My American Journey.

Remember what Colin Powell said at the end of his speech last November announcing he wouldn't run for president?

"In one generation, we have moved from denying a black man service at a lunch counter to elevating one to the highest military office in the nation and to being a serious contender for the presidency. This is a magnificent country and I am proud to be one of its sons."

No wonder Powell is so popular with the American people. Especially white people. Rarely do they hear a black man express such sentiments. But Powell is also popular with black people, lukewarm poll results notwithstanding. Rarely do they see a blackman confident and comfortable enough to say what most wish, in their heart of hearts, they could say with such sincerity. Especially the part about being "proud to be one of [America's] sons."

My American Journey is full of that sort of sentiment, which probably accounts for a good part of its success so far in the literary marketplace. There are echoes in it of some other famous biographies. Powell's account of his youthful employment mopping floors at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, for example, recalls a similar account in Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, right down to the drawing of a moral. ("By the end of summer, I was deputy shift-leader, and had learned a valuable lesson. All work is honorable. Always do your best, because someone is watching.")

But echoes aside, this is Colin Powell's story, a splendid, all-American story. He describes it as "the story of a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means who was raised in the South Bronx and somehow rose to become the national security advisor to the president of the United States and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Powell's accounts of his exploits in those high positions are interesting, but it is the "somehow," the journey, that is more interesting and instructive. Historians will use Powell's recollections along with other accounts and documents and materials to construct full, scholarly accounts of the Gulf War and other such large events. But no one will be able to give us a fuller account of Colin Powell's personal American journey than he has.

Powell's way up was the military, which he and others have described--fairly, I believe--as the closest thing to a true meritocracy in American society. That it isn't a perfect meritocracy was demonstrated as recently as last month, when the General Accounting Office released a study showing a "statistically significant" disparity between actual rates of promotion for blacks in the military and the rates that would be expected based on their numbers in the services. But for Colin Powell it was a system that worked.

Powell discovered his calling in college, the City University of New York, where, he readily admits, he was an indifferent student. But he was avid about ROTC. His account of his initiation into the officer-training program in the fall of 1954 reads like an epiphany. His account of his discovery of the Pershing Rifles, the elite military society on campus, is almost rhapsodic:

The discipline, the structure, the

camaraderie, the sense of belonging

were what I craved. I became

a leader almost immediately. I

found a selflessness within our

ranks that reminded me of the

caring atmosphere within my family.

Race, color, background, income

come meant nothing. The PRs

would go the limit for each other

and for the group. If this was what

soldiering was all about, then

maybe I wanted to be a soldier.

And so he did. Time and again over the 643 (too many, really) pages of the book, Powell restates that all he ever really wanted to do was be a soldier. Important as they may have been, exciting and prestigious as they may have seemed to outsiders, all of his high-level jobs in civilian sectors of the government--including the national security advisor's post--were just digressions from his true vocation: soldiering. (Is there any wonder then, that in announcing he would not run for president in 1996, Powell contrasted his lack of enthusiasm for political life with the passion that he felt "every day" of his thirty-five years as a soldier?)

Why soldiering? To a people fewer and fewer of whom have any experience of military service, the love of the profession of arms may seem baffling. But read his rhapsody to the Pershing Rifles and his similar reflection on his tour as an infantry battalion commander in Korea--"late at night . . . I savor the intense camaraderie, the irrepressible characters, the coltish high spirits"--and the bafflement diminishes somewhat.

But a more interesting question is: Why soldiering for a black man? Powell himself acknowledges that there has always been "[a] certain ambivalence . . . among African-Americans about military service.

Why should we fight for a country that, for so long, did not fight for us, that in fact denied us our fundamental rights?"

The answer, Powell says, lies in "a fact that gets too little recognition. The army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation. The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all my heart."

Recalling later an encounter with raw discrimination--he was refused service at a drive-in diner in Phenix City, Alabama--Powell reveals even more vividly his view of the Army as an oasis of fairness. "For me," he writes, at the real world began on the post. I regarded military installations in the South as healthy cells in an otherwise sick body. If I hurried, I could get to the snack bar or the officers' club before closing and be served, just like everyone else."

What is remarkable in the account of his Phenix City rebuff, and in many others on the subject of race and racism, is how mild Powell is in expressing his reactions. There are no paragraphs and pages of rage and anger. For Powell, such rejection became a propellant, fuel for his ascent. And that was the result of a consciously adopted psychological strategy:

I did not intend to give way to self-destructive

rage, no matter how

provoked. . . . Racism was not just

a black problem. It was America's

problem. And until the country

solved it, I was not going to let bigotry

make me a victim instead of

a full human being. I occasionally

felt hurt; I felt anger; but most

of all I felt challenged. I'll show

you.

Ultimately, Powell enjoyed the best revenge of all: success. It must have been a delicious moment when, in the waning days of the Bush administration, as a hero of the Gulf War and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell, with his wife Alma, returned to Phenix City to have a street named after him.

The mayor made a gracious speech

and presented me with the keys

to the city (the city where, in the

old days, I could not get a key to

a gas station men's room). . . . I had

a street named after me where, previously,

I would not have been allowed

to walk freely. We had

persevered, and we had lived the

American dream.

Somehow, I suspect, Colin Powell's American journey is not yet finished. His American dream has a few more episodes to go.