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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI interviewed Colin Powell in his Pentagon office when he was CJCS.
Just Powell, his press person, my photographer and myself.
I spent almost two hours with him. I was working as a writer and editor for a criminal justice reform non-profit, and seeking a message from him to deliver directly to PoC in America's prisons. Perhaps a word of encouragement or motivation. Even though his experience was not the same as that of ppl who came up in racial strife or impoverished circumstances (as is the experience of overwhelming numbers of prisoners), he still was a highly accomplished Black man who might be a role model for some.
He spoke from his heart, humbly, and with understanding and empathy. There was no artifice in him.
Whatever else he was, he was that, then.
zipplewrath
(16,646 posts)It's what he did.
That's the problem. A person is "judged" on what they do, not what they believe, or aspire to be.
Read his autobiography and look at the chances he had to "do the right thing" and he backed down.
UTUSN
(70,684 posts)stillcool
(32,626 posts)of over a million people had their reasons for doing their part. It is difficult to understand, because the mind-set at the time, what factored in to the decision, none of that is known. When the pinnacle of a career is defined by a such a life-destroying atrocity, it's hard to see past that.
Baitball Blogger
(46,702 posts)Last edited Mon Oct 18, 2021, 10:19 PM - Edit history (1)
be used like that. Was it a sense of duty? Then, Powell gave "duty" a dirty name.
Grasswire2
(13,568 posts)I don't think we will ever know.
He could have been president, easily. It was always said that his wife, Alma, did not want him to run. As president, would he have been owned in the same way, by someone?
I guess it would take a shrink to figure it out.
UTUSN
(70,684 posts)mountain grammy
(26,619 posts)He was a soldier who by all accounts served honorably. Thats not insignificant.
unc70
(6,112 posts)No where near.
His complicity in the My Lai coverup and later tarnished him and his reputation. His later behavior did not change that assessment.
Celerity
(43,333 posts)https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/colin-powells-vietnam-fog/
Bob Kerrey is lost in the haze of Vietnam. As he has contended with the public revelation that the Navy SEAL team he led killed a dozen or so civilians during a nighttime mission in 1969 (accidentally, he and five colleagues maintain; not-so-accidentally, says one team member), his recollections have shifted. Please understand, he told journalist Gregory Vistica, who uncovered this story, that my memory of this event is clouded by the fog of the evening, age and desire. His is not an uncommon fog, as attested to by other vets. The hell of Vietnaman unpopular war that involved hard-to-discern guerrilla combatants, brutal depopulation strategies, indiscriminate bombing and much collateral damage, as military bureaucrats called civilian killsoffers its distinct challenges to memory, the individual memories of many who served there and the collective memory of the nation that sent them and sponsored a dirty war of free-fire zones and destroy-the-village-to-save-the-village tactics. In reviewing Colin Powells military service recently, I found that Powell had his own trouble in setting the record straight on his involvementtangential as it wasin one of the wars more traumatic episodes.
As Powell notes in his 1995 autobiography, My American Journal, in 1969 he was an Army major, the deputy operations officer of the Americal Division, stationed at division headquarters in Chu Lai. He says that in March of that year, an investigator from the inspector generals office of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) paid a call. In a Joe Friday monotone, the investigator shot questions at Powell about Powells position at the division and the divisions operational journals, of which Powell was the custodian. The inspector then asked Powell to produce the journals for March 1968. Powell started to explain that he had not been with the division at that time. Just get the journal, the IG man snapped, and go through that months entries. Let me know if you find an unusual number of enemy killed on any day. Powell flipped through the records and came upon an entry from March 16, 1968. The journal noted that a unit of the division had reported a body count of 128 enemy dead on the Batangan Peninsula. In this grinding, grim, but usually unspectacular warfare, Powell writes, that was a high number. The investigator requested that Powell read the number into the tape recorder he had brought, and that was essentially the end of the interview. He left, Powell recalls, leaving me as mystified as to his purpose as when he arrived.
It would not be until two years later (according to the original version of Powells book) or six months later (according to the paperback version of the book) that Powell figured out that the IG official had been probing what was then a secret, the My Lai massacre. Not until the fall of 1969 did the world learned that on March 16, 1968, troops from the Americal Division, under the command of Lieut. William Calley, killed scores of men, women and children in that hamlet. Subsequent investigation revealed that Calley and his men killed 347 people, Powell writes. The 128 enemy kills I had found in the journal formed part of the total. Though he does not say so expressly, Powell leaves the impression that the IG investigation, using information provided by Powell, uncovered the massacre, for which Calley was later court-martialed. That is not accurate.
The transcript of the tape-recorded interview between the IG manLieut. Col. William Sheehanand Powell tells a different story. During that sessionwhich actually happened on May 23, 1969the IG investigator did request that Powell take out the divisions operations journals covering the first three weeks of March. (The IG inquiry had been triggered by letters written to the Pentagon, the White House and twenty-four members of Congress by Ron Ridenhour, a former serviceman who had learned about the mass murders.) Sheehan examined the records. Then he asked Powell to say for the record what activity had transpired in grid square BS 7178 in this period. The most significant of these occurred on 16, March, 1968, Powell replied, beginning at 0740 when C Company, 1st of the 20th, then under Task Force Barker, and the 11th Infantry Brigade, conducted a combat assault into a hot LZ [landing zone]. He noted that C Company, after arriving in the landing zone, killed one Vietcong. About fifteen minutes later, the same company, backed up by helicopter gunships, killed three VC. In the following hour, the gunships killed three more VC, while C Company located documents and equipment and killed fourteen Vietcong. There is no indication of the nature of the action which caused these fourteen VC KIA, Powell said. Later that morning, C Company, according to the journal, captured a shortwave radio and detained twenty-three VC suspects for questioning, while two other companies that were also part of Task Force Barker were active in the same area without registering any enemy kills.
snip
Pisces
(5,599 posts)Skittles
(153,150 posts)we just see him for WHAT HE WAS
ShazzieB
(16,379 posts)Make of that what you will.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)troll = anyone who doesn't fawn over a warmongering piece of shit
burrowowl
(17,639 posts)Just saying it like it was! My Lai he tried to cover up and the lies on Iraq were egregious!
Skittles
(153,150 posts)he faltered, folded like a deck chair - it would seem his career was more important. Accomplished - meh.
ecstatic
(32,688 posts)are guilty as well, are they not? They voted to allow the war to happen. I was extremely angry about it for a long time, but we've all had to forgive a lot of people since then.
Skittles
(153,150 posts)nope
neither one was my first choice
dixiechiken1
(2,113 posts)At a motivational seminar in Denver. It was an all day thing and there were a number of speakers - Picabo Street, Ed Asner and Colin Powell among them.
Colin Powell was the 2nd to the last speaker of the day. He spoke quite a bit about how he grew up and how he could never get away with anything because all the women in the neighborhood sat in their windows and watched everything that went on. And they would always tell each other what their kids were doing. He said all the ladies in the neighborhood were like his aunts - and he had a thousand aunts. lol
He was a great speaker, very impactful, and you could have heard a pin drop in the arena the entire time he spoke. We all felt sorry for the last speaker who had to follow him because once Colin Powell was done, everyone started clearing out.
Escurumbele
(3,389 posts)He may have told the truth then.
berni_mccoy
(23,018 posts)Hekate
(90,658 posts)Raine
(30,540 posts)for sharing your own personal experience in meeting Powell.
Grasswire2
(13,568 posts)I might have to play it for my edification.
dixiechiken1
(2,113 posts)It would be interesting to see if your memory comports with what you hear now.
I often think of the time I heard him speak and remember it fondly. While my experience wasn't one-on-one, as yours was, I came away with much the same impression you did:
"He spoke from his heart, humbly, and with understanding and empathy. There was no artifice in him."
Thanks for sharing your experience and your perspective.
traitorsgalore
(1,396 posts)What a great guy, LOL.
Grasswire2
(13,568 posts)leftyladyfrommo
(18,868 posts)man that got sucked into the Iraq war mania.
Cheney. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeldt were going to war no matter what. And there was a lot of popular support for that war at that time.
It was all how awful Hussain was. How awful the rape rooms were. And on and on.
Powell didn't cause the Iraq war. War mania caused that war. Super male egos caused that war.
It was awful. It was wrong. But you can't blame just one person. He was the scapegoat but a whole lot of Americans backed that war.