Embattled, Scrutinized, Powell Soldiers On

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Embattled, Scrutinized, Powell Soldiers On

By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, July 24 — After a recent meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was kidding around with the secretaries in the national security adviser's White House office, complaining that their pretzel jar was empty. Then he said: "Okay, that's enough. I've got to get back to work now — and by the way, I'm not resigning."

The staff "all took a slight, shallow breath and then broke up," a senior administration official recalled. But the question of Secretary Powell's tenure is no laughing matter in Washington these days.

A string of internal policy differences and defeats — most recently on the Middle East and international family planning — have set off speculation from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom that Secretary Powell might not last through President Bush's term. Tensions with the White House and Pentagon hawks that Secretary Powell has long sought to minimize are no longer possible to disguise.

In public, Secretary Powell, the four-star-general-turned-diplomat, has done what he always does: soldier on, shaping his commander's policies as best he can from within, with some success. In private, Secretary Powell, an amateur automotive mechanic, complains that old friends spend too much time sympathetically taking his temperature — "dip-sticking me," as he puts it.

"He's not easily defeated," said Marybel Batjer, a former longtime aide who is now chief of staff to Gov. Kenny Guinn of Nevada and still in close touch. "He just isn't. It's not within his constitution to be eaten up or gobbled up by negatives." But she acknowledged: "Frankly, this is hard. His good weeks come with a lot of damn work."

With the possible exception of the moment in the mid-70's when Henry A. Kissinger was both secretary of state and national security adviser, internal tensions and threatened resignations over foreign policy have been more the rule than the exception in the modern White House. But veteran diplomats say the current disagreements are the worst since the days when Secretary Powell's mentor, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, feuded with Secretary of State George P. Shultz in the Reagan administration.

"Since the administration can no longer maintain that these aren't major internal disagreements, they've decided they might as well try to contain them by saying that all administrations have disagreements," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's envoy to the United Nations who aspired to Secretary Powell's job in a Gore administration.

"The dilemma here is that these aren't just personal disagreements bred out of ambition and strong personality," he added. "These are deep, philosophical differences between two very different views of America in the world. One is a traditional conservative view; the other is a radical break with 55 years of a bipartisan tradition that sought international agreements and regimes of benefit to us."

As one of the world's most admired celebrities for more than a decade, with approval ratings that rival President Bush's, Secretary Powell has special status — and singular political value — in a Republican administration supposedly eager to demonstrate its commitment to compassionate conservatism.

But almost from the beginning, he has found himself at odds with many of his more hard-line colleagues and the president himself on the handling of foreign policy, whether over Mr. Bush's rejection of the Kyoto treaty on global warming, the president's lumping of Iran, Iraq and North Korea into a global "axis of evil," or the president's declaration last month that progress toward Middle East peace depended on Yasir Arafat's replacement as Palestinian leader.

In each case, Secretary Powell has embraced the president's position as his own, doing his best to justify the administration's view to often-critical allies around the world. Even when he has initially embraced a position at variance with the administration's ultimate policy — regarding the international family planning issue, for example — Secretary Powell's sense of discipline, loyalty and discretion means that he never shows his true feelings publicly, according to aides and close friends.

Mr. Powell's approach to almost all issues — foreign or domestic — is pragmatic and nonideological. He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has supported abortion rights and affirmative action and is a Republican, many supporters say, in no small measure because Republican officials mentored and promoted him for years.

Secretary Powell has won victories on points of principle that he felt deeply, persuading the administration that the Geneva Conventions governed the handling of captured Taliban fighters, even if they were not granted status as prisoners of war, and arguing successfully that a new arms reduction agreement with Russia should take the form of a treaty ratified by the Senate.

But more often, he has been forced to "pick up the pieces and go on," as one longtime Powell associate put it last month, after Mr. Bush announced his new Middle East policy. "He's the one who now has to put it all together and make it work."

Last week, for example, he shepherded a series of meetings with key Arab allies, who arrived skeptical and left offering ringing declarations that Mr. Bush had reassured them of his administration's unshaken resolve to support creation of a Palestinian state within three years. Signaling a hint of compromise, Secretary Powell let it be known that he would be willing to consider a future Palestinian regime in which Mr. Arafat still had some symbolic role.

"We have full trust in him," the Jordanian foreign minister, Marwan Muasher, said of Secretary Powell. "The president made it clear that the secretary is his point man on the Middle East."

But on Monday, Secretary Powell again found himself in the position of announcing a Bush policy he had not initially embraced: the decision to cut off funds for the United Nations Population Fund on grounds that it supported Chinese government agencies that force women to have abortions. The State Department's fact-finding team had found no evidence of United Nations support for such efforts, and Democratic members of Congress said a top Powell aide had assured them he was trying to preserve such funding.

This week, Secretary Powell heads off on a weeklong trip to keep up pressure on India and Pakistan to avert war, and consult with Southeast Asian nations fighting Muslim extremist groups and terror cells. Mr. Holbrooke gives Secretary Powell high praise for his efforts on the subcontinent and his influence on Pakistan's military president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

"Powell and Musharraf have developed a relationship soldier to soldier, statesman to statesman, which is really important and has paid off by bringing Pakistan into the alliance against terrorism and preventing conflict with India, which would be the most dangerous conceivable event," he said.

In foreign capitals, Secretary Powell is routinely greeted like a rock star. Yet his public visibility and popularity also pose a special problem, which became apparent even before he took office last year.

By reputation, experience and age, he overshadowed the new president it was his job to serve. He did not join the Bush campaign as early as other key advisers like the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and aides to both men say his relationship with the president remains more correct and professional than warm or personal.

Secretary Powell does not lift weights or swap jock jokes easily with Mr. Bush. At the same time, Mr. Bush's instinctive views on a range of policies from Iraq to the Middle East to international cooperation are more in line with more conservative advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

And if Mr. Bush is aware of Secretary Powell's world reputation, Mr. Rumsfeld surely remembers that he was already serving in his first tour as defense secretary 25 years ago when Secretary Powell shook his hand as a lean Army colonel in command at Fort Campbell, Ky., an event that Secretary Powell commemorated with a photograph in his best-selling 1995 memoir.

A senior State Department official, asked about the secretary's mood, observed: "I was going to describe it as depressed with all his failures, but let me put it differently: His virtues are vision and persistence. He figures out where we need to go and then he gets us there, and that applies in his dealings with others in the administration or in the world."

Secretary Powell himself has told associates that his position has never been stronger, one said, summing up the secretary's philosophy as: "Fights come and fights go."

Indeed, Secretary Powell's greatest resource may remain the admiration bordering on awe that he commands from his striped pants civilian army. He never complains, never explains, and neither does his circle — an approach that for much of his tenure has tended to mask tensions that would be much more on display with a more political secretary.

He has taken to arriving at the State Department's main entrance most mornings — instead of being chauffeured through the basement garage — so that he can take the pulse of employees and the public in the lobby on the way to his seventh-floor suite.

"He's adored over here in a way that I can't remember with any other secretary," one midlevel State Department official said. "People will snip out quotes that he uses up on the Hill to advocate for the department or foreign policy and circulate them around."

In fact, there is such support for the secretary among his troops that when the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, Mary A. Ryan, abruptly retired amid sharp criticism of lapses in the department's visa program, "the rumor was going around here that the White House had done it because Powell was too nice a guy," one senior official said.

So Secretary Powell made it a point to tell colleagues that he had made the decision to accept Ms. Ryan's previously promised retirement in light of the challenges to come in integrating the visa-issuing function with a new department of homeland security. "He went out of his way to tell people, `I'm the one who did it,' " the official said.

Edward S. Walker, a former assistant secretary of state who now heads the Middle East Institute, a Washington policy institute, said Secretary Powell "is extremely loyal to the president, but he does not give up on his own approach.

"It's the way he is. He after all has as much experience at the Washington game as anyone. I know a lot of people question his effectiveness, but he's a very effective advocate for his point of view, and he just never gives up."

In fact, most Powell-watchers doubt that the secretary will give up. Friends say that he has been deeply moved by letters from strangers, urging him to keep up his efforts as a moderating voice. He is also acutely conscious of his own status as a role model for members of minority groups, and has made special efforts to try to recruit more to join the Foreign Service.

At a recent ceremony announcing a $1 million grant to Howard University to help prepare black students for diplomatic careers, he spoke of his own pride as the first African-American to hold a string of top government jobs. "It's just terrific to be able to walk into a room somewhere in Africa, Russia and Asia and Europe, and you know they're looking at you," he said, adding to laughter: "You know how they be. They're looking at you, and they recognize your position and who you are, and they also recognize that you're black.

"And it's always a source of inspiration and joy to see people look at me and through me see my country, and see what promise my country offers to all people who come to these shores looking for a better life."