Falling on His Sword

Powell insisted to disbelieving aides that Bush listened to, and even acted on, his advice. "The president has good instincts . . . an instinctual grasp" of issues, he often told them. But he usually followed with an acknowledgment that Bush "has got these rough edges -- his cowboy, Texan rough edges -- and when he gets them exposed, there are other people who know how to use them" to their advantage.

Time and time again during the administration's bumpy first year, Powell had seen Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney intervene to nudge a willing Bush away from moderation and diplomacy, and toward a hard line on foreign policy issues from North Korea to the Middle East. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, their attention turned sharply toward Iraq, and by the following summer it was clear that the administration was headed toward war with Saddam Hussein.

Powell found little evidence to support thinly veiled White House suggestions that Hussein had had a hand in the September 11 attacks. But he saw no reason to doubt the CIA's assessment, fervidly promoted and expanded upon by Cheney and the Defense Department, that the Iraqi leader had stockpiles of chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, which he was ready to hand over to terrorists bent on destruction of the United States.

Powell's own war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 had been fought with half a million U.S. troops, broad foreign support and a U.N. mandate. He believed the decision to invade was Bush's to make, but that international backing was essential for both political and military success. In August 2002, he succeeded in convincing Bush -- for once, over Cheney's objections -- that there would be no multinational support unless the administration first visibly tried to tame Hussein without war.

It took five months for Powell's efforts at the U.N. Security Council to craft a solution short of war to reach the point of collapse, caught in the crossfire of administration intransigence, international mistrust of Bush's justification and motives, and Hussein's perfidy. As the Pentagon's war plans were completed and March 2003 was secretly set as the internal deadline for invasion, Bush still found himself with little foreign support and an uncertain American public.

"We've really got to make the case" against Hussein, Bush told Powell in an Oval Office meeting in late January, "and I want you to make it." Only Powell had the "credibility to do this," Bush said. "Maybe they'll believe you." It was a direct order from his commander in chief, and it never occurred to Powell to question it.

He was told that the case had already been put together by the White House, and he assumed that with a little tweaking he could turn it into a speech that would fit his voice and style. He was taken aback on Tuesday, January 28, when he received the bulk of the document, a 48-page, single-spaced compilation of Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, replete with drama, rhetorical devices and a kitchen sink full of allegations. The most extreme version of every charge the administration had made about Hussein, the document had been written, Powell concluded, under the tutelage of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who shared all of his boss's hard-line views and then some.

Delivery of the speech had been set for the following Wednesday, February 5. Bush planned to announce the date that very night in his State of the Union address to Congress. Acutely aware that he would be selling his own reputation as much as the specific facts, Powell picked up the telephone to tell Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, that he needed more time to get the speech into shape.

"Condi, please," Powell implored, "let's just tell the president that we're going to put in the State of the Union that Secretary Powell will be going to the U.N. next week. Don't put a date."

"She said, 'Right, right, of course,' " Powell recalled, "and she runs away to change the speech. Then runs back about five minutes later" to call him and say, " ' There's good news and bad news. The good news is we can change the speech.' " The bad news, she said, was that the White House had already told the media, in a preview of the State of the Union address, that Powell's presentation would be made on February 5.

"I could have gotten two more days," Powell later said wistfully. "Whether it would have made any difference or not, I don't know."

"HERE YOU GO," POWELL SAID, as he dropped the White House document on the desk of his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson quickly agreed it read more like a badly written novel than something designed to persuade the world. That afternoon, he assembled a State Department team-- including speechwriter Lynne Davidson and Barry Lowenkron, a senior CIA officer before he joined Powell's policy planning staff -- to set up shop at CIA headquarters, across the Potomac River in Virginia. They would examine the evidence themselves and turn the document into what Wilkerson called "a Colin Powell speech." Cheney aide John Hannah and William Tobey, the counterproliferation director at the White House National Security Council, would meet them there to answer any questions.