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My American Journey Paperback – February 18, 2003
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Colin Powell is the embodiment of the American dream. He was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He knew the rough life of the streets. He overcame a barely average start at school. Then he joined the Army. The rest is history—Vietnam, the Pentagon, Panama, Desert Storm—but a history that until now has been known only on the surface. Here, for the first time, Colin Powell himself tells us how it happened, in a memoir distinguished by a heartfelt love of country and family, warm good humor, and a soldier’s directness.
My American Journey is the powerful story of a life well lived and well told. It is also a view from the mountaintop of the political landscape of America. At a time when Americans feel disenchanted with their leaders, General Powell’s passionate views on family, personal responsibility, and, in his own words, “the greatness of America and the opportunities it offers” inspire hope and present a blueprint for the future. An utterly absorbing account, it is history with a vision.
- Print length688 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateFebruary 18, 2003
- Dimensions6.15 x 1.39 x 9.22 inches
- ISBN-100345466411
- ISBN-13978-0345466419
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“The stirring, only-in-America story of one determined man's journey from the South Bronx to directing the mightiest of military forces . . . Fascinating.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Eloquent.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Profound and moving . . . Must reading for anyone who wants to reaffirm his faith in the promise of America.”—Jack Kemp, The Wall Street Journal
“A book that is much like its subject—articulate, confident, impressive, but unpretentious and witty. . . . Whether you are a political junkie, a military buff, or just interested in a good story, My American Journey is a book well worth reading.”—San Diego Union Tribune
“Colin Powell's candid, introspective autobiography is a joy for all with an appetite for well-written political and social commentary.”—The Detroit News
From the Publisher
From the Inside Flap
--The New York Times Book Review
Colin Powell is the embodiment of the American dream. He was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He knew the rough life of the streets. He overcame a barely average start at school. Then he joined the Army. The rest is history--Vietnam, the Pentagon, Panama, Desert Storm--but a history that until now has been known only on the surface. Here, for the first time, Colin Powell himself tells us how it happened, in a memoir distinguished by a heartfelt love of country and family, warm good humor, and a soldier's directness.
MY AMERICAN JOURNEY is the powerful story of a life well lived and well told. It is also a view from the mountaintop of the political landscape of America. At a time when Americans feel disenchanted with their leaders, General Powell's passionate views on family, personal responsibility, and, in his own words, "the greatness of America and the opportunities it offers" inspire hope and present a blueprint for the future. An utterly absorbing account, it is history with a vision.
"The stirring, only-in-America story of one determined man's journey from the South Bronx to directing the mightiest of military forces . . . Fascinating."--The Washington Post Book World
"Eloquent."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"PROFOUND AND MOVING . . . . Must reading for anyone who wants to reaffirm his faith in the promise of America."
--Jack Kemp
The Wall Street Journal
"A book that is much like its subject--articulate, confident, impressive, but unpretentious and witty. . . . Whether you are a political junkie, a military buff, or just interested in a good story, MY AMERICAN JOURNEY is a book well worth reading."
--San Diego Union Tribune
"Colin Powell's candid, introspective autobiography is a joy for all with an appetite for well-written political and social commentary."
--The Detroit News
From the Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
--The New York Times Book Review
Colin Powell is the embodiment of the American dream. He was born in Harlem to immigrant parents from Jamaica. He knew the rough life of the streets. He overcame a barely average start at school. Then he joined the Army. The rest is history--Vietnam, the Pentagon, Panama, Desert Storm--but a history that until now has been known only on the surface. Here, for the first time, Colin Powell himself tells us how it happened, in a memoir distinguished by a heartfelt love of country and family, warm good humor, and a soldier's directness.
MY AMERICAN JOURNEY is the powerful story of a life well lived and well told. It is also a view from the mountaintop of the political landscape of America. At a time when Americans feel disenchanted with their leaders, General Powell's passionate views on family, personal responsibility, and, in his own words, "the greatness of America and the opportunities it offers" inspire hope and present a blueprint for the future. An utterly absorbing account, it is history with a vision.
"The stirring, only-in-America story of one determined man's journey from the South Bronx to directing the mightiest of military forces . . . Fascinating."--The Washington Post Book World
"Eloquent."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"PROFOUND AND MOVING . . . . Must reading for anyone who wants to reaffirm his faith in the promise of America."
--Jack Kemp
The Wall Street Journal
"A book that is much like its subject--articulate, confident, impressive, but unpretentious and witty. . . . Whether you are a political junkie, a military buff, or justinterested in a good story, MY AMERICAN JOURNEY is a book well worth reading."
--San Diego Union Tribune
"Colin Powell's candid, introspective autobiography is a joy for all with an appetite for well-written political and social commentary."
--The Detroit News
"From the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Point Two - Get mad, then get over it.
IRAQ
By the third week in February, the air war had been going on uninterrupted for thirty-five days. I wanted to make sure the President understood that war was going to look a lot different once fighting began on the ground. I took advantage of one of our almost daily briefings to paint the contrast. "Once the ground war begins," I said, "we don't get these antiseptic videos of a missile with a target in the cross hairs. When a battalion runs into a firefight, you don't lose a pilot or two, you can lose fifty to a hundred men in minutes. And a battlefield is not a pretty sight. You'll see a kid's scorched torso hanging out of a tank turret while ammo cooking off inside has torn the rest of the crew apart. We have to brace ourselves for some ugly images." I also made sure that Cheney and the President understood that ground combat cannot be reported as quickly as air strikes. "There's going to be confusion. You won't know what is happening for a while. And so in the early hours, please don't press us for situation reports."
The cold bath of reality was important. Notwithstanding Panama, Cheney had never seen war on a grand scale. The President had, but only from the air during his own long-ago fighter pilot days.
As the bombing continued, one downside of airpower started to come into sharp focus, particularly what happened on February 13. That day, two of our aircraft scored direct hits on the Al Firdos bunker in Baghdad, which we regarded as a command and control site and which the Iraqis claimed was an air-raid shelter. Whatever use the structure served, a large number of civilians died in the strike, which the whole world witnessed on television as victims were hauled from the smoking rubble. Schwarzkopf and I discussed this tragedy. Did we still need to pound downtown Baghdad over a month into the war? How many times could you bomb the Baath Party headquarters, and for what purpose? No one was sitting there waiting for the next Tomahawk to hit. Schwarzkopf and I started reviewing targets more closely before each day's missions.
If nothing else, the Al Firdos bunker strike underscored the need to start the combined air/ground offensive and end the war. During a quick visit Cheney and I had made to the war zone between February 8 and 10, Schwarzkopf had told us that he would be ready to go by February 21. As soon as Cheney and I got back to Washington, we reported this date to an impatient George Bush. Three days later, however, Norm called and told me that the 21st was out.
"The President wants to get on with this," I said. "What happened?"
"Walt Boomer needs more time," Schwarzkopf answered. Boomer's 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions were deployed to drive head-on from the center of the line toward Kuwait City. But first they had to breach a savage complex of entrenchments that the Iraqis had spent months erecting. The Marines would have to penetrate belts of antipersonnel and antitank mines, tangled rolls of booby-trapped barbed wire, more minefields, and deep tank traps, and then climb twenty-foot-high berms and cross trenches filled with burning oil. All the while, they would be under fire from Iraqi troops and artillery. Boomer wanted time to shift his point of attack twenty miles to the west, where one Iraqi defensive position had been largely abandoned under air attack and another line farther back was incomplete. He also wanted more airstrikes to weaken the enemy defenses before his troops moved.
"It'll cost a few days," Norm said. He wanted to put off the ground offensive until February 24.
"Remember the strategy," I reminded him. The frontal assaults were intended only to tie down the entrenched Iraqis, and that included the Marines' mission. "If Boomer hits serious resistance, he's to stop," I said. Having engaged the enemy, his troops would have accomplished their mission by allowing VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps to pull off the left hook in the sparsely defended western desert. "We don't need to kill a bunch of kids singing `The Marines' Hymn,' " I said.
One of my fundamental operating premises is that the commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise. The field commander is on the scene, feeling the terrain, directing the troops, facing and judging the enemy. I therefore advised Cheney to accept Norm's recommendation. Cheney reluctantly went to the President and got a postponement to February 24.
I backed Norm, though I thought he was being overly cautious. Over the previous weeks, I had watched VII Corps, with its tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks, pour into Saudi Arabia. We had secretly moved our armored and airborne forces to Iraq's exposed western flank, and we had been holding our breath to see if the Iraqis responded. All they did was send another undermanned division to that part of the desert. That's it, I told myself. They had been sucked in by our moves hinting at a major frontal assault and an amphibious landing on Kuwait from the Persian Gulf. They had shown us everything they had, and it was nowhere near enough to stop our left hook. Earlier we had worried that the desert soil on the western flank might not be able to support heavy armored vehicles. The engineers had tested the sands, however, and gave us a "Go." We questioned local Bedouins, and they confirmed the solidness of the terrain.
The offensive timetable was further clouded as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to play peacemaker. On February 18, the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, went to Moscow to hear a plan under which we would stop hostilities if the Iraqis withdrew from Kuwait. President Bush was in a bind. It was too late for this approach, he believed. After the expenditure of $60 billion and transporting half a million troops eight thousand miles, Bush wanted to deliver a knockout punch to the Iraqi invaders in Kuwait. He did not want to win by a TKO that would allow Saddam to withdraw with his army unpunished and intact and wait for another day. Nevertheless, the President could not be seen as turning his back on a chance for peace.
On February 20, Norm called saying he had talked to his commanders and needed still another delay, to the 26th. He had the latest weather report in hand, he said, and bad weather was predicted for the 24th and 25th, maybe clearing on the 26th. Bad weather equaled reduced air support, which equaled higher casualties. I was on the spot. So far, Cheney had accepted my counsel. But now I did not feel that Norm was giving me sufficiently convincing arguments to take back to Cheney and the President, first that Boomer needed to move his Marines, then that the Marines needed more air support, then that the weather was bad, and on still another occasion, that the Saudi army was not ready. What should I expect next, a postponement to the 28th?
"Look," I told Norm, "ten days ago you told me the 21st. Then you wanted the 24th. Now you're asking for the 26th. I've got a President and a Secretary of Defense on my back. They've got a bad Russian peace proposal they're trying to dodge. You've got to give me a better case for postponement. I don't think you understand the pressure I'm under."
Schwarzkopf exploded. "You're giving me political reasons why you don't want to tell the President not to do something militarily unsound!" He was yelling. "Don't you understand? My Marine commander says we need to wait. We're talking about Marines' lives." He had to worry about them, he said, even if nobody else cared.
That did it. I had backed Norm at every step, fended off his critics with one hand while soothing his anxieties with the other. "Don't you pull that on me!" I yelled back. "Don't you try to lay a patronizing guilt trip on me! Don't tell me I don't care about casualties! What are you doing, putting on some kind of show in front of your commanders?"
He was alone, Schwarzkopf said, in his private office, and he was taking as much heat as I was. "You're pressuring me to put aside my military judgment out of political expediency. I've felt this way for a long time!" he said. Suddenly, his tone shifted from anger to despair. "Colin, I feel like my head's in a vise. Maybe I'm losing it. Maybe I'm losing my objectivity."
I took a deep breath. The last thing I needed was to push the commander in the field over the edge on the eve of battle. "You're not losing it," I said. "We've just got a problem we have to work out. You have the full confidence of all of us back here. At the end of the day, you know I'm going to carry your message, and we'll do it your way." It was time to break off the conversation before one of us threw another match into the gasoline.
Within half an hour, Norm was back on the phone with the latest weather update. The 24th and the 25th did not look too bad after all. "We're ready," he said. We had a go for the 24th.
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; Updated ed. edition (February 18, 2003)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 688 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345466411
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345466419
- Item Weight : 1.84 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.15 x 1.39 x 9.22 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #209,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #770 in Black & African American Biographies
- #1,182 in Political Leader Biographies
- #7,108 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Joseph E. Persico Historian/Biographer
His latest book is Roosevelt's Centurions: FDR and the Commanders He Led to Victory in World War II, published by Random House and on sale as of May 28, 1213.
Prior to beginning his career as a historian and biographer, Joseph E. Persico was chief speechwriter for New York governor and later U.S. vice president, Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Of Persico's writing career, Eric Sevaried described his Edward R. Murrow: An American Original as "the definitive" biography of the broadcast pioneer. The New York Times said of Persico's The Imperial Rockefeller, "No one has written a book like this about Nelson Rockefeller before." His Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial was described by the broadcast journalist, Howard K. Smith, as "Simply the best account of the trial." This book was adapted by Turner Network Television as a miniseries that won two Emmy awards. Persico was the collaborator on former Secretary of State Colin Powell's autobiography, My American Journey which remained twenty weeks on the New York Times best seller list. His Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage also reached the best seller list and was chosen as one of the notable books of the year. His, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, on Armistice Day, World War I, has been described by historian, Richard Norton Smith as, "The single finest work I have read on the Great War." The Washington Post's Book World said of his Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, "Persico . . . understands that Lucy Mercer helped FDR awaken his capacity for love and compassion, and thus helped him become the man to whom the nation will be eternally in debt."
His articles have been published in American Heritage Magazine and the Military History Quarterly. He is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World and is a commentator on several PBS and History Channel documentaries.
Roosevelt's Centurions has been chosen as the main selection by the History Book Club and the Military book Club.
For more information go to website josephpersico.com
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Perhaps of even greater value are the lessons Powell draws from these experiences. Some are succinct, like Powell's Rules written on scraps of paper kept on his desk. They include "Get mad, then get over it," "Officers always eat last," and "Share credit." Others are longer statements of personal philosophy or perspective. Here are nine of Collin Powell's hard-won lessons:
- "Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."
- "Never be without a watch, a pencil, and a notepad."
- "Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."
- "With vision only, you get no follow-through. With enforcers only, the vision is realized, but leaves a lot of wreckage. Good chaplains pick up the pieces and put everything together again." [On three complementary leadership styles.]
- "I had long since learned to cope with Army management fashions. You pay the king his shilling, get him off your back, and then go about doing what you consider important."
- "The staff meeting served one useful purpose, however. It stroked the participants' egos and made them feel like part of the team."
- "There was a lot of talk about Powell the `reluctant warrior.' Guilty. War is a deadly game and I do not believe in spending the lives of Americans lightly."
- "The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise."
- "Reject the easy path of victimhood. Dare to take the harder path of work and commitment, a path that leads somewhere."
There are longer lessons, too. Along with thoughtful portraits of military and political leaders, on-the-ground accounts of historical events, and candid assessments of U.S. military capability from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. Powell is critical while remaining respectful, and cautionary while remaining optimistic. His own account of his life and service to his country is worth reading and enjoying. It is highly recommended.
Top reviews from other countries
Therefore I cannot relate to his time in Viet Nam, but appreciate all that the US Forces did albeit losing the conflict.
This book, for me, was a page turner.
Capt. (ret'd) Brian Caldwell, CD
P.S. This was the second war the US has lost - the first was the war of 1812 against my country.
Dies ist die Geschichte eines Einwandererkindes aus der Karibik, das es aus kleinsten Verhältnissen kommend nach ganz OBEN geschafft hat - weil er nach den Regeln gespielt hat und alle Chancen genutzt hat. Er war immer der Erste und der Beste, aber nie der Erstbeste. Das Militär war gut für ihn, er hat Vietnam durchlitten, er war am Golf, er war auch in Deutschland, er hat die Welt gesehen und er hat eigentlich alles erlebt, was man in seiner Zeit als aufstrebender junger Mann in der Army und in der Politik erfahren konnte.
Powell war dem Rassismus seiner Zeit ausgesetzt. Er gehörte später zum politischen Personal und hat alle wichtigen Figuren seiner Zeit getroffen. Er schreibt in seinem Buch von den "Rules", die er aus seinen Erfahrungen gezogen hat. Ein Zitat habe ich mir herausgeschrieben in Bezug auf den Umgang mit der Presse: - " I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it " (George Bernard Shaw).
Die Darstellung seines Familienlebens ist ein anderer interessanter Aspekt: wie lebt man als US-Soldat, wie ist das mit der Familie, wie lebt man als "african-american" Aufsteiger und was macht man in seiner Freizeit? Alte VOLVOS reparieren. Ein sympathisches Buch von einem bekannten Darsteller der jüngeren Zeitgeschichte, welches nichts beschönigt und den Leser teilhaben lässt an seinem politischen Leben in Amerika. Man lernt viel, man trifft die bekannten Persönlichkeiten der amerikanischen Politik, man versteht die Ziele der US-Administration, ihre Strategien, ihre Irrtümer. Man sollte das Buch lesen, bevor die Ereignisse um 9/11 vergessen sind. Schon mal von v. Clausewitz gehört? Er hat!
FÜNF Sterne für MY AMERICAN JOURNEY.
Schließlich: Englisch habe ich auch gelernt. Das Buch war für mich flüssig zu lesen und unbekannte Ausdrücke erschließen sich weitgehend aus dem Zusammenhang. Ich habe mir dann anschließend "It worked for me" genehmigt. So schlecht kann dann wohl "My American Journey" nicht gewesen sein. DANKE