Breaking Ranks

(Predictable aside on hawks like Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz: "None of these guys ever heard a bullet go by their ears in combat.")

After Vietnam, Wilkerson went on to the elite Airborne and Ranger schools, earned his bachelor's in English literature and advanced degrees in international relations and national security. Rising through the ranks, he attended the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and eventually returned there to teach. He later served as acting director at the Marine Corps War College at Quantico.

He made a natural professor. In conversation, he often lectures in a lofty but folksy way, citing the works of the great war theoretician Karl von Clausewitz or putting the zeal of neocons in historical context: Their fellow travelers, he says, were Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins of the French Revolution -- utopians who had no qualms using the guillotine in service of their ideals.

(Long aside on how Bush, who criticized "nation building" as a candidate in 2000, became a globe-changing Jacobin: "Here we are with a failure in Iraq, a massive failure. Not only an intelligence failure, but it looks like it's gonna be a real failure on the ground. How do you suddenly transform that? Well, you suddenly become a Jacobin yourself, you're suddenly for this messianic spread of freedom and democracy around the world. You're suddenly an advocate of all things that John F. Kennedy was an advocate of: 'We will bear any burden, pay any price.' You've discarded John Quincy Adams, who said we're the friends of liberty everywhere, the custodians only of our own. And you've suddenly said, 'I'm the custodian of the whole world's liberty, and by God if you don't realize it I'm going to bring it to you -- and if I have to bring it to you at the point of a gun, that's the way I'm going to bring it to you!' ")

But back to the biography: Wilkerson spent years in Korea, Japan and Hawaii, assigned to the Navy's Pacific Command, where he burnished his skills as an executive assistant to the top brass.

"He's the most competent Army officer I've ever worked with," says retired Lt. Gen. James W. Crysel, one of Wilkerson's bosses at Pacific Command. "He could run a large corporation."

Retired Rear Adm. Stewart A. Ring, whom Wilkerson served for three years, is similarly effusive: "He is the most principled individual I have ever met and ever worked with. He is a remarkable guy with essentially no ego. He stands up for what he thinks is right -- not for Larry Wilkerson, but for what is right."

Such high praise won him an interview with Powell in early 1989, when the general was exiting as national security adviser in the Reagan White House and heading to Army Forces Command in Atlanta. Wilkerson says he was happy where he was, teaching at the Naval War College, and that evidently impressed Powell: "He said he didn't like overly ambitious people, and it was clear that I was content doing what I was doing and I wasn't really politicking for a job with him."

(An aside on Powell's personality: "He can be the most endearing person you'd ever want to meet in your life. The next minute he can be colder than fish.")

Powell's Confidant

It was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship, spanning Powell's stint as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Persian Gulf War, the general's return to private life -- during which he launched America's Promise, the nonprofit initiative that seeded the Macfarland school project -- and Powell's support for candidate Bush and appointment as secretary of state.

Powell has long been known as a "reluctant warrior." Before the 9/11 attacks, he took the view that 10 years of U.N. sanctions had contained Saddam Hussein and expressed skepticism that Iraq had any ability to use weapons of mass destruction.

Having prepared Powell's testimony and speeches, and having received top-level intelligence briefings, Wilkerson also knew the post-9/11 case against Hussein was not airtight. Powell "presented a number of alternatives to war," Wilkerson recalls. "Those alternatives did not entail the use of force, or they did not entail the use of force immediately. And when he was made aware of the decision otherwise, he became the good soldier that he was. I know how he operates and he would have decided, 'Okay, I lost, and now I'll carry out the decision as best I can' -- and make it seem like it was his decision."