How Colin Powell plays the game.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: Potential presidential candidate - Cover Story

The general is everybody's dream candidate. more pleasant than Dole, more eloquent than Gramm, more stable than Perot. But judging from his record, is Powell really the man to shake up the capital?

On one of the first days of 1991, as U.S. troops massed near the Saudi/Kuwaiti border, Stephen Solarz's telephone rang in his Capitol Hill office: General Colin Powell was on the line. Solarz, then a New York congressman, had just written a long article for The New Republic making the case for war in the Persian Gulf At the time, President Bush was trying to build support for the use of force against Saddam Hussein; congressional hearings were underway, and with Senator Sam Nunn and two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)--Admiral William Crowe and General David Jones--publicly arguing to give economic sanctions more time, Solarz was a key Democratic hawk. The Powell call was brief but kind, a valentine about the magazine piece. "He was very generous and congratulated me on it," Solarz recalled recently. "But then I read in subsequent books that he was actually opposed to the points I was arguing, so I'm not sure what to make of that."

Solarz's mystification makes sense. According to Bob Woodward's book The Commanders, for which Powell was a major source, the general had reservations about going to war, favoring a containment strategy. Yet, once Bush decided to fight, it was Powell's job as chairman (the principal military advisor to the president) to carry out the wishes of his civilian boss. That Powell, an officer with a high sense of duty, did this is not at all surprising. What is striking about Powell around this time is how adroitly he cast himself as a member of the winning war party within the administration.

Hence the stroke call to Solarz; blind accounts in magazines and newspapers about Powell's eagerness and toughness; and his appearance with Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney before the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 4, 1990. There, he took on those such as Nunn, Crowe, and Jones, who believed that sanctions or limited air strikes could force Iraq out of Kuwait. "Many experts, amateurs and others in this town believe that this can be accomplished by such things as surgical air strikes, or perhaps a sustained air strike. And there are a variety of other nice, tidy, alleged low-cost, incremental, may-work options that are floated around with great regularity all over this town," Powell said. "Those strategies may work, but they also may not. Such strategies are designed to hope to win. They are not designed to win."

For Powell to be this dismissive of a position for which he had had such sympathy indicates that the general had decided not only to carry out his duty but also to carry political water for Bush. This was a tough Washington hand to play, but Powell did it beautifully. By the end of the war, he had, in the words of U.S. News & World Report, restored "the public's faith in its fighting force." People like Crowe and Jones were discredited, and Powell, who had privately told them--but never Bush--that he was on their side, came up a national hero, "America's Black Eisenhower" (as National Review dubbed him).

Now the Powell-for-President drumbeat is sounding throughout the land. In an October Newsweek cover story, Joe Klein wrote this of the general: "He stands, at 57, as the most respected figure in American public life. He is an African-American who transcends race; a public man who transcends politics. He seems a distinctly American character, with an easy confidence that inspires trust even among the most skeptical." R.W. Apple, Jr., in The New York Times, called Powell "a coveted general" in a page-one story about competing GOP and Democratic hopes to claim him as one of their own; in the Los Angeles Times, James Pinkerton published a column headlined "Colin Powell: A President for All Seasons."

Implicit in speculation about Powell's potential as a dream candidate is that he is somehow not of Washington, a figure (as Klein put it) who "transcends politics." His poll numbers reflect his popularity: 58 percent of Americans view him favorably and a phenomenally low 6 percent unfavorably (compare that

to Bill Clinton's 41 percent negative rating in the same recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey). And a Newsweek poll found that 54 percent believe it's a plus that Powell "has no ties to politics as usual."

Powell, however, operates in Washington as shrewdly and capably as anyone in modern memory. He has held a string of some of the most prestigious and important posts in the capital--White House Fellow, military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, national security advisor to President Reagan, JCS chairman under Bush. "It was very clear early on that the advice and counsel he brought were more political than you might have expected from a man who's been in the military," recalls Tom Griscom, Reagan's director of communications from 1987 to 1988, when Powell was at the National Security Council. Margaret Tutwiler, James Baker's longtime aide, says Powell "knows how to work the departmental and interagency process." And the general was very helpful to prominent reporters, from Woodward on down. "He was clearly the guy to go to at the Pentagon, of all the civilians and all the officers, if you wanted direction on a story," says NBC News' Fred Francis, who covered the Pentagon from 1984 to 1993. "He was not a leaker in the traditional sense, but he wouldn't let you broadcast a bad story and if you already had information, he would generally confirm it. He always made himself available."

People who know Powell universally salute his efficiency, sense of humor, and ability--rare in a city seemingly dedicated to spinning its wheels--to get things done. "Weinberger was sometimes a difficult man to deal with, so I used to go to Colin," recalls Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense, of Powell's days as military assistant. "He's got a photographic memory, handles pressure very well, and is able to make things happen. It's a very rare combination."

At the moment, Powell has not only not announced whether he will run for president but also has yet to say officially whether he is a Republican, a Democrat, or something in between. "Nobody knows," claims Weinberger. For three decades, however, Powell's political patrons have been Republicans (Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, Reagan, and Bush); his best friends are former assistant secretary of Defense Richard Armitage (to whom Powell spoke by telephone every morning at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. during the Reagan and Bush administrations) and Kenneth Duberstein, Reagan's last chief of staff; and his outlook seems generally conservative. During the 1988-89 presidential transition, for example, Powell wrote a New York Times op-ed titled "Why History Will Honor Mr. Reagan." For Republicans, fresh from their historic mid-term thrashing of Clinton and the Democrats, the partisanship of Gingrich and Dole may wear thin by 1996--which could mean that the GOP will move not to a presidential nominee such as Dole or Phil Gramm but will instead try to recruit a figure of national unity to head the ticket, leaving congressional Republicans to play hardball on the Hill. And about the only figure of national unity with Republican leanings is Colin Powell. Alternatively, from Powell's point of view, the GOP's gains in November may prompt him to embrace the Republicans and run as a moderate who can bridge the gaps in the party. Or there is yet another scenario: Powell could bypass traditional politics...