Colin L. Powell was nominated by President Bush on December 16, 2000 as Secretary of State. After being unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he was sworn in as the 65^th Secretary of State on January 20, 2001. 

Prior to his appointment, Secretary Powell was the chairman of America’s Promise - The Alliance for Youth, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to mobilizing people from every sector of American life to build the character and competence of young people.

Secretary Powell was a professional soldier for 35 years, during which time he held myriad command and staff positions and rose to the rank of 4-star General. His last assignment, from October 1, 1989 to September 30, 1993, was as the 12^th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military position in the Department of Defense. During this time, he oversaw 28 crises, including Operation Desert Storm in the victorious 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Following his retirement, Secretary Powell wrote his best-selling autobiography, My American Journey, which was published in 1995. Additionally, he pursued a career as a public speaker, addressing audiences across the country and abroad.

Secretary Powell was born in New York City on April 5, 1937 and was raised in the South Bronx. His parents, Luther and Maud Powell, immigrated to the United States from Jamaica. Secretary Powell was educated in the New York City public schools, graduating from the City College of New York (CCNY), where he earned a bachelor’s degree in geology. He also participated in ROTC at CCNY and received a commission as an Army second lieutenant upon graduation in June 1958. His further academic achievements include a Master of Business Administration degree from George Washington University.

Secretary Powell is the recipient of numerous U.S. and foreign military awards and decorations.

Secretary Powell’s civilian awards include two Presidential Medals of Freedom, the President’s Citizens Medal, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Secretary of State Distinguished Service Medal, and the Secretary of Energy Distinguished Service Medal. Several schools and other institutions have been named in his honor and he holds honorary degrees from universities and colleges across the country.

Secretary Powell is married to the former Alma Vivian Johnson of Birmingham, Alabama. The Powell family includes son Michael; daughters Linda and Anne; daughter-in-law Jane; and grandsons Jeffrey and Bryan.

Source: U.S. Department of State

A hallowed rite of American politics ended Tuesday. Every few weeks for the past six years, reporters have speculated hopefully about whether Gen. Colin Powell would deign to run for president or vice president. Countless polls have confirmed the general's astounding popularity—only 7 percent negative! That's better than motherhood! His every refusal has been dissected for a loophole. (What exactly does, "My answer is irrevocably no" mean, anyway?) Even on Monday, when it was obvious that George W. Bush would pick Dick Cheney, Dan Rather was claiming that Bush and his father were still trying to convince the general to grace the ticket. (In this week's "Readme," Michael Kinsley argues that Cheney's selection still may not silence the Powell-for-veep huffing.) 

When he declined a presidential run in 1995, Powell declared that running for office was "a calling that I do not yet hear." Now it seems clear he never will. Powell has telegraphed that he would serve as Bush's secretary of state, and he will almost certainly get the job if Dubya wins. But electoral politics is not likely. The general will be 67 by the next presidential election, too old for a first run. He has become the Mario Cuomo of the GOP, the girl who always got away.
 

So this is the moment to wonder what we missed. What kind of No. 1 or No. 2 would Powell have been? Powell's fairytale biography tends to overwhelm actual thinking about him. His story is too perfect. The son of striving West Indian immigrants, he grew up in the tough, polyglot South Bronx. He was an aimless kid, but he found order and meaning in the Army. He rode military service from Vietnam soldier to national security adviser to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Eventually, he prosecuted the most successful war in U.S. history, then retired to help at-risk kids. 

For many, Powell is confirmation of the American dream: A black man from modest circumstances can do anything if he works hard enough. He affirmed idealism about the U.S. military: It is the meritocratic, colorblind institution it claims to be. And he is a role model and champion of hard work, discipline, honesty, loyalty, patriotism, and good humor. But the retelling of his spotless life suppresses cool consideration of the general's fitness for office. 

Powell would have been a funny kind of candidate. American voters demand that their politicians be (or pretend to be) mavericks. Every presidential candidate promises to shake things up, claims to be impatient with the ways of Washington, and wants to seize power back from the bureaucrats and return it to the people. Generals have traditionally made compelling candidates because they appear to be warriors who won't be deterred by Beltway opposition. This is not Powell. Despite his military service and apparent outsiderness, he has exactly the qualities Americans say they don't want in a president. He is an organization man, fiercely loyal to bureaucracies, happy with the status quo, at least as comfortable taking orders as giving them. 

Powell's military career testifies to his skills as a bureaucratic infighter. He had one year of real combat—a nasty stint as a Vietnam adviser—but mostly he was a staff officer, planning and advising superiors on strategy and logistics. Powell was great at getting along. In a 1968-69 tour of Vietnam, he served as a staff officer in the division that committed the My Lai massacre. He arrived in Vietnam after the massacre occurred but before it was discovered. As Charles Lane chronicled in the New Republic, Powell made no aggressive effort to investigate war crimes when he was asked to look into them, and he brushed off a soldier who had complained. According to Lane, Powell also kept his head down as a White House fellow during Watergate. When Powell worked for Ronald Reagan's National Security Council, he objected quietly to the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal but then helped Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger arrange the dubious transfer of missiles to Iran. 

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell confirmed his reputation for caution and bureaucratic chess-playing. He won credit from goo-goos for cutting the Pentagon budget after the Cold War. But military reformers were dismayed by his methods. He did not significantly trim any of the four service arms. More important, he made little effort to reorganize the Pentagon to fight new, less conventional kinds of war. 

Powell also preached the Powell doctrine, his gospel—stemming from Vietnam—that American troops should never be committed to battle without overwhelming force and overwhelming popular support. This philosophy, designed to protect the U.S. military from anything that could tarnish its reputation, arguably elevated Pentagon interests over national ones. So when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Powell opposed driving him out, favoring sanctions instead. When war came, Powell pushed to end it quickly before Saddam fell or the Republican Guard was smashed. Powell, who voiced his objections privately, carried out President Bush's orders superbly and ended up a hero. 

But Powell has never absorbed any blame for the U.S. decision not to vanquish Saddam, nor for our failure to intervene in Bosnia, another policy he pushed. In Sunday's Washington Post, Robert Kagan contended that Powell's reluctance to use force, discomfort with the U.S. acting as a global cop, and general caution make him an iffy choice for secretary of state. Under Powell, Kagan hints, the Department of State might retrench into isolationism and inactivity just when the United States must be more engaged in the world than ever. 

Since 1997, Powell has devoted much of his time to America's Promise, a group he founded to encourage volunteering that helps kids. It too has been marked by his establishmentarian, bureaucratic style. Powell, a superb recruiter, enlisted corporations, nonprofits, and governments to commit resources to children. (America's Promise pushes mentoring, safe places for kids, and child health among its "five promises.") But despite scads of Powell-centered PR, it's not clear the organization has achieved much. The New York Times, the newspaper Youth Today, and philanthropy scholar Pablo Eisenberg have smacked America's Promise for operating secretively, exaggerating accomplishments, and resisting objective assessments of its programs. Corporations have failed to deliver on some of their commitments. Those that have delivered have made their contributions to big, establishment charities, rather than the grass-roots ones that most help needy kids. 

Powell's history, in short, does not suggest that he would have made a great president. That job requires an impatient leader who likes to slice through red tape, not create it, and who wants to shake up the government, not pacify it. But we have missed a superb vice president, someone who would complain mildly in private but follow the president's orders in public, someone who would protect the federal bureaucracy while making it slightly more efficient, someone who wouldn't take risks, someone who would stay out of trouble. Someone a lot like Al Gore.

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It's hard to come up with another explanation for his jaw-dropping behavior last week before the House International Relations Committee. There he sat, recounting for the umpety-umpth time why, back in February 2003, he believed the pessimistic estimates about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I went and lived at the CIA for about four days," he began, "to make sure that nothing was—" Suddenly, he stopped and glared at a Democratic committee staffer who was smirking and shaking his head. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man back there?" Powell grumbled. "Are you part of the proceedings?"

Rep. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, objected, "Mr. Chairman, I've never heard a witness reprimand a staff person in the middle of a question."
Powell muttered back, "I seldom come to a meeting where I am talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you, giving editorial comment by head shakes."

Oh, my.

Here is a man who faced hardships in the Bronx as a kid, bullets in Vietnam as a soldier, and bureaucratic bullets through four administrations in Washington, a man who rose to the ranks of Army general, national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state, a man who thought seriously about running for president—and he gets bent out of shape by some snarky House staffer?

Powell's outburst is a textbook sign of overwhelming stress. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Then again, he's also been having a bad three years.

As George Bush's first term nears its end, Powell's tenure as top diplomat is approaching its nadir. On the high-profile issues of the day, he seems to have almost no influence within the administration. And his fateful briefing one year ago before the U.N. Security Council—where he attached his personal credibility to claims of Iraqi WMD—has destroyed his once-considerable standing with the Democrats, not to mention our European allies, most of the United Nations, and the media.

At times, Powell has taken his fate with resigned humor. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker last year of a diplomatic soiree that Powell attended on the eve of war, at which a foreign diplomat recited a news account that Bush was sleeping like a baby. Powell reportedly replied, "I'm sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming."

At other times, though, Powell must be frustrated beyond measure. One can imagine the scoldings he takes from liberal friends for playing "good soldier" in an administration that's treated him so shabbily and that's rejected his advice so brazenly. That senseless dressing-down of the committee staffer—a tantrum that no one with real power would ever indulge in—can best be seen as a rare public venting of Powell's maddened mood.

The decline of Powell's fortunes is a tragic tale of politics: so much ambition derailed, so much accomplishment nullified.

From the start of this presidency, and to a degree that no one would have predicted when he stepped into Foggy Bottom with so much pride and energy, Powell has found himself almost consistently muzzled, outflanked, and humiliated by the true powers—Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Bureaucratic battles between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon have been a feature of many presidencies, but Powell has suffered the additional—and nearly unprecedented—indignity of swatting off continuous rear-guard assaults from his own undersecretary of state, John Bolton, an aggressive hard-liner who was installed at State by Cheney* for the purpose of diverting and exhausting the multilateralists.)

One of Powell's first acts as secretary of state was to tell a reporter that the Bush administration would pick up where Bill Clinton left off in negotiations with North Korea—only to be told by Cheney that it would do no such thing. He had to retract his statement. For the next nine months, he disappeared so definitively that Time magazine asked, on its cover of Sept. 10, 2001, "Where Is Colin Powell?"

The events and aftermath of 9/11 put Powell still farther on the sidelines. He scored something of a victory a year later, when Bush decided, over the opposition of Cheney and Rumsfeld, to take his case for war against Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly. But Powell's attempts to resolve the crisis diplomatically ended in failure.

Once the invasion got under way, the principles of warfare that he'd enunciated as a general—the need to apply overwhelming force on the battlefield (which, during the last Gulf War, was dubbed the "Powell Doctrine")—were harshly rejected (and, in this case, rightly so—Rumsfeld's plan to invade with lighter, more agile forces was a stunning success, at least in the battlefield phase of the war). Powell's objections to Ariel Sharon's departure from the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" were overridden by a White House where Eliot Abrams had been put in charge of Middle East policy. Powell's statements on the Middle East came to be so widely ignored—because no one saw them as reflecting U.S. policy—that Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to the region when he wanted to send a message that would be taken seriously. When Bush dispatched an emissary to Western Europe after the war to lobby for Iraqi debt-cancellation and make overtures for renewing alliances, he picked not Powell but James Baker, the Bush family's longtime friend and his father's secretary of state.

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk-assessment firm, notes that Powell has scored significant policy achievements on China, Georgia, and the India-Pakistan dispute. But these are issues over which neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld has much at stake—politically, ideologically, or financially.

There have also been occasions, on higher-profile topics, when Powell has broken through the barricades and advanced his positions. He (and Condi Rice) persuaded Bush, over Rumsfeld's opposition, to implement the U.S.-Russian accord reducing strategic missiles. However, he couldn't stop the president from pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty.

Last September, Powell met with President Bush in the Oval Office to make the case for presenting a new U.N. resolution on the occupation of Iraq—and to announce that the Joint Chiefs agreed with him. This was a daring move: Rumsfeld opposed going back to the United Nations; Powell, the retired general, had gone around him for support. Even here, though, Powell's triumph was partial, at best. Bush went back to the United Nations, but the resulting resolution did not call for internationalizing political power in Iraq to anywhere near the degree that Powell favored.

Similarly, Powell has had a few successes at getting Bush to participate in negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear-weapons program. (Cheney and Rumsfeld oppose even sitting down for talks.) Yet Bush has declined to adopt any position on what an acceptable accord, short of North Korea's unilateral disarmament, might be. More than a year into this perilous drama, the fundamentals of U.S. policy haven't changed at all.

Powell has also won the occasional battle—or, more accurately, has been on the winning side—when his position converges with Bush's vital political interests. For instance, against the advice of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Bush will probably turn over at least some political control in Iraq to the United Nations. He will do so not because Powell has advised such a course, but because the presidential election is coming up and Bush needs to show voters that he has an exit strategy and that American soldiers will not be dying in Baghdad and Fallujah indefinitely.

If there is a second Bush term, Powell will almost certainly not be in it. News stories have reported that he'll step down. He has stopped short of quitting already not just because he's a good soldier, but because that's not what ambitious Cabinet officers do in American politics. Those who resign in protest usually write themselves out of power for all time. They are unlikely to be hired even after the opposition party resumes the Executive Office because they're seen as loose cannons. 

Powell, who at one point might have been an attractive presidential candidate for either party, has fallen into a double-damned trap. He can't quit for reasons cited above; yet his often-abject loyalty to Bush, especially on the Iraq question, makes him an unseemly candidate for a future Democratic administration. 

He seems to have launched a rehabilitation campaign, to escape this dreaded state. Last month, after David Kay resigned as the CIA's chief weapons inspector and proclaimed that Iraq probably didn't have weapons of mass destruction after all, Powell told a reporter that he might not have favored going to war if he'd known there were no WMD a year ago. He almost instantly retracted his words, as all internal critics of Bush policies seem to do. 

Powell's best option, after January, may be to abandon his ambitions for further public office, nab a lucrative job in the private sector, and write the most outrageous kiss-and-tell political memoir that the world has ever seen.

Correction, Feb. 19, 2004: The piece originally identified John Bolton as the No. 2 in the State Department. In fact, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary, is the department's No. 2. Bolton is one of six under secretaries. Return to the corrected sentence.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at  .
Photograph of Colin Powell by Yuri Gripas/Reuters.

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