Prometheus 6

From the way DeYoung has put her book together — two-fifths of it is devoted to the final four years of Powell’s career — it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she wrote it in response to a single moment: when Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations and made the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction....

That Powell never allowed race to interfere with his rise in the world appears to have been less a matter of colorblindness than of shrewdness. Ronald Reagan apparently once said, “You know, you don’t even think of Colin as black,” and many of the white officers who promoted him, as well as Powell himself, seemed to concur. (“I ain’t that black,” he once explained to someone who asked how a black man’s career could have met with so little resistance from whites.) Powell, DeYoung writes, “saw no personal profit in racial activism and considered himself largely above, or at least apart from, issues of color.”...

“I detected a common thread running through the careers of officers who ran aground even though they were clearly able,” he wrote, looking back on his time in the Army but also ahead to his time working for several presidents. “They fought what they found foolish or irrelevant, and consequently did not survive to do what they considered vital.” He never forgot, as he put it, to “pay the king his shilling.”... 

Reluctant Warrior
By MICHAEL LEWIS

When her kid brother exhibited a strange new passion for church-going, Marilyn Powell decided he was “as much enthralled with the pageantry and costumes as he was imbued with the Holy Spirit.” A few years later, when Colin Powell, an otherwise aimless freshman at City College in New York, enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program, those who knew him best would conclude that he was less interested in serving his country than in the spit and the shine. “What attracted him more than anything else was their uniforms,” Karen DeYoung writes in her account of Powell’s life. “The young cadets looked sharp in their dark brown shirts and ties and gleaming brass buckles. Compared to his solitary, stumbling progress through college, they seemed to belong to something and to know where they were going.” The young Colin Powell seems to have been a character in search of a role, who sensed that it would be easier to play if it came with a costume.

A less sympathetic biographer might have seized on this point in Powell’s character — a perhaps excessive interest in the surface of things — turned it into a weapon and run him through with it. DeYoung, an associate editor at The Washington Post, offers it up more mercifully as just another of Powell’s personality traits, to be set incongruously beside his courage, ambition, humor, evasiveness, charm, calculation and decency. It’s not that she is entirely uncritical; it’s just that she is blessed with the ability to see through her subject and forgive him for the view. She’s written a portrait of Powell that is as revealing as it can be and remain flattering, and as flattering as it can be and remain revealing. And she’s written it very well.

Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell author: Karen DeYoung asin: 1400041708