COLIN POWELL ON COLIN POWELL

If Colin Powell is not Running for President yet, he certainly is getting good practice. Starting this Friday, 800,000 copies of his much anticipated autobiography, My American Journey, will start landing in bookstores. Meanwhile, Powell embarks on a 23-city, 20-day publicity blitz, including TV interviews with Barbara Walters, Larry King, Jay Leno and Tom Brokaw, that promises to be the D-day of author tours. Then, as he tells TIME in this week’s interview, his first to appear since his retirement in 1993, “I’ll sit down with my family and those people who provide me with advice and counsel and some very dear friends who care about me, and make a decision as to what to do.”

By that time, millions of Americans will not only have seen and heard Powell out of uniform for the first time but will also have had the chance to read the story of his life, which is excerpted on the following pages. No other candidate can hope to match Powell’s inspiring tale, “the story,” as he puts it, “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 Adviser to the President of the United States and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Colin Powell embodies the American Dream; in this age of the anti-politician, Colin Powell has good reason to hope he could be the American Dream candidate.

Powell, 58, is keeping his options open, and his views on the issues reflect that: as a self-described “fiscal conservative with a social conscience,” he says little that will alienate most voters. Like Bill Bradley, the Democrat from New Jersey who announced last month that he would not seek a fourth Senate term, Powell expresses his disenchantment with both parties. Like Bradley, Powell suggests that now may be the time for a third party to emerge to represent what he calls the “sensible center of the American political spectrum.” Powell reveals that he has never registered as a Republican or a Democrat and discloses having voted for J.F.K. in 1960, L.B.J. in 1964, Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush thereafter.

The book’s considerable strength lies not so much in what Powell has to say about politics or his service in Washington as in what he says about the forces that shaped his character and thinking: his parents, his early attraction to a military career, his brushes with racism in the South, his two tours of duty in Vietnam. Powell, who wrote the book with historian- biographer Joseph E. Persico, retains a serious but not pompous tone, with frequent flashes of self-deprecating wit. A man fond of maxims, Powell is always looking to learn from mistakes as well as successes, and he frames much of his story that way. Under the glass top of his desk at the Pentagon, Powell kept a pulpit’s worth of sayings: Get mad, then get over it. Share credit. It can be done!

Powell’s most prominent patrons were Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but many readers with an eye on 1996 will pay closest attention to what he says about Bill Clinton. Even before Clinton took office, Powell had a couple of feelers–nothing more than that–about leaving his post as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and joining the Clinton team. In May 1992, Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan, a good friend of both men, visited Powell. “Your polls are running off the charts,” Jordan told him . “Are you interested in running as Clinton’s V.P.?” Powell dismissed it out of hand. “Vernon, first of all, I don’t intend to step out of uniform one day and into partisan politics the next. Second, I don’t even know what I am politically. And third, George Bush picked me [as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and stuck by me. I could never campaign against him.” On Nov. 1, two days before the election, Powell dined at Jordan’s home, and this time his host asked, “Are you interested in State or Defense?”Again Powell said no

When Powell finally did meet the President-elect for the first time, on Nov. 19, he came away impressed: “Clinton was self-assured, smart, curious, likable and passionate about his ideas.” Powell never wavers far from that initial assessment (in the book, at least), but he offers a devastating critique of the Administration’s modus operandi. National security meetings “meandered like graduate-student bull sessions ellipse Backbenchers sounded off with the authority of Cabinet officers. I was shocked one day to hear one of [National Security Adviser] Tony Lake’s subordinates, who was there to take notes, argue with him in front of the rest of us.”

Bosnia absorbed much of the Administration’s time, with Powell delivering his “constant, unwelcome message”: the U.S. “should not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective.” In one particularly heated debate, Powell recalls U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright asking him in frustration, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” As Powell relates it, “I thought I would have an aneurysm. American G.I.s were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board…I told Ambassador Albright that the U.S. military would carry out any mission it was handed, but my advice would always be that the tough political goals had to be set first. Then we would accomplish the mission.”

According to Powell, David Gergen, presidential counselor, sounded him out about staying on for a third two-year term as Chairman, but Powell retired in September 1993 as he had planned. Then, on Dec. 18, 1994, Powell got his most serious job feeler yet: Clinton invited him to the residential quarters of the White House and told him Warren Christopher wanted to leave. Would Powell like the post? Powell politely declined, citing the need to finish the book and his desire to spend time with family. “Left unspoken were my reservations about the amorphous way the Administration handled foreign policy,” Powell writes. “I did not see how I could fit back into this operation without changes so radical that the President would probably have difficulty making them.”

In the following excerpt, Powell’s story is divided into four chapters. The first explores his upbringing in the Bronx and how he grew attracted to the military through ROTC. The second part details his first tour of duty in Vietnam, a defining experience that taught him lifelong lessons about the relationship between civilian leaders and their soldiers. The third section deals with the Gulf War, including Powell’s sometimes heated relationship with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf and why the Bush team did not continue the battle until Saddam was toppled. Finally, Colin Powell muses about the presidency and what he thinks is ailing America today.

–By James Kelly