One day in 1997, Colin Powell visited his old stomping grounds on the Pentagon’s E Ring, where he made history as America’s first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.
It was two years after Powell announced, after much soul-searching, he would not be answering the call from Republicans to run for president against Bill Clinton in 1996, and he was happily leading America’s Promise, a charity dedicated to helping the nation’s youth.
Hearing he was just down the hall from my Pentagon office, I grabbed his 1995 memoir My American Journey from my bookshelf and headed for the briefing room where Powell was holding court with friends and admirers.
“General, will you sign my copy of your book?” I asked as I approached him.
Powell said he’d be happy to do so.
During his last year in uniform, I’d covered Powell, traveled with him, and anchored a CNN documentary about his life and career.
Powell began autographing my dog-eared copy of his memoir.
“To Jamie, With admiration,” he wrote but then paused to thumb through the book, noting the many highlighted passages and dozens of sticky notes sprouting from the pages.
“This is pretty marked up,” Powell observed.
“Yes, I went through it very thoroughly, back when I wrote about how you weren’t such a great general after all,” I said.
“Ah yes, I remember now,” he smiled, but having already written “with admiration,” he needed to complete the inscription, so he added, “Notwithstanding your pissing me off.”
Such was Powell’s humility and penchant for self-deprecation that he rarely took critical press coverage personally.
In my story in October of 1995, written as Powell was still weighing a presidential bid, I examined three cases in which Powell’s best military advice had been proven wrong by events.
Among them is the little-known fact that even though he commanded no troops as Joint Chiefs chairman, Powell commanded so much respect after the 1991 Gulf War that it was his recommendation alone that launched the ill-fated manhunt for Somali militia leader Mohammed Farah Aidid in 1993.
The so-called resulted in the Black Hawk Down firefight in Mogadishu that cost the lives of 18 Americans, including Delta Force commandos.
At the time, Clinton’s Defense Secretary Les Aspin took the blame. Still, Aspin approved the mission only after Powell called him on vacation and reversed public stance against never targeting a single person.
Powell’s stature left Aspin feeling he had little choice but to dispatch Army rangers on a covert mission to snatch Aidid or risk the ridicule of ignoring the revered hero of the Gulf War.
In his memoir, Powell only wrote, “It was a recommendation I would later regret.”
Powell was a self-described “reluctant warrior,” and this formed the basis of his personal rules for the use of American military power, which came to be labeled by others as the “Powell Doctrine.”
It is often characterized as advocating “overwhelming force” to vanquish an enemy. Still, in his conversations with me, Powell said he never liked the adjective “overwhelming,” which to him connoted heavy-handed overkill, and instead preferred the term “decisive force.”
And he told me his “doctrine” drew heavily on rules instituted by his onetime boss Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger after the 1983 bombing in Beirut killed 241 Marines, who were on a fuzzy mission to provide “presence” in Lebanon.
In a 1984 speech, Weinberger resolved that henceforth, military force should be used only as a last resort, in well-defined, achievable missions that advance only vital U.S. interests and are fully supported by the public.
Powell’s version of the Weinberger Doctrine called for a clear mission, public support, decisive force, and an exit strategy.
That high bar often made Powell the odd man out during both Bush administrations.
Powell initially opposed the 1991 Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush and the 2003 invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein under his son, President George W. Bush.
After Clinton took office in 1993, Powell’s aversion to limited military intervention began to earn him comparisons to the infamous Civil War Gen. George McClellan, whose hesitancy to engage in battle prompted President Abraham Lincoln to write him, “If you don’t want to use the Army, I should like to borrow it a while.”
Powell’s “all-in or nothing” approach collided with Clinton’s desire to order the limited bombing of Serb forces in Bosnia to punish them for massacring Bosniaks.
Powell argued that air power alone could not change the Serb behavior — only ground troops would accomplish that, and not without heavy U.S. casualties.
“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright snapped at Powell at one interagency meeting, according to his memoir.
“I thought I would have an aneurysm,” Powell wrote.
But in the end, the limited intervention in Bosnia resulted in the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended the 3 1/2 year war.
And four years later, NATO’s 78-day air-only bombing campaign also forced the capitulation of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, ending the Kosovo War without a single allied casualty.
Once again, Powell had been wrong about victory only being achievable with “boots on the ground.”
Powell did not go to the U.S. Military Academy and did not graduate at the top of his class, mainly receiving mediocre grades at the City College of New York in the late 1950s.
But Powell got straight As in ROTC and earned a reputation for something more valuable than sheer intellect: common sense and judgment.
In my very first interview with Powell, when I accompanied him on a visit to the Air Force Academy in 1993, he explained his aversion to war.
“I have been characterized as ‘the reluctant warrior.’ Guilty,” he said. “But I follow in a long tradition of American generals who have always been reluctant warriors.”
And Powell was fond of the famous quote from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
