General Colin Powell - 10 November 1995

When a president dies either of natural death or by assassination you maybe sure that the first press conference of the incoming president will be a packed occasion – already a simple sentence has left a wholly misleading impression.

When Lincoln was shot and then Garfield and then McKinley, three assassinations in 35 years, there was no such institution as a press conference. It was taken up as a regular thing as late as 1928 by Herbert Hoover – an astute and articulate president if ever there was one – but he abandoned it altogether on the excellent grounds, which would be thought ridiculous today, that members of Congress who had the president's confidence tended to leak policy intentions to the press, which made it all the more difficult to carry out policy.

If that sounds vague, let me remind myself of a sentence, practically a philosophy I once heard from the second to Secretary General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld. He said the worst thing to come out of the peace conference after the First World War was the American President Woodrow Wilson's promise of open covenants, openly arrived at. On the contrary, Hammarskjöld passionately believed that the more delicate the negotiations between parties, especially between nations, negotiations must be conducted in private ,and then leave the results open to the press for criticism, and repeal if need be. His clinching sentence was: "Open conveyance secretly arrived at." No paper, no TV station or writer or talker would tolerate that attitude today, censorship would be the automatic cry of 1,000 editors.

Well, what started me on this theme was the memory of the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the packed first press conference of his successor Harry S. Truman. It was the memory of the word 'packed' that suggested to me, not so much the function of the press, as the size of it covering the president. At that first press conference of Harry Truman I should guess there were, all of maybe 40 of us at the most, all standing in a broken half circle round the president's desk in the oval office. The usual gang of White House correspondents were, was about 20.

Today, I believe something over 300 reporters have White House credentials. Why? Because a Scotsman or a Russian or an American – they'll never settle it – invented television. There used to be only about a dozen papers and four network stations that could afford the luxury of their own White House correspondent, everybody else used the three worldwide news agencies, the associated press, the united press writers.

What follows then, from the contrast between a dozen reporters trailing Kennedy and 300 trooping and bussing and flying with Clinton, is the fact that when and where there is little news, or none at all, it and comment on it, have to be manufactured – papers and television and editors don't pay reporters to sit on their hands! And since we all have a choice 24 hours a day of 70 odd television channels, most of them independent and, so help us, most of them employing their very own Washington correspondent, he/she has to have something to say every day, which brings us to the particular cause of this lamentation: the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin.

After we saw the funeral and the eulogies for three days and nights the serious papers were filled, the air and the screens were choked, with useless speculation on one theme: would the death of Mr Rabin quicken or deter the peace process in the Middle East? Why do I say useless? Because this is something that nobody can possibly know, it's totally unpredictable, so the only sensible political comment it seems to me on the death of Mr Rabin is a shudder and a sigh and no comment.

I suppose the speculation and the guessing would have gone on and on had we not suddenly had word, on Wednesday morning, that yet another open question was closed down by a decision of the party of the first part, that everybody had been guessing about since the early spring.

I've been tempted several times to do a talk on General, retired General Colin Powell as a potential candidate for the presidency. I don't know how it all started, I don't think there was any inventor or instigator of the idea, though they'll be lots of claimants, but about six months ago it was one of those ideas that were in the air, born I'm sure, of fatigue with politics and a lacklustre regard for the candidates already in the running including President Clinton.

On the Republican side, there are nine candidates and after the early primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire there will be fewer. Indeed from the look of the latest polls, polls of Republicans only, Senator Dole is first and the rest nowhere. I think his latest figure is upwards of a third of all registered Republicans want him, none of the other eight even works up a 10 per cent loyalty.

Well, whatever was the mood brewing over the political landscape that released out of the mist the glittering spirit of General Powell, it was for many millions of Americans, a revelation, and it's interesting now to theorise why? I say now, because I ought to have given the hard news in the first sentence. On Wednesday, the general called a press conference for three in the afternoon at which he declared positively he would not run next year for the presidency would rule out accepting a call to be vice president on anybody's ticket. And as for changing his mind and running in 2000 AD he said cryptically, "The future is the future." So how did the Powell phenomenon arise and with no effort at all on the part of the general? The less he said about being a candidate, the higher her rose in the polls. I ought to add at once that the hazy general belief that General Powell had not declared himself on the debatable issues was a myth. As The New Yorker magazine pointed out this week, just by walking through a room whose furnishings include a television set, you'd know that General Powell is a strong believer in free market economics, he would be reluctant to send American troops abroad, he is essentially in favour of a woman's right to an abortion, he is for some restrictions on the ownership of guns, he is opposed to allowing prayer in the public schools, presumably on the first amendment prohibition of a state religion. He is against openly allowing gays in the military and he thinks that Speaker Gingrich's contract with America – the laundry list of radical bills whittling down the budget, along with welfare, Medicare, government bureaus - the general thinks the contract is too harsh.

On Wednesday he added very little to his views, he was there to announce that while he had a passion for soldiering, he has none for politics, so he was not going to start musing on political issues, though he gave as a reason for declaring himself a Republican, that he liked the idea of the 'Republican revolution', as we call it. He did think the government was too big, too central. He would do everything he could to persuade the Republican party, he said, to broaden its appeal – which means in words he'd never used, begin to face the special disabilities of the blacks – also, don't believe the widespread nonsense that the Republican party is controlled by the Christian right. He didn't say that, but the message was clear. He is a moderate Republican and the prospect of his deciding to run gave conniption fits to the Republican right – they were already mobilising to fight him, to declare him a traitor to the cause as Governor Nelson Rockefeller tried to betray the conservative cause of the great Barry Goldwater 30 years ago.

The wry note about this attitude over the Republican right, the Christian right so-called especially and the fear they've planted that they are the only true American alternative to Mr Clinton is this: when you take a national poll on the issues, you find that a sizable majority of Americans are on General Powell's side on abortion, on gun control, especially on the domestic policy of the Republican right abominates affirmative action, which is the act of tipping the balance in the favour of a black man or other minority whose qualification for a job is the equal of a white man. The General says what he means by the harshness of the present Republican policy is that it removes the minimum safety net from the very poor of whatever colour. You'll notice by the way, that nobody but nobody of either wing of the Republican party, or its body, has raised a whisper of concern over General Powell's colour. It is as he said: "A great thing that two generations ago, a black man couldn't eat in the same cafe as a white and today one was accepted as a serious contender for the presidency".

It ought to be said too, before most of the Republican candidates drop off like dead flies, that most Americans who yearned for General Powell probably don't read The New Yorker, didn't know how he stood on the issues, what's more didn't care. Why? Because in their disgust with politics in general and their boredom with the contenders, they weren't looking for another politician, they were looking for Moses. In fact, you can truly say that once every four years in the approach to the presidential conventions, Americans are always looking for Moses, somebody to lead them out of the worldliness above and beyond the dull daily business of politics. Sometimes they think they belated him. After about 18 months his rating is very low, he turns out always not to be Moses, but a man with a far harder job than Moses ever had: to be president of the United States.

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