My American Journey by Colin Powell "The army made it easier for me to love my country, with all its faults"
Wycliff, Don
BOOKS Colin Powell's unfinished Journey Colin L.Powell with Joseph E.Persico Randm House, $25.95, 643pp. Don Wycliff Remember what Colin Powell said at the end of his speech last November...
...Race, color, background, income meant nothing...
...Powell discovered his calling in college, the City University of New York, where, he readily admits, he was an indifferent student...
...But no one will be able to give us a fuller account of Colin Powell's personal American journey than he has...
...If I hurried, I could get to the snack bar or the officers' club before closing and be served, just like everyone else...
...And until the country solved it, I was not going to let bigotry make me a victim instead of a full human being...
...My American Journey is full of that sort of sentiment, which probably accounts for a good part of its success so far in the literary marketplace...
...Powell himself acknowledges that there has always been "[a] certain ambivalence...
...The mayor made a gracious speech and presented me with the keys to the city (the city where, in the old days, I could not get a key to a gas station men's room...
...It was America's problem...
...Especially the part about being "proud to be one of [America's] sons...
...Is there any wonder then, that in announcing he would not run for president in 1996, Powell contrasted his lack of enthusiasm for political life with the passion that he felt "every day" of his thirty-five years as a soldier...
...But Powell is also popular with black people, lukewarm poll results notwithstanding...
...I became a leader almost immediately...
...The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all my heart...
...Somehow, I suspect, Colin Powell's American journey is not yet finished...
...among African-Americans about military service...
...To a people fewer and fewer of whom have any experience of military service, the love of the profession of arms may seem baffling...
...And that was the result of a consciously adopted psychological strategy: I did not intend to give way to self-destructive rage, no matter how provoked....Racism was not just a black problem...
...Rarely do they see a black man confident and comfortable enough to say what most wish, in their heart of hearts, they could say with such sincerity...
...His account of his discovery of the Pershing Rifles, the elite military society on campus, is almost rhapsodic: The discipline, the structure, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging were what I craved...
...For Powell, such rejection became a propellant, fuel for his ascent...
...Time and again over the 643 (too many, really) pages of the book, Powell restates that all he ever really wanted to do was be a soldier...
...His American dream has a few more episodes to go...
...Recalling later an encounter with raw discrimination-he was refused service at a drive-in diner in Phenix City, Alabama-Powell reveals even more vividly his view of the Army as an oasis of fairness...
...For me," he writes, "the real world began on the post...
...I occasionally felt hurt...
...Especially white people...
...That it isn't a perfect meritocracy was demonstrated as recently as last month, when the General Accounting Office released a study showing a "statistically significant" disparity between actual rates of promotion for blacks in the military and the rates that would be expected based on their numbers in the services...
...I'll show you...
...Powell's accounts of his exploits in those high positions are interesting, but it is the "somehow," the journey, that is more interesting and instructive...
...This is a magnificent country and I am proud to be one of its sons...
...The PRs would go the limit for each other and for the group...
...What is remarkable in the account of his Phenix City rebuff, and in many others on the subject of race and racism, is how mild Powell is in expressing his reactions...
...His account of his initiation into the officer-training program in the fall of 1954 reads like an epiphany...
...All work is honorable...
...There are no paragraphs and pages of rage and anger...
...And so he did...
...No wonder Powell is so popular with the American people...
...But read his rhapsody to the Pershing Rifles and his similar reflection on his tour as an infantry battalion commander in Korea-"late at night...I savor the intense camaraderie, the irrepressible characters, the coltish high spirits"-and the bafflement diminishes somewhat...
...Why soldiering...
...Why should we fight for a country that, for so long, did not fight for us, that in fact denied us our fundamental rights...
...It must have been a delicious moment when, in the waning days of the Bush administration, as a hero of the Gulf War and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell, with his wife Alma, returned to Phenix City to have a street named after him...
...I had a street named after me where, previously, I would not have been allowed to walk freely...
...Don Wycliff Remember what Colin Powell said at the end of his speech last November announcing he wouldn't run for president...
...Historians will use Powell's recollections along with other accounts and documents and materials to construct full, scholarly accounts of the Gulf War and other such large events...
...But for Colin Powell it was a system that worked...
...But a more interesting question is: Why soldiering for a black man...
...I found a selflessness within our ranks that reminded me of the caring atmosphere within my family...
...Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation...
...Important as they may have been, exciting and prestigious as they may have seemed to outsiders, all of his high-level jobs in civilian sectors of the government-including the national security advisor's post-were just digressions from his true vocation: soldiering...
...By the end of summer, I was deputy shift-leader, and had learned a valuable lesson...
...In one generation, we have moved from denying a black man service at a lunch counter to elevating one to the highest military office in the nation and to being a serious contender for the presidency...
...Don Wycliff is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...
...But he was avid about ROTC...
...But echoes aside, this is Colin Powell's story, a splendid, all-American story...
...Rarely do they hear a black man express such sentiments...
...He describes it as "the story of a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means who was raised in the South Bronx and somehow rose to become the national security advisor to the president of the United States and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...Always do your best, because someone is watching...
...I felt anger...
...Powell's way up was the military, which he and others have described- fairly, I believe-as the closest thing to a true meritocracy in American society...
...There are echoes in it of some other famous biographies...
...Powell's account of his youthful employment mopping floors at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, for example, recalls a similar account in Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, right down to the drawing of a moral...
...The army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America...
...If this was what soldiering was all about, then maybe I wanted to be a soldier...
...but most of all I felt challenged...
...I regarded military installations in the South as healthy cells in an otherwise sick body...
...The answer, Powell says, lies in "a fact that gets too little recognition...
...We had persevered, and we had lived the American dream...
...Ultimately, Powell enjoyed the best revenge of all: success...
Vol. 123 • January 1996 • No. 1
