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The Life of Colin Powell
Knopf
October 2006
On Sale: October 10, 2006
Featuring: Collin Powell
624 pages
ISBN: 1400041708
EAN: 9781400041701
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Over the course of a lifetime of service to his country,
Colin Powell became a national hero, a beacon of wise
leadership and, according to polls, “the most trusted man in
America.” From his humble origins as the son of Jamaican
immigrants to the highest levels of government in four
administrations, he helped guide the nation through some of
its most heart-wrenching hours. Now, in the first full
biography of one of the most admired men of our time,
award-winning Washington Post journalist Karen DeYoung takes
us from Powell’s Bronx childhood and meteoric rise through
the military ranks to his formative roles in Washington’s
corridors of power and his controversial tenure as secretary
of state. With psychological acumen and a reporter’s eye for detail,
DeYoung introduces us to the racially integrated
neighborhood where Powell grew up, his courtship of and
marriage to Alma Johnson, and his years as a promising young
Army officer. We are witness to the pivotal events that
helped shaped his world view, including two tours of duty in
Vietnam, where he was disillusioned by a breakdown in
leadership and the lack of a clear objective, and a 1988
meeting as President Reagan’s national security adviser with
Mikhail Gorbachev, who looked at him dead-on and effectively
declared an end to the Cold War. We are privy to his
reasoning as the architect of Operation Desert Storm and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H. W.
Bush and Bill Clinton, a position that made him a household
name and an international celebrity. And we experience his
agonizing deliberations in the face of a groundswell of
public desire that he run for the presidency. Yet it was his capacity as America’s chief diplomat in the
administration of George W. Bush that brought Powell the
most renown—and criticism. Charged with the formidable task
of making the case for war with Iraq, he convinced a wary
nation that it was both necessary and right, only to find
his own credibility hanging in the balance as the
justification for invasion began to unravel. At odds with
the White House on a range of foreign policy issues,
Powell’s counsel went unheeded and his reputation was tarnished. With dramatic new information about the inner workings of an
administration locked in ideological combat, DeYoung makes
clearer than ever before the decision-making process that
took the nation to war and addresses the still-unanswered
questions about Powell’s departure from his post shortly
after the 2004 election. Drawing on interviews with U.S. and
foreign sources as well as with Powell himself, and with
unprecedented access to his personal and professional
papers, Soldier is a revelatory portrait of an American
icon: a man at once heroic and all-too-humanly fallible.
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