Colin Powell died on a Monday, which seemed about right.
Mondays have a particular talent for delivering the news you didn’t want, the
kind that sits in your chest like a stone you swallowed and can’t pass. He was
eighty-four years old, fully vaccinated against the thing that killed him
anyway—COVID-19, that patient, invisible stalker that had spent two years
reminding the human race that all its certainties were made of wet paper. The
cancer in his blood had been waiting, too. Multiple myeloma, a name that sounds
almost musical if you don’t know what it means, and then there was the
Parkinson’s, that slow thief creeping through the corridors of his nervous
system, turning off lights in rooms he still needed. Three things were killing
Colin Powell at once. In the end, the virus just got there first.
He had been a soldier for more than thirty years, and
soldiers learn early that most things in this world will try to kill you. What
they don’t always learn—what most men never learn, not really—is that the
things you do in the dark have a way of finding you in the light.
---
It started in Vietnam, the way so many American stories of
that era started, in a wet green hell ten thousand miles from home where young
men learned that the line between civilization and something older and darker
than civilization was thinner than anyone back in the World wanted to admit.
Powell was a young officer then, still finding his footing,
still learning to polish his boots and his ambitions with equal devotion. His
superior was a man named Brig. Gen. John W. Donaldson, and Donaldson had
allegedly done things from helicopters—terrible things, the kind of things you
couldn’t un-know once you knew them, the kind of things that had a way of
screaming at three in the morning for decades afterward, if you let yourself
hear them. Six Vietnamese civilians dead. Two more wounded. Firing down from
the sky like some Old Testament angel, except the wrong kind. The kind with a
rifle instead of a trumpet.
Powell had worked under Donaldson for eight months. Eight
months is long enough to know a man. Long enough to know what he’s capable of.
Long enough to have suspicions that feel like facts but can’t quite become
facts because becoming facts would mean doing something about them, and doing
something about them would mean making enemies, and making enemies would mean
the career was over before it had really begun.
So Powell called Donaldson “aggressive and courageous.” He
wrote it down. Made it official.
There is a particular kind of courage that gets praised in
military citations and a particular kind of courage that never gets mentioned
in them at all. Powell had the first kind in abundance. The second kind—the
kind that looks your superior in the eye and says I know what you did and I’m
saying so out loud—that kind is rarer than a four-leaf clover, rarer than
an honest man in Washington, rarer than a war that actually solves the thing it
set out to solve.
Donaldson walked.
---
Then there was My Lai. My Lai, where American soldiers had
descended on a village like something out of a nightmare and killed at least
350 people—old men, women, children, babies, the whole terrible arithmetic of
atrocity. It happened in March of 1968, and by the time a soldier named Tom
Glen put something down on paper about the way American troops were treating
Vietnamese civilians, Powell was the man tasked with looking into it.
He did not, it should be noted, actually look into it very
hard.
He did not interview Glen directly. He accepted the word of
Glen’s superiors—men with careers to protect, with reputations balanced on a
knife’s edge, with every reason in the world to say our boys weren’t close
enough to see anything and every reason in the world to hope someone would
take that answer and go away quietly. Powell took the answer. He went away
quietly. He filed a report that said relations between American soldiers and
the Vietnamese people were “excellent.”
Excellent.
There is something almost admirable about the audacity of
that word, the way it sits there on the page like a fat, satisfied cat, unaware
of or indifferent to the bodies it’s resting on. Excellent. The word of a man
who had learned, somewhere along the way, that the king wanted good news and
that the man who brought good news rose and the man who brought bad news tended
to find himself stationed somewhere cold and unimportant.
“Always give the king his due first,” Powell had written
years later, in a book full of leadership wisdom and hard-earned lessons. “The
faster I satisfied my bosses, the faster they’d stop bugging me about their
stuff, and the sooner I could get to my own priorities.”
He meant it as inspiration. The problem is that it also
describes, with uncomfortable precision, the mechanism by which ordinary men
become complicit in extraordinary evil. Not monsters. Not mustache-twirlers.
Just men who understood the rules of the game they were playing and played them
very, very well.
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Powell rose. That’s the thing. He rose the way certain men
rise when the machinery of institutions is working exactly as designed—smoothly,
inevitably, each promotion a reward not just for competence (of which he had
plenty) but for the subtler art of knowing when to see and when to go
conveniently blind.
Four-star general. National Security Advisor. Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in the United
States of America, a nation that had more military officers than most countries
had citizens. The first Black American to hold each of these positions, which
was genuinely historic, genuinely meaningful, the kind of achievement that
could make a man feel that everything he’d done to get there had been worth it.
And then: Secretary of State. The Cabinet. The inner circle.
The smoke-filled rooms where the actual decisions got made, where the actual
levers of the actual world were pulled by actual hands.
---
The thing about February 5, 2003 is that it was, in its way,
a masterpiece.
Not a masterpiece of truth. A masterpiece of presentation—of
the careful arrangement of words and photographs and recordings, the theatrical
deployment of authority, the weaponization of trust. Colin Powell was trusted.
That was the asset, the thing everyone in the Bush administration understood
and valued: here was a man whose credibility had survived Vietnam, Panama, the
Gulf War, thirty-something years of American military and political life. Here
was a man who had made himself, through intelligence and discipline and an
almost supernatural understanding of how institutions worked, into a symbol of
American rectitude.
And now here he was at the United Nations, laying it all on
the table.
The photographs. The recordings. The biological weapons labs
on wheels. The aluminum tubes. The drone program. The connections to al-Qaeda,
to a Jordanian militant named Zarqawi who may or may not have met Osama bin
Laden once at a party and who Powell mentioned twenty-one times, conjuring him
like a spell, like the repetition itself could make the danger more real.
“There is no doubt in my mind,” Powell said, and the words
fell into the chamber like stones into still water, and the ripples moved
outward, and in Baghdad people who had nothing to do with September 11th and
nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction went about their lives not knowing
that the ripples were already moving toward them.
The intelligence was wrong. Not a little wrong.
Catastrophically, foundationally, bone-deep wrong, the kind of wrong that
investigators would later spend years documenting in reports that used the word
“flawed” the way doctors use the word “aggressive”—as a gentler synonym for
something more frightening. There were no stockpiles. There were no mobile
labs. There was no meaningful connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,
those two scorpions in a bottle who had spent years watching each other with
mutual suspicion and contempt.
There was only the war that came after. The war that killed
at least 184,000 Iraqi civilians, give or take, depending on which accountant
of atrocity you consulted. Real people. People who had names and faces and
families and favorite foods and dreams about their children’s futures. People
who became numbers in a report.
Maryam, somewhere in Iraq, would eventually say simply: “He
lied, and we are the ones who got stuck with never-ending wars.”
There is a compression in that sentence that no statesman’s
eulogy could match.
---
He called it a “blot.” In 2016, more than a decade after the
invasion, Powell sat down with a Frontline interviewer and described his
UN speech—the speech that had helped open the gates—as a “major intelligence
failure” and a “blot” on his record.
A blot.
I have written about monsters my whole career, and the thing
I have learned, the thing that keeps coming back in the books and the
nightmares both, is that the truly terrifying ones aren’t the ones that come at
you with claws and fangs in the dark. The truly terrifying ones are the ones
that look reasonable. The ones that give good speeches. The ones that receive
the Presidential Medal of Freedom—twice—and stand at podiums with their chests
full of ribbons while somewhere far away, in a country they helped to unmake, a
woman named Suha Mutlak tries to explain that her cousins are dead and her
family lived in tents for three years.
“What kind of victory is this?” Suha asked. “Not for them,
and certainly not for us.”
---
Powell died on a Monday in October 2021, and the obituaries
were magnificent. Trailblazer. Pioneering. Sterling reputation. A favorite of
presidents. America’s most popular public figure, once upon a time. Richard
Haass remembered him as “one of the most intellectually honest people” he had
ever known.
And maybe, in certain rooms, in certain conversations, with
certain people about certain things, that was true.
But there is a thing about the dead that the living
sometimes forget, or choose to forget, because it is uncomfortable: the dead
don’t get to revise their accounts. The record closes. What’s there is there.
What’s there, in Colin Powell’s record, alongside the
genuine achievements and the real history made and the personal story of a
Jamaican immigrant’s son who rose to the highest reaches of American power
through sheer force of will and work—what’s there, alongside all of that, is
also Vietnam, and My Lai, and the UN speech, and the 184,000.
The blot doesn’t go away just because the man does.
Somewhere in Iraq, a journalist named Muntadher Alzaidi—the
man who threw his shoes at George W. Bush, which is the kind of gesture that
achieves a rough poetry precisely because it is so inadequate, so human, so
helplessly small against the scale of what it’s responding to—wrote that he was
sad Powell had died without facing trial, but believed divine judgment awaited.
Maybe. Maybe not. The universe, in my experience, does not
keep as careful a ledger as we’d like. More often it just keeps going, patient
and indifferent, grinding through its business while the names on the monuments
weather and fade and the cities that were bombed keep growing back around their
ruins, as cities do, because people keep insisting on living there even when
they shouldn’t, because that is what people do.
The stone in the chest.
Monday’s particular talent.
The weight of the lie that outlived the liar.
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