The Daily - The Life and Career of Colin Powell

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Colin Powell, who in four decades of public service helped shape U.S. national security, died on Monday. He was 84.Despite a stellar career, Mr. Powell had expressed a fear that he would be remembered for a single event: his role in leading his country to war in Iraq.We look back on the achievements and setbacks of a trailblazing life. Guest: Robert Draper, writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq.”Love listening to New York Times podcasts? Help us test a new audio product in beta and give us your thoughts to shape what it becomes. Visit nytimes.com/audio to join the beta.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Colin Powell was emblematic of the ability of minorities to use the military as a ladder of opportunity — one that eventually led him to the highest levels of government. He died of complications of Covid-19, his family said.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Across three presidencies, Colin Powell served as America's top soldier, diplomat, and national security advisor. His great fear was that he would be remembered for just one moment.

I spoke with my colleague, Robert Draper, from the Times Magazine. It's Tuesday, October 19th. Robert, what were you thinking when you heard the news just a few hours ago that Colin Powell had died? The first thing that came to mind, Michael, was a conversation that I learned that then Secretary of State Colin Powell had had with actually more than one individual. It was the year 2004. It was to be his last year as Secretary of State in the Bush administration, and the Iraq war was underway, well underway. But at that juncture, it was already clear that Saddam, in fact, did not possess weapons of mass destruction, contrary to

the speech that Colin Powell had given in February of 2003, a month before the invasion, saying that he did. And what Powell said to individuals was that he recognized that his obituary was going to begin with Colin Powell sold Americans on going to war in Iraq based on intelligence that turned out to be bogus. In other words, Powell realized that the totality of an otherwise distinguished and even singular military and political career would forever be tainted and would in a way be sublimated to what had happened in Iraq. And he felt like that there was plenty more to say about Colin Powell, that he was not the sum total of a single fateful speech that he gave to the United Nations in February of 2003. Well, tell us about that

history that he feared might be erased by an obituary that focused on his role in Iraq. erased by an obituary that focused on his role in Iraq. Powell's history was a history unlike anything I think we'd seen before in America. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants, a father who was a shipping clerk, a mother who was a seamstress. He grew up in the South Bronx, was an undistinguished high school student, went to the City College of New York because he wasn't interested in athletics. He gravitated instead to the ROTC, where he truly found his calling, and from there became a member of the Army and was deployed to Vietnam. He endured racism

both in the ranks and, for that matter, during training in Georgia, but was not deterred by that. Became instead a highly decorated military veteran, receiving the Purple Heart for sustaining injuries and saving others in a helicopter crash. From there, in 1969, Powell won a White House fellowship and was moved over to the Office of Management and Budget. After that, he moved back to the military, but stayed on the radar of the political world and was brought up to be National Security Advisor during the Reagan administration and got to know then-Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush

and developed a relationship such that when Bush became president, Powell became a natural choice of his to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He became chairman at the youngest age ever for anyone to hold that position, 52, and also for that matter was the first African American to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. for that matter, was the first African-American to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And along the way, developed what became a very coherent, muscular, and sensible military policy. The Powell Doctrine, as we all came to know it. Would you describe that? Sure. I mean, it was something very much informed by our experience in Vietnam and the recognition that a war was not politically sustainable

if it had no end game and if it had no political support. So the Powell Doctrine essentially held that first one had to exhaust all diplomatic options, then to determine just what a path to victory would be, what victory would look like, and then to muster support both at home and amongst a coalition abroad. And after having achieved all of those things, then to go in with, to use his phrase,

overwhelming force, to use any and every means necessary to achieve a decisive victory and then to get out as quickly as possible. Right. The idea being, don't get into endless wars, get into quick and decisive wars. Yeah. And wars, by the way, that the public could understand and that the public could be behind. Those were bars that the Vietnam War failed to clear. And Powell would later say that he was part of the careerist mentality of the American military that caused the Vietnam War to go on as long as it did without any clear objective. He was determined to make sure that he wouldn't be a part of any such enterprise.

And what's an illustration of the Powell Doctrine once Colin Powell's in a position to oversee the U.S. military? Sure. The most obvious one was Operation Desert Storm. Just two hours ago, Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. The first Gulf War, it's also known as, which took place in early 1991 in the first Bush administration.

Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait. Tonight, the battle has been joined. And Powell was a leading tactician of that, obviously, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But we remember Powell not only for being a strategist of this. I'd like to turn the briefing over to my colleague, Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Let me also express... But for being an explainer of it. This is the end of the first week of operations,

and what I'd like to do is for a few moments take stock with you in an attempt to dampen out the oscillations between euphoria and distress that sometimes catches us up every hour on the hour. Because he was the guy that we saw behind the podium. And I'd like to do that by first reminding you of the military operational objective that we set out to accomplish, and that is simply to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Explaining in very, very succinct phraseology that this is what we were up to. Our strategy to go after this army is very, very simple.

First, we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it. We identify the enemy, we cut it off, and then we kill it. We identify the enemy, we cut it off, and then we kill it. Thank you. And it was a war that was lightning fast. The actual ground invasion took place over a period of 100 hours. It succeeded in its very narrowly defined objective of removing Saddam and Saddam's army from Kuwait. It did not extend itself beyond that. And so it was compressed. It was successful.

It was coherent. And it was very much Powell's overwhelming force doctrine put into place. And Powell was the personification of the decisiveness that was, in fact, the Gulf War, a victory in and of itself, and offered a kind of new approach to military strategy, at least in the United States. And so what did that victory mean for Colin Powell? Well, we became acquainted with Powell for the first time as a result of this. He became a darling in Republican political circles, in Washington political circles writ large, a fixture on the sort of Georgetown dinner circuit, was immediately talked about both amongst Democrats and Republicans

as somebody's ideal version of a vice presidential running mate and perhaps even something greater than that down the line. Powell received something like a $6 million book contract. The book for his memoir immediately became a number one bestseller. His book tour itself became a kind of national event where cameras followed him everywhere. He really became an American celebrity. And what he chose to do with that celebrity seemed to be entirely up to him. But basically, the sky was the limit for Colin Powell. And what does Powell end up doing with all this celebrity and limitless possibility? Well, ultimately what he decided to do was reenter the government in the form of becoming the Secretary of State for George W. Bush.

In directness of speech, his towering integrity, his deep respect for our democracy, and his soldier sense of duty and honor. Bush actually had been referencing Powell with admiration on the campaign trail, trying to appeal to moderate voters. Colin Powell demonstrates the qualities that made George Marshall a great Secretary of State, qualities that will make him a great representative of all the people of this country. And when Bush ultimately won the presidency with a razor-thin, if even that, mandate. It is a great honor for me to submit the name to the United States Senate of Colin L. Powell as Secretary of State.

The first person he turned to as a cabinet selection was Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. What's significant, though, Michael, is that Bush wasn't necessarily looking for a mentor in foreign policy. If anything, he kind of had that already with Dick Cheney. What ultimately came to pass was that President Bush would use the public standing of Colin Powell that he, Bush himself, lacked the credibility that Powell had to sell a skeptical American public on a war against a country that had not attacked America and would ultimately use Powell as the spokesman for that endeavor. We'll be right back. So, Robert, help us understand the role that Powell ends up playing in the military campaign

that came to define his tenure as Secretary of State, the invasion of Iraq after 9-11. Yeah, in the immediate wake of September 11th, there was first a determination of who it was that attacked us. That was al-Qaeda. And this led to the deployment of troops to Afghanistan to wrap the Taliban. Then Bush turned his attention to what he described as the next theater in the war on terror. Now, this was not something that Secretary Powell had in mind. He assumed that in the wake of September 11th, we had one clear objective, and that was to go after terrorist organizations like the ones that had attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But Bush had Saddam Hussein in mind instead. Why? Well, Bush started talking about the possibility of invading Iraq because, first of all, he viewed Saddam Hussein as a bad actor, I think for a couple of reasons. He remembered Saddam Hussein as the person whose intelligence service had apparently attempted to assassinate his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993. And secondly, he also noted that in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, when pretty much every country in the world, including Iran, indicated solidarity towards the United States, Iraq stood alone in kind of jeering the U.S., essentially saying, you had it coming to you. Saddam, in fact, did give a speech on September the 12th in which he said that America has reaped the thorns of its own foreign policy.

So Bush gave a speech at the State of the Union address, the famous Axis of Evil speech, in which he called out Saddam and Iraq and indicated that they were state sponsors of terror. So he was not only putting Saddam, but really the U.S. and the world on notice that Saddam was on his radar. Now, Powell kind of figured, like a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment, that Saddam did have some weapons capacity, but he also believed that Saddam didn't pose a threat to the U.S. This put him in direct opposition with Dick Cheney, the vice president, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Bush himself. Powell began to realize that he was really an outside man looking in,

that the guy who had been brought in to be this credible force in foreign policy for this fledgling administration was now a guy who was not influencing foreign policy at all. So once this realization dawns on Powell that Bush wants to go to war and that he thinks that's a terrible idea, what does he do? Yeah, I spent a lot of time as someone who wrote a book on this subject looking at this window of the summer and fall of 2002 when Powell begins to realize that he's kind of the outside man looking in and needs to do something about it. And so what he does is he reaches out to Bush's friend and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and says, I want a meeting with the president.

So it was Powell who, on August the 5th, 2002, had this dinner in the White House residence with the president. And it was an interesting conversation, interesting for one thing in its singularity, because there was no one else up to this point, and for that matter, no one else after this point, who Bush would hear from in his administration, who would say, you know, there's a lot of bad things that could happen if you invade Iraq. And so it was Powell who basically said, if you do this, Mr. President, you will become the proud owner of a country and its 20 or so fractious provinces. Essentially, you know, if you break it, you will own it.

It seems like what he's saying is this will not at all be a Powell doctrine-like war. Yeah. I mean, he was saying that it instead could be a mess. And Bush then said to Powell, well, what should I do? And he said, go to the United Nations, build a coalition through the UN, have them pass a resolution that will have weapon inspectors go in. And ultimately, he heeded what Powell's advice was. And Powell believed, coming out of that meeting and in the weeks and months to follow,

that he had succeeded. But Bush got very impatient during that whole process. So in January 2003, Bush comes to Colin Powell and he said, you know what? I think I have to do this. I think I have to invade Iraq. Are you with me? And what do you think Bush meant by that? Well, it's important to note first, Michael, that Bush had already at that point stated his

intentions to invade Iraq with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, with Vice President Dick Cheney, and with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. So in essence, what Bush was saying was, look, I need to do this, and I need to know that I have your support. I need you essentially to drop your concerns and be with me on this. Now, when Powell heard this, he said, yes, sir, I'm with you, very much in the manner of the four-star general that he was. And indeed, when I discussed this matter with Powell, he said to me, what was I going to do? He was the commander-in-chief after all. But then Powell went on to add, but you know, people call me the reluctant warrior, but in fact, in the end, I'm a warrior.

And so if you're going to go to war, I'm a guy to have with you. Powell was essentially saying that at the time he was thinking, if Bush is going to go to war, he's going to need me to supervise this war for him. Even if it's a war he did not at all support, he wanted to be the one to oversee it. Yeah, he wanted to make sure that if Bush was going to go to war, that it would be a war done in the most efficacious manner possible by the author of the Powell Doctrine. And so once he makes this decision to be the reluctant warrior,

to sign on to a war he does not think will work out well for the U.S., what does it start to look like and what role does he play in it? Well, something that I think that Powell hadn't anticipated, which was that, as it turned out, he was not asked to supervise the war, to conduct the war. He was asked to sell the war. And this became clear in the latter part of January of that same month in 2003, when Powell was asked by Condoleezza Rice on behalf of President Bush if Powell would give a major speech to the United Nations and make the case for war based on the intelligence findings that the American intelligence community had. Vice President

Cheney, in fact, reinforced this to Powell, saying to him, in essence, look, Colin, you've got, you know, more popularity than the rest of us put together. Why don't you spend some political capital? And once again, Powell, I think being an enormously self-confident man, also believed that he was the right guy for that. He was, after all, the chief diplomat of the United States. He also believed that he could issue more restraint in his speech and make a fact-based presentation in a way that others in the administration could not. So how does he approach this speech? What is Powell's thinking?

So what Powell did was he was handed a kind of a working draft of the speech that had been compiled by the vice president's office. He basically thumbed through it, had some of his own intelligence experts take a look at it, and ultimately tossed it in the garbage can and said, nope, we're starting from scratch. This has got too many outlandish claims to it. He then spent a long weekend at CIA headquarters in a conference room. He and a speechwriter surrounded by intelligence analysts and just went through the intelligence piece by piece, basically deciding, okay, what can we credibly say? What do we really know about Saddam's weapons program? And through this process, he kept a lot of really dubious intel out of the speech. And by the end of it all, believed that through this

process, had a speech now with rock solid intelligence that attested to not just Saddam's weapons capability, but to the weapons he actually had at his disposal at that point. Okay, so that's where things stand as Colin Powell heads over to the U.N. to deliver a speech I know I watched and that everybody else I know in the media was watching that day. I call now on the distinguished Secretary of State, Mr. Colin Powell. Yeah, that's where things stood when on February the 5th, 2003. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General.

The Secretary of State made it to the United Nations. The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world. And gave a lengthy, seemingly evidentiary-based recitation of Saddam's weapons program. Let me now turn to those deadly weapons programs and describe why they are real and present dangers to the region and to the world. First, biological weapons.

Among the things that Powell said was that Saddam had an active biological weapons program. One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. Consisting of mobile biological laboratories that had been undetectable by the U.S. If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate, chemical weapons are equally chilling. Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry. And that Saddam was pumping out an alarming amount of chemical weapons, also in contravention

of the United Nations. Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan. nearly five times the size of Manhattan. And that Saddam possessed the capacity to develop a nuclear program owing to some aluminum tubes that had been seized that could be used for nuclear centrifuges. We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program.

On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons. In essence, what Powell was saying was a kind of nightmare scenario, that Saddam already had weapons of mass destruction, and worst of all, was intent on developing an active nuclear program as well. We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not fail in our duty and our responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body. Thank you, Mr. President. Right. The message was Saddam Hussein is a threat, an urgent threat to the United States, and there is justification for war.

And I think, Michael, that anyone who wasn't a real student of the intelligence tended to come to the conclusion you've just described. Certainly that was the case on Capitol Hill, where, for example, the Democratic leader Tom Daschle said to his Senate caucus, look, I know you guys don't believe Vice President Cheney, but surely you believe Colin Powell. The sheer dry elaboration of this weapons program delivered by someone who seemed once again to be in his element, giving basically the most important speech of his career and seeming at the time to be thoroughly up to the task was itself as persuasive as the evidence that he was presenting. So Bush was right to understand that Powell's stature and popularity,

and Powell's stature and popularity alone, could overcome the skepticism of even congressional Democrats about this war. Absolutely. Yeah. For the Secretary of State, who had been urging a diplomatic path, who had been talking about going to the United Nations to make the presentation that he did, was itself an indicator to some people who'd been on the fence that, OK, it now makes sense to go to war. the fence that, okay, it now makes sense to go to war. And then, of course, the United States invades Iraq. And we eventually learned that all of that intel, all of that evidence that Powell has used in this speech was totally false, and that U.S. intelligence agencies had gotten it wrong. Right. What Powell came to realize woefully after the fact was that that

weekend when he was putting the speech together, surrounded by intelligence analysts, that what the analysts were basically spouting to him were conclusions that were the result of years and years of groupthink that had not been challenged, that there had been a leaning into worst case scenarios about what Saddam had, when in fact there was no evidence, literally none, of what Saddam did have. It was all based on suppositions. And that somehow all of the nuance, all the caveats had been lost. And what ultimately proved out was that Powell had become a kind of fall guy, that he had been set up.

He'd been set up perhaps not intentionally by the Bush administration, but ultimately that's what it turned out to be, that he was there presenting intelligence, virtually all of which turned out to be completely false. He had, in essence, sold the American public and the international community on a phony pretext for war with tragic consequences.

And as he finally comes to understand this, and I know you've talked to him about this, what is his reaction? His reaction was horror, anger, and then bitterness. And it's worth mentioning also that by the end of 2004, Bush decided he no longer needed pal services and replaced him with Condoleezza Rice. In the months and years that followed his departure from the Bush administration. Writing in his new memoir about your February 5th, 2003 speech to the UN, which has now become historic. He does a number of interviews. Are you ticked?

Yeah. Which he himself is penitent. But you held public opinion. I swayed public opinion. There's no question about it. Takes his own lumps, recognizes his own responsibility for this. I know. You changed the ball.

I changed, I turned the dial. There's no question about it. As much as it fatigues him to be talking over and over about this singular matter that now appears to be legacy-defining, he does so. And that's what the president wanted me to do and what I was supposed to do. You regret it. I regret it now because the information was wrong. Of course I do.

But I will always be seen as the one who made the case before the international community. But there wasn't a word in that speech. Robert, I'm really curious in your conversations with Powell about this war and about his role in selling it, what kind of responsibility he does or doesn't take for it and for all of its consequences. Powell in my conversations with him was pretty defensive on the subject. I mean, the fact that he had been answering so many of these questions over and over again indicated a kind of penitence on his part, a recognition that he owed it to history to answer at least semi-serious questions.

But that didn't mean that he was going to take responsibility for a war that he believed standing alone among Bush senior officials was inadvisable. And he essentially was of the position that, look, I tried to slow it down. I tried to tell Bush what could go wrong. That's basically about as far as Powell would go. I think that he was really of the view that it seems wrongheaded to suggest that Colin Powell should shoulder so much of the blame for the Iraq debacle when he had done more than anybody else in the administration to move it off course? I mean, that's a complicated answer. And it makes me wonder how we should be thinking about his legacy and about this speech all these years later, right? I mean, in selling a war on false premises, whether he knew they were false or not. Did he ultimately squander this reputation

that he had rightfully earned, or was he kind of robbed of it by the people around Bush? Is it the story of this peerless military leader who didn't quite have the courage to stop and stand up to a bad war, or is it the story of a man who was a victim of people who were so committed to the war that they were

willing to deceive him. Yeah, I'm not going to be the guy who says that this highly decorated military veteran lacked courage. You know, if there's anything I find him particularly guilty of, it's that he was of the same foreign policy establishment that embraced the same kind of groupthink about Saddam Hussein. Powell, in agreeing to give the fateful UN speech, basically was coming in with a view that, yes, Saddam's got weapons. He's got weapons of mass destruction. And there were plenty of indicators that, at minimum, that baseline judgment needed to be reappraised. That Powell didn't do that puts him in the same category, by the way, as then-Senator Hillary Clinton, then-Senator Joe Biden, and an awful lot of other people.

His decision not to say to the president, nope, bad idea, I'm resigning, I suppose it's fair to make a judgment against Powell for that. But American history is not exactly spangled with instances of generals who stand up to a president in such a manner. And, you know, that presents the complicated, nuanced view of an arguably tragic but heroic figure. Why tragic? Tragic in the sense that but for his decision to stick with Bush when asked the question, are you with me? And his decision to give the speech that he did. But for all of that, Colin Powell would have been viewed as utterly heroic, as someone

who was a first in American life in so many ways, who was so admired as a leader in the State Department, in the military, and who people still speak of who worked with him in reverential tones. A person who had really lived this seemingly legendary life, but then came Iraq, and so he's tragic. Robert, I wonder if you could read the first sentence of Colin Powell's obituary that was published in The Times. Yes. The first sentence reads, Colin L. Powell, who in four decades of public life

served as the nation's top soldier, diplomat, and national security advisor, and whose speech at the United Nations in 2003 helped pave the way for the United States to go to war in Iraq, died on Monday. He was 84. This was the obituary he feared. This was the first sentence he did not want. Yeah. I mean, Powell had, again, tragically, a gift of prophecy here. He accurately forecast that this was how he would be remembered. Well, Robert, thank you very much. We appreciate your time. My pleasure, Michael.

On Monday, the family of Colin Powell said he had died from complications of COVID-19, despite being fully vaccinated against the virus. Powell, the family said, was being treated for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells that weakens the immune system and leaves those with the disease at greater risk of developing severe cases of COVID-19. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, former President Donald Trump sued both Congress and the National Archives in an attempt to block them from disclosing White House documents related to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. The House committee investigating the attack, which has requested the documents from the

National Archives, hopes they will shed light on Trump's role in the assault. In the lawsuit, Trump claims that executive privilege protects the documents from congressional review. And the Times reports that federal regulators are likely to endorse a plan that would allow Americans to receive COVID-19 booster shots that differ from their original vaccines. vaccines. The ability to mix and match the shots requested by state health officials will give doctors and patients greater discretion about which shots to use as boosters. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vander Ploeg, Stella Tan, Sydney Harper, and Chelsea Daniel. Stella Tan, Sydney Harper, and Chelsea Daniel. It was edited by Lisa Chow and M.J. Davis-Lynn, engineered by Chris Wood,

and contains original music from Marian Lozano and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.