document, a 48-page, single-spaced compilation of Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, replete with drama, rhetorical devices and a kitchen sink full of allegations. The most extreme version of every charge the administration had made about Hussein, the document had been written, Powell concluded, under the tutelage of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who shared all of his boss's hard-line views and then some.
Delivery of the speech had been set for the following Wednesday, February 5. Bush planned to announce the date that very night in his State of the Union address to Congress. Acutely aware that he would be selling his own reputation as much as the specific facts, Powell picked up the telephone to tell Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, that he needed more time to get the speech into shape.
"Condi, please," Powell implored, "let's just tell the president that we're going to put in the State of the Union that Secretary Powell will be going to the U.N. next week. Don't put a date."
"She said, 'Right, right, of course,' " Powell recalled, "and she runs away to change the speech. Then runs back about five minutes later" to call him and say, " ' There's good news and bad news. The good news is we can change the speech.' " The bad news, she said, was that the White House had already told the media, in a preview of the State of the Union address, that Powell's presentation would be made on February 5.
"I could have gotten two more days," Powell later said wistfully. "Whether it would have made any difference or not, I don't know."
"HERE YOU GO," POWELL SAID, as he dropped the White House document on the desk of his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson quickly agreed it read more like a badly written novel than something designed to persuade the world. That afternoon, he assembled a State Department team-- including speechwriter Lynne Davidson and Barry Lowenkron, a senior CIA officer before he joined Powell's policy planning staff -- to set up shop at CIA headquarters, across the Potomac River in Virginia. They would examine the evidence themselves and turn the document into what Wilkerson called "a Colin Powell speech." Cheney aide John Hannah and William Tobey, the counterproliferation director at the White House National Security Council, would meet them there to answer any questions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092700106.html
