What to like about Today's Ike.

Most memoirs burn bridges and settle scores. Colin Powell's is clearly not a finale, however, but a prologue

My American Journey Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, Random House, $25.95

Colin Powell's memoirs have become a publishing phenomenon, one of those rare events in which the usually obscure agreements surrounding a book contract have become the stuff of common knowledge. The $6 million advance, the book tour, the carefully considered interview with Barbara Walters--all are familiar by now. And as the hour of Powell's presidential decision approaches, the interest in the man and his career only grows.

What's less well-known is the book itself or at least parts of it. The rags-to-riches story has received plenty of attention: that Powell spoke Yiddish as a child, that he hails from Jamaican stock, and that he hung out with a multiracial gang in his old Bronx neighborhood. But other important strains in the book have been largely passed over.

For one thing, My American Journey has a lighter touch than these sorts of books tend to have. Most memoirs, literary or political, are aimed, in large measure, at obituary writers; they are a last, bald attempt to shape one's epitaph. And so they wind up puffing up one's role in controversial events. After Donald Regan resigned as White House chief of staff, for instance, he tapped out one of the great, score-settling memoirs--its revelations about Nancy Reagan's astrologer being the most memorable jab---in a book designed to exonerate Regan from Iran-Contra and other missteps of Reagan's second term. Other memoirs are written by the intellectually insecure and are designed to shore up one's position as a great thinker. The Kissinger memoirs and Nixon's many books exemplify this genre at its apex. For Powell, the memoir is a different sort of tool. Powell obviously sees his best days ahead of him, not behind. This is about promise, not retribution. His reflections, then, are less infused by the self-pity or pomposity that are the hallmark of memoirs meant to be a capstone. (Alas, they're short, too, on the kind of bridge-burning that can make memoirs so much fun.) Instead, My American Journey is accented with a breezy, self-deprecating sense of humor. One night finds Powell pounding an array of shots--from Creme de Menthe to gin--with his buddies well past midnight, only to be awakened early the next morning for a drill simulating a Soviet nuclear attack. Powell also tells a hilarious story about a GI under his command in Germany who had gotten a young German girl and her mother pregnant. "This situation," writes Powell, "had not been covered in the basic course at Fort Benning."

To be sure, the general is not above posturing; his account of the Gulf War is clearly designed to blunt the negative impression left by Bob Woodward's The Commanders, a book from which Powell emerged as something of a hypocrite--pro-Gulf War in public, a reluctant warrior behind the scenes. And Powell is not above sheer pabulum, like his declaration, typical of many in the book: "I treasure my family's British roots, but I love our America, land of opportunity."

Stronger, though, is a good-natured machismo that is fairly infectious. There's much in here about Powell's drinking, smoking, and cursing, the cumulative effect of which is to make Powell seem like the perfect guy to get a beer with or to have backing you up in a bar brawl. Given his love of spit and polish he's also quick to describe people by appearance; the neat and the physically strong garner his praise. Powell is impressed that Reagan's shoes bore no creases. He notes that his friend Richard Armitage is "built like an anchor." And, of his early career, Powell says one of his favorite rituals was "breaking starch": He and the other men in his unit would iron their clothes until they were so stiff that it took a broom handle to separate the cuffs.

But the most interesting thing about My American Journey is its story of the military bureaucracy and how it works. Like Bill Clinton, Powell has barely breathed in the private sector. But, unlike Clinton, Powell spent his formative years not in elective office, but as an organization man, where most of the action in the public sector takes place.

The general's rise through the bureaucracy was, no doubt, guided by admirable qualities--intelligence, amiability, determination. He spits out inspirational slogans like a Tony Robbins in uniform. But Powell's greatest asset was an ability to learn the rules of any game he played. When he was in ROTC at City College in New York, Powell joined an elite military society called the Pershing Rifles. Before Powell took over as the group's "pledge officer," potential recruits to the Pershing Rifles were given drinks and shown pornographic movies. Powell argued that the campus fraternities were already pushing beer and women. Better, he argued, to show the recruits films of the Pershing Rifles in the midst of drill competitions, in all their glory. The idea worked. The number of desirable recruits went up. "This was a defining moment for me," he writes, "the first small indication that I might be able to influence the outcome of events." It was also, of course, an early sign of Powell's talents as an organization man: He made the pledge officer into a position of influence.

At each of his many military assignments, Powell refined his talents. When he was assigned to a base in Massachusetts, Powell learned to write "Welcome Baby" letters to the newborns of men in his unit. "Another lesson learned and filed," Powell writes. "Make individuals feel important and part of something larger than themselves."

In Vietnam, Powell learned more important lessons. He saw the idiocy of the "body count"--the bureaucratic imperative that led American commanders and their South Vietnamese allies to overestimate the number of casualties they had inflicted on the Communists. He also saw the lunacy of behind-the-lines intelligence analysts. One who worked near him used regression analysis, in the spirit of a McNamara whiz kid, to calculate that the number of North Vietnamese mortars rose in inverse proportion to the phase of the moon. That came as no surprise to anyone actually fighting the war: The darker it got, the more the enemy fired.

Still, Powell pursued with gusto all the intellectual training the Army had to offer. He went to Fort Benning in Georgia for an Infantry Officers Advanced Course and later went on to become a White House Fellow, an MBA at George Washington University, and a graduate of the National War College. Even as each of these edu-assignments bolstered Powell's charmed resume, though, they also threatened it. Throughout his career, Powell fretted that he would be pegged a defense intellectual, with plenty of policy experience but not enough time spent commanding troops, an essential rung on the military career ladder.

So much of Powell's story is about trying to get ever larger commands. Nowhere was Powell more threatened than at Fort Carson, Colorado, in 1981 when he ran afoul of the base commander Maj. Gen. John Hudachek. Hudachek and Powell clashed over a series of events, most notably how to handle the dismissal of an officer who was having an affair with the wife of an enlisted man. Hudachek gave Powell the Army's equivalent of pass-without-honors. Fortunately for Powell, Gen. John Wickham, an old boss and ally, plucked him for the job of Casper Weinberger's chief of staff, and from there, Powell rose through the Pentagon and the White House. Lesson: Always have a Rabbi to protect you.

Did Powell learn the right lessons from his tenure in the bureaucracy? The result is a mixed bag, but mostly favorable. I suspect Monthly readers will be delighted to know that Powell writes often about his suspicions that information is twisted as it flows from the bottom up, a longtime concern of this magazine. For instance, on the night of the KAL 007 shootdown in 1983, Powell was extremely skeptical, and rightfully so, about early reports that the plane had "reappeared" after falling off radar screens.

He learned other lessons as well. In the 1970s, when Powell was assigned to the Office of Management and Budget as a White House Fellow, he learned how little control the political appointees have over the bureaucracy. Later in the decade, Powell would help forge the new Department of Energy and saw first-hand how the agencies that made up the DOE behaved like "step children from different marriages." In the 1980s, Powell saw how bosses could be kept in the dark: During the early days of the Iran-Contra affair, the super-secret National Security Agency was reporting directly to the White House, leaving Powell and his boss Weinberger uninformed.

Powell was also wise enough to encourage his staff to argue with him, and while he had a temper, he warned his aides not to let it deter them from telling him what he needed to hear. Was Powell a Washington Monthly-style military reformer, fighting the more wasteful tendencies at the Pentagon? Obviously not. On the other hand, he was not so protective of the military that he fought its downsizing in the eighties and nineties. If anything, he managed the scaleback rather well.

All of this, though, is tarnished by Powell's lack of forthrightness on the Iran-Contra affair. He told prosecutors that Weinberger did not keep a diary, the later discovery of which, you'll recall, led to criminal charges against the former defense secretary. As Weinberger's assistant, Powell knew that Weinberger scribbled his thoughts on hundreds of small notepads. Powell lamely claims that he did not think that those pads constituted a diary. Powell can't bring himself to burn a boss; even now, he is painfully kind to anyone who was good to him.

Can a mili-crat like Powell be a good president? No one knows. But one thing that's certain is that Powell may well be able to offer the best defense of government power of any candidate around. Clinton still has the spirit of a government activist, but not the fortitude. Powell, on the other hand, is less abashed about his faith in public power and its uses. His personal biography is an example of how government can aid the individual; and the Armed Forces, which Powell headed, remain one of the few institutions that Americans still revere. His very presence in the presidential contest would be a compelling argument that government is not congenitally hapless. This, even more than race, may be the best argument for his candidacy, if not his election, as we await the general's big decision.

Matthew Cooper, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a senior editor of The New Republic where he writes the "White House Watch" column.