Quote of the day: Colin Powell on the roles of the national security advisor

A few months ago I was re-reading Colin Powell's memoir, My
American Journey, and liked his summary of the job of being national
security advisor: "judge, traffic cop, truant officer, arbitrator, fireman,
chaplain, psychiatrist, and occasional hit man." (P. 352)

I re-read Powell's book and H. Norman Schwarzkopf's memoir, It
Doesn't Take a Hero, back to
back. I was surprised to find I enjoyed both more now than I did the first
time, when they were first published long ago. I suspect this was because back
then I read them as a reporter digging for news, while this time I was looking
more broadly to understand both men and their sense of the Army in which they
served.

Then I read Karen DeYoung's bio
of Powell. "The Bush administration had clearly manipulated Powell's
prestige and reputation, even as it repeatedly undermined him and disregarded his
advice," she writes, and then asks, Why had he let them do it? Part of the
answer, she concludes, was that "he had been winning bureaucratic battles for
so many years that he simply refused to acknowledge the extent of the losses he
had suffered." He also had a sense of duty, she noted. And, she concluded, "He
was a proud man, and he would never have let them see him sweat." (Pp. 510-511,
DeYoung, Soldier.)