Nav i g at i n g t h e P e r m a n e n t Q uag m i re
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optimistic view of the forward progress of American ideals: “There is no country on earth that is not touched by America, for we have become the motive force for freedom and democracy in the world.” As such, he said later at his confirmation hearing (he was approved unanimously, of course), “We are attached by a thousand cords to the world at large, to its teeming cities, to its remotest regions, to its oldest civilizations, to its newest cries for freedom. This means that we have an interest in every place on this Earth, that we need to lead, to guide, to help in every country that has a desire to be free, open, and prosperous.”¹⁸ Powell was also the heir to another strain of continuity in U.S. foreign policythe great tradition of pragmatic internationalism going back to Elihu Root (secretary of war under William McKinley and secretary of state under Teddy Roosevelt), Henry Stimson (secretary of state under Hoover and secretary of war under FDR), and Dean Acheson, the Truman secretary of state who was “present at the creation” (his own words) of the postwar world order. Despite his Wilsonian idealism, Powell was, like those men, a hardheaded problem solver unchained to any particular ideology beyond patriotism, breaking through global logjams by virtue of his charisma and intellect. He also exuded a classic American positiveness: “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier” was one of the thirteen “rules” he lived by and later posted, like a legacy to the nation, at the end of his autobiography. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s description of the “wise men” establishment of the Cold War fit Powell perfectly: “They were equally opposed to the yahoos of the right and the softies of the left. Ideological fervor was frowned upon; pragmatism, realpolitik, moderation and consensus were prized. Nonpartisanship was more than a principle, it was art form.”¹⁹ In the s, this described the Ivy League–educated WASP elite; by the multicultural, PC standards of fifty years later, it was no surprise, somehow, that an African American out of City College would be the lineal descendent of this tradition. But Powell was such a man, starting with the fact that no one in Washington could tell if he was really a liberal Republican or a centrist Democrat in disguise. In other ways, however, Powell was also a product of his own times. If the “Wise Men” were legatees of a victorious World War II America, Powell was heir to the Vietnam debacle. Like so many of his generationthe