Powell's Loyalty And Moderation Praised
[Editor's Note: The original piece in USA Today is much longer.]
Traveling around the world in the past few months, Colin Powell would occasionally come to the back of his plane, where reporters sit, to reflect on the long arc of his career and marvel at how a poor boy from the Bronx rose to become the nation's chief diplomat.
The conversations were nostalgic, almost wistful, and often dealt more with the promise of the past than the realities of the present.
Few rsums are as packed with accomplishments as Powell's: secretary of State, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, national security adviser, recipient of multiple military decorations and two Presidential Medals of Freedom.
In announcing his resignation Monday, Powell pointed to diplomatic successes on his watch, such as solidifying U.S. relations with China, India and Pakistan and increasing U.S. foreign aid.
"I think we've accomplished a great deal," Powell said.
His enormous popularity at home and abroad afford him the opportunity for even more accomplishments. But as he prepares to leave the State Department, there is a nagging sense of unfulfilled promise about Powell, who has had one of the most distinguished public service careers of any black American.
When Powell became secretary of State, it was assumed he would be a major figure, setting U.S. foreign policy for a president who took office untutored in international affairs. But President Bush listened more to Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- Powell's likely successor -- in planning a muscular U.S. role in the world.
"It is not so much what he did but what he could have done that the administration did not take advantage of," says retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, a Powell friend who briefly served as State Department envoy to the Middle East."I don't think the administration adopted his philosophy of moderate realism, but leaned toward" a more hawkish view that"put Powell on the outside" on many issues, Zinni says.
Outgunned by hawks
Administration hawks persuaded Bush to try to remake the Middle East by toppling dictators and installing democracies; Powell, whose service in Vietnam made him wary about the use of force, strongly cautioned Bush about the costs of going to war, according to published accounts.
Some historians fault Powell for lacking a strong alternative vision of the world that could compete with the one the hawks were advocating."That lack of boldness on his part puts him in a second tier of secretaries of State," says Douglas Brinkley, a historian who directs the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans.
Others say Powell tried as hard as he could to moderate policies but accepted defeat when overruled."People have to be sensitive to the reality that, at the end of the day, there is only one administration foreign policy," says Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, and a former senior State Department official under Powell."Powell operated within that context; he didn't create the context."
Powell's legacy will be largely one of facilitating two wars. In Afghanistan, he successfully built international support to oust the Taliban regime that had harbored Osama bin Laden; in Iraq, he had striking diplomatic success at first but then faltered.
Inside the administration, Powell helped persuade Bush to go to the United Nations to seek broad backing for toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein."I strongly recommended a diplomatic approach first," Powell said in an interview with the USA TODAY editorial board Oct.18."He took it to the U.N."