Former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell 

                                                         (credit: Wikipedia)

                          

An Honest Man

I’ve been thinking about Colin Powell for the last few days. He just died ten days ago, and his passing led to some heavy thinking on my part.

I've been thinking about how I grudgingly admired him, even though I disagreed with many of his political views. Powell believed in small government and minimal government involvement in the lives and affairs of ordinary citizens. Strong military, small government, lower taxes, and letting markets work with very little government interference. But, like any thinking person, he went through several versions of his political views over the years.

Maybe, some background on me is in order here. My dad and mom endured some of the hardest times during the Depression, so I grew up in a basically socialist home. My parents knew from experience that markets left to their own devices really will let workers’ kids starve to death while crops are being burned in other parts of the land “to keep the price up”. Bankers will finance foreign dictators and, in a few years, send young men off to fight them. And die in the ensuing war.

I think Powell probably told himself that markets and armies produce some bad results sometimes, but the alternatives are even worse. I just can’t agree. Western Europe is quite socialist in its outlook and function these days, but for me, the versions of socialism and the mixed economies they have arrived at work. They don’t have the numbers of homeless America does. 

So why would I ever admire Colin Powell? Because he could admit when he was wrong. That fact alone heavily shaped my response to him.

The glaring example of this character trait was seen in his complex handling of the declaration of the 2003 war in Iraq. Powell went on tv at the UN in front of the whole world and stated that evidence was clearly showing the Iraqis were close to building an atom bomb and might even already have one. Therefore, the nations of the West, with America in the lead, would have to invade and stop Saddam Hussein from using such a bomb.

America and Britain did invade. Almost all of the rest of the nations did not agree and did not join that invasion. In the end, after Iraq had been largely laid waste and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had died, not one weapon of mass destruction – atomic, chemical, or biological – was ever found. The US had committed a massive blunder in front of the whole world, at least in part because of Colin Powell. I still get sickened when I think about it.

But Powell was able to admit that he’d made a big mistake. He called that decision a “blot on his record”. And he gradually got more honest and open about his regrets with regard to that decision, which is evidence of a kind of character that the big majority of politicians never reach.

I’ve taken nearly two weeks to write this post because I was thinking hard about other politicians and trying to figure out what other politicians might qualify as “honest” in the “fatness of these pursy times” (Hamlet). Yesterday, I realized that on at least one big occasion, a white man who was a Democrat actually fit the bill.

               Cuban Armed Forces surrounding Bay of Pigs invaders (April 19, 1962)                                              (credit: Rumlin, via Wikimedia Commons) 

In 1962, when I was a boy, John Kennedy privately okayed the launching of an invasion of Cuba, which had gone over to Castro and the Communists a few years before (1959). The invasion was led by about 1400 Cuban ex-patriots who were living in the US and who loathed Fidel Castro. They did land but were quickly surrounded and cut off from all aid. The uprising of the Cuban people, who supposedly wanted Castro gone, the uprising that the CIA had assured Kennedy repeatedly would happen, never showed a glimmer. It was all a myth. These ex-pats and their US backers in the CIA and in the military in general, reportedly urged Kennedy to send more US air support. 8 US bombers had hit several Cuban airfields just before the invasion, but when Kennedy saw that he had been lied to by his own military and intelligence communities, he pulled the plug. No more air support. No more aid of any kind to the Cuban ex-pats. The invaders surrendered to Castro’s forces after only three days on Cuban soil.

But Kennedy went further. He admitted the day the ex-pats surrendered that he was the “responsible officer of the government” and a week later admitted that the final decision was “mine and mine alone”.

It’s well-known now that when Kennedy admitted that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a mistake and that he was the main one responsible for the decision to go ahead with the invasion, his popularity in the polls went up, not down.

What is not so widely known is that both he and Powell had been lied to by men that they trusted. But that’s a post for another day.

Hang in there, folks. Democracy has come through hard times before; it will again. And in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, recall that that shadow has been hanging over us for a lot of years now. WWIII is probably less likely to happen now than in Kennedy’s times. Maybe, the world’s people, and especially the American people, aren’t hopelessly stupid after all.     

                                

         

                                           John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the US 

                                                       (credit: Wikipedia)