Memories of the Powell Administration

Some see in him a chance to cast a vote for racial comity. “Without minimizing the number of people who are racially intolerant, there are actually a sizeable number of Americans who really would like to see things go better in the area of race,” says Paul Sniderman, a professor political science at Stanford University who has done extensive research on racial attitudes. “A lot of people would really see this as their chance to support a historic accomplishment.” Yet there’s also reason to believe that white admiration for Powell does more to deny and paper over the existence of racism than it does to ameliorate it. Says Juan Williams, a black journalist who has written often about politics and civil rights, “A lot of his attraction to whites is that it allows them to say, ‘I’m not a racist; I like Colin Powell. I don’t have a problem with blacks; I have a problem with blacks who don’t share my values.’”  In this view, Powell’s chief symbolic importance is to send the falsely reassuring message that if he made it big, then so can anyone else. “There is a very mistaken notion that if you see one black man who has succeeded, then society is open for all black people,” says Clifford Alexander, a black attorney and businessman who served as Secretary of the Army during the Carter administration.

It’s no accident that accounts of Powell’s career tend to exaggerate the humbleness of his roots as “a ghetto child,” born in Harlem and “raised in the poverty-ridden South Bronx.” (“We get poorer and poorer,” Powell’s sister has wryly noted, as media interest in Powell grows.) The more disadvantages he can be seen to have started with, the more his great success validates the American Dream. It is clear in the comments of some of Powell’s close friends and supporters that they believe their admiration for Powell holds them harmless for the harsher racial judgments they may harbor of blacks in the aggregate. “I think he could be a fabulous president,” says one of his closest friends. “yes, partly because he’s black, and having a competent black president would be wonderful.” There is, in the remark, that unconscious condescension—the weary suggestion that fair-minded whites are so tired of giving opportunities to blacks who waste them. No one embraces this attitude more openly than Powell’s number-one white booster, Charles J. Kelly, Jr., who is the self-appointed force behind what he calls Citizens for Powell. Kelly is 66, a retired financier who as a young law student was involved in Citizens for Eisenhower. His confederates in the Powell effort include Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose and Tex McCrary, the eccentric public-relations maestro who also boosted Ike’s 1952 campaign. Kelly exudes both an indelibly Midwestern civic-mindedness—“sort of Babbitt on the Potomac,” in the words of an acquaintance—and nostalgia for a simpler era. He works almost full-time on his efforts to line up supporters for Powell, traveling around the country to meet with C.E.O.’s and chambers of commerce, drafting cogent memorandums to persuade  reporters and potential backers that Powell can win the Republican nomination. He belongs to Washington’s most establishmentarian group, the Metropolitan Club, and he and his wife rent a wing of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn’s enormous house in Georgetown.

Sitting on Bradlee’s spacious grounds on a warm July morning, Kelly explains that America is more than ready to elect its first black president. “If I talk to rednecks, and cabdrivers, and so on, they don’t see him as the black problem, which is associated with irresponsible behavior.” Kelly and I have stumbled almost accidentally onto this line of conversation, but he is suddenly deeply engaged. “Powell represents a litmus test in America,” he says. “What is the meaning of racism in America? Is racism skin-color prejudice? Does a car full of teenagers dressed in urban-guerilla costumes with a loudspeaker blaring offensive lyrics in traffic—is revulsion at that racist revulsion? Or is it revulsion at the offensive incivility of the process, at the arrogance of these youths? Which no one will speak to, for fear of being called racist—or for fear of their lives…. From everything I’ve been able to determine, the prejudice is behavior-related.” Powell himself has admonished audiences of minorities that racial progress demands a greater assumption of personal responsibility. But he always stresses, too, that racism remains a crushing fact of life in America, embracing the reality that prejudice, behavior, and perception act on one another in boundlessly complex ways.

Some white Powell enthusiasts, however, are peddling the comforting belief that racism is a thing of the past. If black men with bachelor’s degrees now earn 76 cents for every dollar earned by their white counterparts, they’re just not trying hard enough. Powell helps the problem, Kelly says, “just by standing there. His presence says, ‘Kwitcherbitchin. If I can do it, you can do it. Don’t run around talking about how the world owes you a living. Just don’t whine about it. Get on with your lives.’”