Powell Coming Out

People are permitted to grow wiser as they grow older, and when they do, we should try not to give them a hard time.

While campaigning for president, Bill Clinton promised to lift the military’s ban on gay service personnel. Once in office, his plans encountered stiff opposition from senior members of the military, conservative Congressmembers, and various assorted bluenoses from across the fruited plain. Even as Senator Sam Nunn presided over a carnival of a congressional hearing, during which assorted beribboned potentates and scholastic hacks soberly intoned that the Republic would Faint Dead Away if openly gay people were permitted to take up arms, Colin Powell, then serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quietly assembled support for a “compromise,” in which gay people might serve, so long as they did not openly declare themselves, or engage in sexual relations. In return, the military would cease its punitive “homosexual hunts.” Clinton, eager to put the issue behind him, so that he could get on to bungling health care, caved. And so Powell’s policy, soon dubbed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” sailed through Congress, to be anchored into federal law as 10 USC 654.

While maintaining that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy “was correct for the time,” in an appearance this past Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Powell signaled that it is now time for that policy to go.

Colin Powell is a gradualist. As a black man in his time and in these United States, he would never have ascended to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, nor served first as National Security Advisor and then as Secretary of State under George I and George II, if he had been anything but.

Powell is more about what is possible than what is desirable. When what is desirable has proved not possible, he has sometimes gone along, to get along. In this, he has, on occasion, disserved both his country, and himself.

As I said on the last occasion when I lauded this man, in response to his October 2008 endorsement of Barack Obama for president, “Colin Powell is an imperfect man who has done imperfect things. Some of those things have caused, or contributed to, great suffering.”

Yet that endorsement of Obama was key. As I said then:

Powell didn’t need to make this endorsement. He didn’t need to so forcefully attack his own party in doing so. He didn’t need to call out the McCain campaign, and he certainly didn’t need to come to the defense of the nation’s Muslims. But he did.

If anybody is going to be able to get across to this nation the fact that Muslims are equal Americans, equal human beings, it is Colin Powell. No one is going to accuse him of being a Muslim, a terrorist. Powell is the man, after all, who presided over three wars against the two biggest Muslim/terrorist boogey-men of our time: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Colin Powell is a man whose counsel is taken very seriously among career military people, many of whom live in Virginia and North Carolina. Barack Obama, by the slimmest of margins, carried both those states. I can cite to no definitive evidence proving Powell to be responsible for those victories. But his forceful endorsement of Obama, and his equally forceful denunciation of his own party’s disreputable campaign against Obama, certainly couldn’t have hurt.

It is because Powell is a heavyweight to career military people that his pronouncements on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” matter. Both Obama and Congress are ready to move on from that policy. The resistance resides within the military itself. And among the bluenoses, of course, and the tub-thumpers of the rightwing noise machine, ever ready to mobilize them. But the bluenoses will matter not a whit if the military people are prepared to move. Obama, who is something of a gradualist himself, is presently prodding his military officials, both those on the inside, and those, like Powell, on the outside, to move them.

As Aubrey Sarvis yesterday observed, George II holdover Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, “has moved from ‘the president and I feel like we’ve got a lot on our plates right now and let’s push that one [DADT] down the road a little bit’ (last March) to ‘if we do it’ (last April) to seeing ‘if there’s at least a more humane way to apply the law until the law gets changed’ (last week) . . . In his press conference last week, the Secretary said the question is ‘how do we begin to do preparations’ and at the same time how does ‘the administration move forward in terms of asking the Congress to change the law’?”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, appearing on the same edition of State of the Union as Powell, said of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that “it’s very clear what President Obama’s intent here is. He intends to see this law change.” And “I am internally discussing that with my staff on how to move forward and what the possible implementation steps could be.”

What Powell said Sunday was this: 

Well, the policy and the law that came about in 1993, I think, was correct for the time. Sixteen years have now gone by, and I think a lot has changed with respect to attitudes within our country, and therefore I think this is a policy and a law that should be reviewed.

I am withholding judgment because the commanders of the armed forces of the United States and the joint chiefs of staff need to study it and make recommendations to the president and have hearings before the Congress before a decision is made.

All of this can of course be frustrating to those who regard “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as silly and insulting, which it is, and who want it gone, which it will be. As with most things in life, it’s just going to take longer than it should. That Colin Powell, the architect of the policy, is himself coming out of the closet, and instructing his uniformed heirs to try opening the door themselves, will, I think, help to get it gone just a little bit faster.

Meanwhile, here is a rather startling shot of Powell onstage with the Nigerian hip-hop artists Olu Maintain. Who knows what new changes this might portend? Perhaps a hip-hop number of his own, in which Powell reprises his scathing denunciation before the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, of the neo-cons who plagued him in the George II administration, and as “fucking crazies.” It is said that when it was suggested to Powell that he use that term as the title of the next volume of his memoirs, he “laughed uncontrollably.” Might as well set it to music.