(Military-speak for staying on top of everything.) Powell was famous for this in every job he ever had, constantly picking up the phone to take the temperature of senior military colleagues, civilian peers in other agencies, the Washington media, foreign counterparts, friends over the decades. “You’re not being sent over there to be the 21st-century version of Charlemagne.” Humility, so much at the core of Colin Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants and graduate of a City College of New York, was job one. “Remember who you are, Stavridis,” he said. You’ll be treated like royalty in the job: a stately Belgian chateau set on a couple of dozen acres the biggest security detail in the armed forces (Belgian and U.S.) your personal set of Blackhawk helicopters the best Gulfstream jet a chef and staff to run the diplomatic entertainment and on and on. We spent a couple of hours together, and at the end of it, I walked away reassured and thinking more optimistically than I had since I’d learned of the assignment.įirst, he said, you need to park your ego at the door. This included when I was senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld in the early 2000s, a job Powell had held in the 1980s under Secretary Caspar Weinberger.Īs I knocked on the door of his home in the Washington suburbs, I hoped he could boil down for me the key elements of leading a large coalition in combat, dealing with the diplomatic elements of NATO and the other allies, and handling the personal pressure and challenges. Powell, not Secretary of State Powell - had always been generous with his time and advice as I moved through more senior positions. Powell - to those of us in uniform, he will always be Gen. I’d known Colin Powell, who died Monday of complication from COVID-19, since I was a young commander and he was the Joint Chiefs chairman. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they both said, “Go talk to Colin.”
When I relayed my doubts to both Gates and Adm. I was worried about my ability to lead given the complexities of that coalition. The other problem was that NATO was engaged in a brutal land war in Afghanistan, with nearly 150,000 troops hundreds of miles from the sea. Pacific Command in Honolulu, a traditional posting for a Navy officer.) But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wanted me in Europe, so off I went. (My dream four-star job was thousands of miles away: commander of U.S. Southern Command, focused on Latin America - this new job would be jumping into the deep end of the pool.įor starters, I would be the first Navy admiral to take the job - all my predecessors had been generals with deep experience in NATO. While I had already served three years heading one of the military’s 11 combatant commands - U.S.
In 2009, I was nominated to be the 16th supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
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