On the deceased Colin Powell [a New York Times account of his life/career]

From The New York Times Magazine [12/26, 2021], under the title "The Lives"  

Colin L. Powell in 2007. Martin Schoeller/AUGUST

COLIN POWELLB. 1937

He was a lifelong fixer of problems, but George W. Bush was the one he couldn’t solve.By Robert Draper

Until his final days, Colin L. Powell remained preoccupied with fixing things. The former secretary of state and four-star general tinkered endlessly in his garage — sometimes with his welder and sometimes on a succession of early Volvos, which were less complicated than the Corvette he used to whiz around the Beltway. (He took the Corvette to a track to race against Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his Stingray in the fall of 2016. “You want a head start?” Powell goaded Biden. “Go ahead.”) He was a regular at the neighborhood hardware store in McLean, Va., where he rummaged through parts for his house’s malfunctioning dishwasher or leaky faucets.

His plywood-and-wire fixes often left something to be desired aesthetically. But they satisfied his native frugality, his curiosity about how things worked and, perhaps above all, his compulsion to repair rather than discard what was broken. When he was fixing things, his longtime friend and deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage said, “there was a result at the end of the day. It’s why he was so happy as an Army officer: You take a platoon, and you make it better.”

At Powell’s memorial service in November, his son, Michael, recalled the time in 1982 when his father, then stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, bought a pallet of defective adding machines from a government surplus auction so that he could take each of them apart and make them work again. He did not mention that his father’s career at the time had hit a brick wall, after receiving a lackluster annual efficiency report. Then and later, Powell refused to blame racism for the matter, though he might have had cause to suspect it. His Jamaican parents had taught him that the way to overcome bigotry was to “get over it and be better than them,” as Michael Powell recently told me.

He did: A decade later, Colin Powell was a four-star general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and arguably the most admired man in America. His swift ascent seemed to personify the military strategy that came to be known as the Powell doctrine: Establish precise goals, exhaust all diplomatic options, amass support from allies and the public, then defeat the adversary with overwhelming force.

Both the general and his doctrine became famous during the Persian Gulf war of 1991, an invasion of such brutal efficiency that it lasted all of 100 hours. The victory would not save the presidency of Powell’s friend and political benefactor George H.W. Bush. Yet Powell also seemed well suited to the center-left boomer triumphalism of Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, whom Powell served for eight months of the new president’s first term. After all, Powell’s persona offered the tantalizing prospect of America moving past the two defining fault lines of the 1960s: race and Vietnam.

After Powell stepped down, Republicans swooned over the idea of the Black general as their standard-bearer. He and his wife, Alma, eventually decided that a life of electoral politics would not be to their liking. But he was still the most popular political figure in America five years later, when George W. Bush, in his first cabinet appointment, named Powell secretary of state.

By the beginning of 2003, Powell was faced with a problem that seemed beyond his ability to fix: the commander in chief was determined to go to war with Iraq, hastily and with threadbare support from America’s allies. Such a ground invasion flew in the face of the Powell doctrine. Alone among the members of Bush’s war council, the secretary of state enumerated to the president the many things that could go disastrously wrong. Still, when Bush asked in January 2003, “Are you with me on this?” Powell assured him that he was.

“What choice did I have?” Powell told me a decade and a half later. “He’s the president.” His decision reflected a career built on prevailing from inside the system, ever aware that quitting was exactly what the critics and bigots wanted to see him do. For once, however, the supremely self-confident Powell failed to appreciate his leverage with the American public. Had he resigned in protest, the likely succession of events might well have forestalled the war.

“They call me the reluctant warrior,” Powell told me, “but if you want to go to war, I know how to do it.” Bush tasked Powell not with overseeing the war but instead selling it to the public. The secretary’s infamous speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, with its multitude of claims about Saddam Hussein’s illicit weapons program that would later be proved false, amounted to an indelible stain on an otherwise remarkable career of public service.

Powell later matter-of-factly described the U.N. speech to his son as the biggest mistake of his career. But he refused to denigrate his former commander in chief — who, after all, had delegated the burden of that speech to the one man in America who had the credibility to deliver it.

After departing the Bush administration in January 2005, Powell would sit in the fire-lit home office that he called “the bunker,” haloed by TV and computer screens and photographs of himself with the most powerful men and women in the world, taking calls from foreign diplomats and heads of state seeking his counsel. He tried his hand at the private sector, joining the board of the cloud-computing company Salesforce in 2014. He continued to work with students, particularly at his alma mater, the City College of New York, with its Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, and attended dedication ceremonies for elementary schools across America that bore his name.

Powell also was a regular on the corporate speaking circuit. He relished the challenge of tailoring his monologues to obscure organizations. At one such appearance in October 2019, a keynote address at the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation’s annual fund-raising dinner in Chicago, he told the audience: “Well, we have something in common.” He had just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, or plasma-cell cancer.

Every other Friday for the next two years, as the disease inexorably advanced against him, he drove himself to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for his cancer treatments in the Corvette. “To the last fricking day,” Michael Powell recalled.

Even when he was secretary of state, Powell would spend his few idle hours tinkering in the garage, to a soundtrack of calypso, Broadway musicals and Bob Marley, ABBA and the Mighty Sparrow. “It was therapeutic to him,” said Peggy Cifrino, his longtime assistant. “He said: ‘Going into the garage, I can see that the carburetor’s the problem and fix it — unlike foreign policy, where nothing gets resolved. You’re just spending four years doing the best you can.’”

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine.