February 2009: Former Chief of Staff Says Powell’s Job Was Primarily ‘Damage Control’

Reflecting on the tenure of his former boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell, former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson recalls: “I’m not sure even to this day that he’s willing to admit to himself that he was rolled to the extent that he was. And he’s got plenty of defense to marshal because, as I told [former defense secretary] Bill Perry one time when Bill asked me to defend my boss—I said, ‘Well, let me tell you, you wouldn’t have wanted to have seen the first Bush administration without Colin Powell.’ I wrote Powell a memo about six months before we were leaving, and I said, ‘This is your legacy, Mr. Secretary: damage control.’ He didn’t like it much. In fact, he kind of handed it back to me and told me I could put it in the burn basket. But I knew he understood what I was saying. ‘You saved the China relationship. You saved the transatlantic relationship and each component thereof—France, Germany.’ I mean, he held [then-German Foreign Minister] Joschka Fischer’s hand under the table on occasions when Joschka would say something like, ‘You know, your president called my boss a f_cking _sshole.’ His task became essentially cleaning the dogsh_t off the carpet in the Oval Office. And he did that rather well. But it became all-consuming. I think the clearest indication I got that [former Deputy Secretary of State] Rich [Armitage] and he both had finally awakened to the dimensions of the problem was when Rich began—I mean, I’ll be very candid—began to use language to describe the vice president’s office with me as the Gestapo, as the Nazis, and would sometimes late in the evening, when we were having a drink—would sometimes go off rather aggressively on particular characters in the vice president’s office.” [Vanity Fair, 2/2009]