Playing Powell Politics: The General's Zest for Power

Powell is very much a man of the army, not a rebel against it in any way, although uncomfortably aware of some of its vices. He regularly declares his love for it as an institution. He was also a participant in its defining experience of the second half of this century--Vietnam. It is in the chapters discussing that conflict that one can find the key to Powell's views on military power and statecraft; although put eloquently, they are entirely the standard view of rising officers of his generation. Powell served two tours in Vietnam. During his first tour of some ten months in 1963, he spent most of his time as an adviser to a South Vietnamese infantry battalion. From the summer of 1968 through that of 1969, he served as a staff officer in the troubled 23rd Division of My Lai infamy. He was wounded on each tour, once by stepping on a punji stick, a second time in a helicopter crash. Worse than his physical scars was the loss of close friends. He describes with particular keenness his shock and sorrow at the death of an ROTC comrade, Tony Mavroudis. In one of the more moving parts of the book, Powell describes watching a television show almost a year later in which Mavroudis was prominently featured.

Powell's tours in Vietnam, although hardly easy, were not unusual for professional infantrymen of his generation, save that he never had a combat command of American forces (although as an adviser he exercised informal command of a South Vietnamese unit). Vietnam molded his views as it did those of so many of his peers--views not merely of that war but on the causes worth fighting and dying for, America's political leadership, and civilian defense officials. The sarcasm with which he describes the naive and undifferentiated anticommunism of the Kennedy years, his loathing of politicians who allowed America's elites to avoid military service, and his contempt for "slide-rule prodigies" mark this section of the book with a deep bitterness: "Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world." This theme--a dichotomy between theorists, politicians, and thinkers on the one hand and men of affairs such as himself, who deal with things in practice, on the other--pervades the book. There are few complimentary references to thinkers as opposed to doers here, and those in the former category are addressed primarily to fellow soldiers.

It is in the context of his discussion of Vietnam that Powell sets forth his uncompromising doctrines on the use of force: "War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support; we should mobilize the country's resources to fulfill that mission and then go in and win." "Half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons" was Powell's great fear as a soldier. Powell does not discuss the consequences of this maximalist position for the conduct of American foreign policy, for the assertion of its power in the world. On this score, the views deeply held by the national security adviser to President Reagan and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have remained those of Major Colin Powell, the grieving comrade of Captain Tony Mavroudis.

Throughout his memoir, Powell speaks of his anxiety about being labeled a "political general," and there is something unintentionally comic in his account of his efforts to evade ever-better jobs in Washington. His cycle seems to begin in each case with his pleading not to be given a stellar but desk-bound position in the Washington national security establishment, followed by machinations to get back to the field, delight at his success in so doing, and deep disappointment at being swiftly recalled to higher office from a happy life with fellow soldiers. But one doubts whether anyone can succeed in Washington as spectacularly as Powell has without having not merely a talent but a zest for bureaucratic life.

In truth Powell's career beginnings were those of a foot soldier. Powell's fundamental outlook on military matters--including his disdain for "deep thinkers," "intelligence wizards," and "puffed-up pilots"--are those of the bred-in-the-bones infantryman. His early training and posts--the army's grueling ranger program, a plum instructorship at the infantry school at Fort Benning, command of a brigade in the elite 101st Airborne Division--bespeak a talent for genuine soldiering. Equally revealing is his admiring discussion of his division commander in 1973-74, Major General Hank "Gunfighter" Emerson, a study in leadership under difficult circumstances, of an army inundated with misfits and troublemakers but determined to pull itself out of its Vietnam trough.

THE GAME OF GOVERNMENT

Powell's phenomenal popularity with American soldiers, who are good if fallible judges of military leadership, also suggests that part of him is, as advertised, the simple soldier. But there is also clearly a very different side to Powell, that of the superb Washington operator who rose with breathtaking speed from a White House fellowship through positions on the army staff to the very pinnacle of the national security bureaucracy. Here, as in his more conventional military career, he had his mentors and friends who helped him along, and it is instructive to see who they were. Among the earliest was Fred Malek, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of President Nixon's "hatchet men" (as Powell himself puts it). Malek's ambition, of which Powell clearly approved, "was to gain control over the bureaucracy for the White House," not to pursue any particular doctrine or policy. From Malek's maneuvering "emerged one of my rules: you don't know what you can get away with until you try."