Microphone clipped to his tie, Secretary of State Colin Powell paces the stage confidently, a State Department audience listening enrapt as he waxes motivational with the finesse of a man who had been earning nearly $60,000 a speech in the private sector.
But behind the bold and hopeful tone there is a daunting challenge facing the early superstar of the Bush Cabinet: fixing a department that even loyal insiders call “a rusted-out diplomatic hulk.”
“If you perform well, we’re going to get along fine. If you don’t, you’re going to be doing push-ups,” the former Army general says as the crowd filling the auditorium erupts in laughter.
Powell’s demeanor is jovial, but his purpose dead serious: to take a limping bureaucracy and turn it into an engine–his engine–of foreign affairs.
Perhaps no secretary of state has come to the job with so deep a reservoir of national popularity, admiration from Capitol Hill and real-world experience in the trenches of government and national security.
In his first days on the job, most recently his motivational talk Thursday, Powell has signaled that he intends to use that political capital to fix an agency many in Washington say is troubled.
His audience of civil servants and career diplomats comes from a tweedy, Ivy League culture. They are linguists, policy analysts, number-crunchers and regional specialists. Powell comes from the Army and, more recently, the lucrative world of high-tech commerce.
Given the odd pairing, Powell’s first line of attack is humor, and an attempt to show his audience that he is one of them.
“I’m going to go home as soon as no one’s looking on the seventh floor,” Powell says, referring to the elegant suite of executive offices from where he will preside.
“I don’t have to prove to anybody that I can work 16 hours when I can get the job done in eight. If you’re logging long hours here to impress me, I can tell you you’re wasting your time. Do your work. Get the work done, and then go home to your families. Go to your soccer games. … Have fun, enjoy the work.”
The scene of Powell’s session was the Dean Acheson Auditorium, named after President Harry Truman’s flinty and politically embattled secretary of state. The room was used by President John F. Kennedy for some of his early press conferences. For some time, the “e” has been missing from Acheson’s name on the sign out front, a small symbol of far larger troubles.
Diplomats overseas still communicate with Washington using a cable messaging system that dates to the Acheson era. And former NATO Ambassador Robert Hunter, who has co-written a study on reviving the State Department, calls some of the Embassies abroad “rat holes and a disgrace to the United States.”
When a desk officer wants to send a report to the seventh floor, a staffer must carry a paper copy and computer diskette upstairs because there is no secure internal e-mail system. Most State Department employees cannot access the Internet from their desks.
“It’s hard to remember a time when morale at the department has been lower,” Hunter said.
Amid the bureaucratic malaise, the State Department’s prestige and position within the government have slipped gradually.
The last four secretaries of state–James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright–essentially operated on their own with small, hand-picked staffs of political appointees. They seldom consulted the career diplomats at lower levels for advice, department veterans say.
In the meantime, other government agencies, notably the Treasury Department, U.S. trade representative, FBI and Department of Commerce, have elbowed their way into expanding roles overseas as global finance, trade and terrorism have become key foreign-affairs issues.
While the Pentagon and federal law-enforcement agencies enjoy political and financial support on Capitol Hill, the State Department suffers what one State Department official describes as “catastrophically bad relations with Congress.”
Led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who has called the department a bloated bureaucracy, Congress cut State Department and international aid spending for six years in a row during the Clinton administration.
Thus, Powell’s strategy of building morale is not aimed just at winning loyalists in Foggy Bottom, the Washington neighborhood that is home to the State Department and whose name expresses the recent mood. Rather, he sees revival of the department as essential to his ability to wield influence within the Bush administration and around the world.
For a former general hesitant to use military force except when vital interests are at stake and the goals and means are clear, diplomats are his divisions.
“In a world where the Red army is no longer poised in East Germany to come across the Fulda Gap, the front-line troops are no longer soldiers, they’re our colleagues at the Embassies,” Powell said. “I view it as my solemn obligation to make sure that they have and that you have all the resources you need.”
Powell’s allusion to the front line is literal. In the last 30 years, 92 Americans assigned to Embassies have been killed. Since 1988, 137 U.S. posts have been evacuated because of violence or political turmoil. More ambassadors have been killed since the end of the Vietnam War than generals or admirals. After the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, a study found eight out of 10 U.S. Embassies lacked adequate security.
Into this steps Powell, Vietnam veteran, co-architect of the Persian Gulf war victory, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, best-selling author and millionaire businessman.
Powell gets a standing ovation from the Acheson Auditorium crowd. When employees line up to ask questions, most start by telling him how glad they are to see him, how welcome his words are. Several African-American employees choke back emotion. A retired diplomat tells Powell he’s ready to come back to work. One employee, a former Army sergeant-major, is so effusive in his praise that Powell laughs in embarrassment, and quips, “What’d you say your name was, son?”
Clearly Powell has made internal reform a priority in order to minimize the amount of time foreign policy challenges have to be confronted with a broken bureaucracy.
Among the policy issues he faces are the Mideast peace process and a possible new, conservative government in Israel. He must support the Bush administration’s desire for a ballistic missile defense in the face of skepticism in Western Europe and hostility in Asia, particularly China. Canada’s foreign minister has noted opposition in Ottawa to placing missile defense radar on Canadian territory and to opening Alaska’s North Slope to oil exploration.
Powell is trying to win support for a tightening of sanctions against Iraq at a time when the pressure from major powers in the UN Security Council is for the opposite. And in Colombia, Powell must steer a large U.S. military aid program while keeping the United States from being drawn more deeply into Latin America’s drug wars.
The support of his new troops is important and “he has visibly energized the organization,” said Ted Strickler, a deputy assistant secretary in the office of foreign missions. “The sense of hope and optimism that things are going to improve is so strong that you can feel it.”
Strickler is one of the organizers of the “SOS for DOS” campaign, a cry for help for the State Department. Some 1,400 agency employees signed a letter addressed to the new secretary before the selection of Powell was known. They have taken to wearing blue lapel ribbons to show their concerns.
“We are entering the uncharted waters of the 21st Century in a rusted-out diplomatic hulk that is no longer seaworthy,” the letter states. “Multiple studies have identified the problems. We must act now to make the needed repairs.”
Indeed, of all of Powell’s many applause lines, few have been greeted as enthusiastically as his promise not to convene any more blue-ribbon panels to study problems at the State Department.
“I’m drowning in studies,” Powell said at his confirmation hearing. Three of them, written over the last three years, reach conclusions similar to one titled “Diplomacy for the ’70s” that has been collecting dust since 1969.
“It’s now time to do something with them,” Powell said. “We’re just going to start fixing things: the recruiting system, the Embassy building system–one by one, like coral coming up out of the water, I hope.”
“I can hear the cheering now,” replied Sen. Christopher Dodd, (D-Conn.).
Powell promises to increase the State Department budget. The amounts may seem small to a Pentagon denizen. At just over $4 billion, the total State Department budget is less than the increase Congress has routinely accorded the military budget in each of the last several years.
Pulling anecdotes and names from his time as a board member at America Online, Powell says he will scrap the antiquated system of diplomatic cables and put Internet-capable computers on everyone’s desk.
He promises to listen to career desk officers instead of walling himself off with a few senior deputies, which tended to be the style of his recent predecessors. He urges everyone from ambassador to janitor to feel part of the team.
“What we’ve had has been a little bit like the Starship Enterprise where the command module can separate from the mothership,” Strickler said. “What Secretary Powell has done is reconnect them.”
In his first day on the job Jan. 22, Powell walked in the public, C Street entrance, pointedly eschewing the underground garage and private elevator normally used by the secretary of state. The symbolism was not missed by the employees gathered to greet him.
“He has conducted himself admirably,” said Dan Geisler, former head of the American Foreign Service Association.
“There has grown up since the time of Henry Kissinger a sort of imperial attitude of the secretary of state. They travel like the Emperor Diocletian. No one ever sees them,” Geisler said.
Powell, keenly aware of the importance of morale, clearly wants to be seen.
“I know a little bit about organizations. I’ve run one or two in the course of my career,” he told his new colleagues on his first day at the office.
“I want to hear from you as directly as I can with the minimum number of layers in between. … I’ve got to empower you to do the people’s work.”
