My American Journey by Colin L. Powell

Author:Colin L. Powell [Powell, L. Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76368-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

Throughout the early months of 1986, I operated in a twilight zone, carrying out my job while at the same time planning to leave it. My daily routine would have made no sense as a job description. I might start out the day deciding which memoranda Weinberger should see and finish the day editing the Secretary’s next speech. In between, I would stroke a disgruntled chief’s ego, arrange to have the parade ground reseeded, and integrate the Secretary’s dining-room staff, which consisted entirely of Filipino waiters and must have looked like raw racism to our foreign visitors.

Most of my tasks and a thousand and one phone calls would evaporate with time. But I did leave one mark. The Secretary’s office is located in the Eisenhower Corridor of the Pentagon. I have always felt a special affinity for Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero who did not have to bark or rattle sabers to gain respect and exercise command, a President who did not stampede his nation into every world trouble spot, a man who understood both the use of power and the value of restraint and who had the secure character to exercise whichever was appropriate. It was Ike, for example, who had resisted pressure to intervene in Vietnam when the French went under at Dienbienphu. I admired him as a soldier, a President, and a man.

The corridors in Army, Navy, and Air Force country were decorated like mini-museums, while the Eisenhower Corridor was hung with a few pictures. Ike’s hall, I believed, should honor his memory more dramatically. Weinberger, a lover of history and tradition, concurred. Doc Cooke was the man I went to see to push through my plan to remake the corridor. Doc found the money in some budgetary cookie jar, gave me his talented staff artist, Joe Pisani, and we went to work. For months, the corridor, draped with drop cloths, looked like a Jackson Pollock retrospective. The hammering and sawing seemed to go on forever.

Midway through the project, Marybel Batjer dragged me out into the hall. Were we opening a bordello? she wanted to know. The corridor commemorating the architect of victory in Europe was being painted fingernail pink.

“Does this look right to you?” I asked the foreman.

“We don’t pick ’em, General,” he said. “We just slap it on.”

It turned out the paint number had been transposed on the work order, and the hallway had to be redone. In the meantime, some wiseacre hung a sign in the corridor: “Powell’s Pizza Parlor, Opening Soon.”

Nine months after the work first began, John D. Eisenhower, the late President’s son, presided over the dedication of the refurbished corridor. We had found an old sign reading “Buying Station—The Bell-Springs Creamery,” from the creamery where Ike worked eighty hours a week as a boy. We displayed his West Point yearbook, opened to his photo with the inscription “Daredevil Dwight, the Dauntless Don…. He’s the handsomest man in the Corps.” Among the glass display cases were mementos of the military career of the Allied leader who gave the fateful “go” for the invasion of Normandy.

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