The Global Cable The Great Rift: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and the Broken Friendship that Defined an Era

This summer, we've launched a special edition of The Global Cable - our 'Summer Reading List.' Every other week, we'll release a new conversation with an author, discussing their latest book and the inspiration behind it.

Our first guest is renowned journalist and author James Mann, talking about his book The Great Rift: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and the Broken Friendship that Defined an Era. He shares what he learned about these two famous figures in U.S. politics, and why their story matters at a moment when the United States is so divided at home and diminished on the world stage.

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Music & Produced by Tre Hester.

Franklin Few

On every episode of The Global Cable, we ask our guests the 'Franklin Few' - an updated version of a questionnaire used by Penn founder Benjamin Franklin. Here are James Mann's answers.

Someone you'd like to meet: Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States.

A book, movie, or anything else you'd recommend to listeners:

• Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche
• Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City by Fang Fang and Michael Berry

Someone who's recently done something that deserves praise or attention: Lisa Murkowski, United States Senator from Alaska, for her public criticism of President Donald Trump's handling of recent protests.

Something Penn and Penn students can do to be of service to the world: Learning the skills and knowledge required to affect political change, alongside being politically active. 

Transcript

James Mann [00:00:08] This is, again, during the administration where Powell recalls how he and Cheney used to sit up at night in Cheney's office and schmooze with one another. Now, those were the perceptions of the '90s. What's interesting about it is after things blew up in Iraq, the perceptions completely changed. And the idea was that these guys had always been enemies, which is sort of the reverse.

John Gans [00:00:47] Welcome to a special summer season of The Global Cable, a podcast from Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, where we discuss the world's most important issues that people work on. I'm John Gans, the Director of Communications and Research here at Perry World House.

 [00:01:01] Though COVID-19 restrictions have changed beach reading this year, it's still a good idea to have a Summer Reading List. If you're looking for suggestions or assignments, you've come to the right place. On each episode this summer, we'll speak to an author about their latest book. We want to hear what inspired them, what they learned during the writing process, and more. Our first guest is renowned journalist and writer James Mann. He talks to us about his new book, The Great Rift: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and the Broken Friendship That Defined an Era. He shares what inspired him to write about these two famous figures in U.S. politics, what Powell and Cheney got right and wrong about China, and why their story matters at a moment when the United States is so divided at home and diminished on the world stage. James Mann, welcome to The Global Cable.

John Gans [00:01:53] So, Jim Mann, welcome to the Global Cable and Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks so much for joining us.

James Mann [00:02:00] Glad to be with you, John.

John Gans [00:02:01] So I guess the first question of our summer reading season is what made you decide to write a book about Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, especially as Donald Trump rose to power and took the White House? What drove this topic to the top of your to do list?

James Mann [00:02:18] Well, to clear one thing up, I started the book before Trump was president. And in fact, at a time in 2015 when it was far fetched that he would even be a serious Republican candidate. I wanted to write about the period of America coming out of the Cold War and all of its divisions and I thought Powell and Cheney would be the vehicle to describe the two different points of view because of the disputes they got into.

[00:02:53] I had done one previous book, Rise of the Vulcans, about the entire George W. Bush foreign policy team. I'd written a little bit about them [Powell and Cheney], but I really hadn't - that book ended in 2004 and I wanted to round out the story of the Bush administration and Iraq through them.

John Gans [00:03:28] For listeners who might be familiar with the Rise of the Vulcans book, it was a look at the people, but also the ideologies that were surrounding George W. Bush when 9/11 happened, and then the policy decisions that were made in the aftermath of 9/11. You worked in Washington for decades. You worked in covered foreign policy at the State Department and elsewhere. And so you were familiar with these two men. And really almost everybody in America of a certain age is familiar with Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. I mean, for a while they were probably two of the most famous non-Hollywood celebrities in America in the early 2000s. So, what did you learn about the two of them and to an extent, their relationship, that that surprised you?

James Mann [00:04:22] Well, there's a political answer for each one, because in looking at Powell, I didn't realize until the research for this book how early his departure from the Republican Party mainstream was. I said that a little bit backwards because in the mid 90s, the Republican Party mainstream, which at the time was dominated by people like former President George Bush 41. And people like him began drifting to the right.

[00:05:01] And so Powell, who was really a charter member of that Republican establishment, got up at the 1996 Republican convention and delivered a speech in which he spoke of both of the importance of inclusiveness, affirmative action, and also the importance of immigration to American society. And he was booed. That was really kind of the beginning of the story of Powles alienation from the Republican Party. It began really, before the George W. Bush administration. So that's the Powell end of it.

[00:05:44] And the Cheney end of the politics, I was fascinated that much later, after the George W. Bush administration and after the rise of Donald Trump, Cheney comes out as clearly opposed to the direction of the Trump foreign policies. It only shows up in private meetings and so on, but you find Cheney telling not Trump, but Vice President Pence, that he doesn't like what the Trump administration is doing on North Korea or Russia. Cheney is the traditional hawk, and Trump was many things. I'm not sure you can find a consistent foreign policy, but he wasn't a hawk. So in both cases, you see the splits within the seeming unity of the Republican Party.

John Gans [00:06:48] What's fascinating, I found, is that you really write about Powell and Cheney individually because you sort of tell the story of these two individuals. Some of that ground is pretty well covered, especially for people who are relatively familiar with the sort of the trajectories of their lives. Cheney was a rabble rouser, while Powell had served in Vietnam and things along those lines. And then you go into a history of their partnership, like a biography of their partnership.

[00:07:24] And then you go into an analysis of their breakup, and really the crackup of Republican foreign policy. What surprised you of their partnership? In the whole scheme of things, I guess they actually did not work together for very long, just about four years. In the Bush administration  they both became famous as the Secretary Defense for Cheney and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for Powell. What impressed you about that time together, especially, as an arc of art doing archival work? That's a time it's really fresher, right, because those files are sort of opening. What did you learn and surprised you of that time?

James Mann [00:08:09] Well, you know, this is really in some ways the story of our ourselves and our shifting perceptions, because if you talked to anyone in the '90s, Powell and Cheney were widely perceived as closely allied. I found a Maureen Dowd column where she speaks of and quotes Republican congressmen as speaking of Cheney and Powell as the Babe Ruth and the Lou Gehrig of the administration. And I was surprised to find then the reminiscences where, during during the administration,  Powell recalls how he and Cheney used to sit up at night in Cheney's office and schmooze with one another.

00:09:05] Now, those were the perceptions of the '90s. What's interesting about it is after things blew up in Iraq. The perceptions completely changed. And the idea was that these guys had always been enemies. Sort of the reverse. And in fact, I had a couple of Powell's friends who said, in interviews, "Oh, you know, these guys were never friends."

[00:09:36] It couldn't have been Dick Cheney as defense secretary who picked Colin Powell to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That doesn't seem plausible. Well, the record shows it was. And as I did my archival research  in the Reagan Library, I found this growing friendship between the two guys. They're both in more junior positions at the time. Powell is the Deputy National Security Adviser. Cheney is a fairly senior, but Republican congressman, not in the executive branch at all. And there are these notes, "Hope you're well, Powell. Signed, your buddy." They became very close as they were useful to one another in their jobs.

John Gans [00:10:29] I think that one of the things that you do a good job of capturing is this coming up as aides. I think Cheney's Secret Service code name was Back-Seat, right? And Powell was a military aid to, really, everybody. It's amazing when you stack up all the different people he supported.

James Mann [00:10:53] One of the two things these guys had in common in their history is they were a great staff guys. And they came up, the staff guys. Powell didn't become famous for his commands in the field, although he had them. He was the best staff guy for three straight Deputy Secretaries of Defense, then for a Secretary of Defense. And that Secretary of Defense made him the Deputy National Security Adviser. So Powell was talented in Washington. And Cheney had an even quicker or earlier rise as the door keeper for Donald Rumsfeld. He was the guy in the outer office who decided who got to go talk to Rumsfeld.

John Gans [00:11:38] Well, it's also fascinating because I think their time doing that, they were really affected. You know, you talk about the book like looking at the end of the Cold War, but it was really like the hot war of the Cold War that shaped a lot of their early career. For Powell it was Vietnam.  Cheney didn't serve in Vietnam rather famously, but he dealt with the politics of the post-Vietnam era and post-Watergate era, and both of those really shaped these two individuals. Was Vietnam as critical to their thinking as it seems from reading the book?

James Mann [00:12:24] Absolutely. I mean, I would phrase it for Cheney, much as you say, Cheney's formative experience was being in the White House as a senior official in reaction to Vietnam because he was there mostly during the Ford administration, when Congress was passing one restriction after another on the power of the presidency. His cause became defending executive power and getting rid of the limits on executive power, that was started with Vietnam for certain.

 00:13:04]  Vietnam was receded now, after nearly half a century. But it's hard to describe now how much that was the formative foreign policy experience. We've now had Americans in combat more than two or three occasions since then. But the fact that America had gone from essentially from World War Two and a stalemate in Korea, to a war where it was very stalemated against a country that it thought it could defeat. That was an incredibly traumatic experience for the whole country, and Powell and Cheney were part of it. 

John Gans [00:13:50] One of the things that I mentioned earlier was that the book has sort of three different sections: the lead up to the partnership, the partnership, and the breakdown of partnership.  I think you make the first third a more traditional biography of these two characters. And then this memoir of this partnership is told much more in real time. Like, things are half in Panama than you got to Iraq, these first hot wars of the post-Cold War era. Admirably, you don't do the tick tock of Iraq and every single decision in that way, but you really analyze Iraq. You and I first met while Iraq was still a daily conversation in Washington, '06, '07, '08, '09. What did you take away from those, with a little bit of perspective? For so many people, memories and appreciation for the Iraq war steered by the politics and the living of it. What did you learn anew or find yourself coming away thinking differently in terms of Iraq?

James Mann [00:15:04] A couple things. First, as I went over the record, and the memos and the memcons, what was stunning to me, it's something that other people have speculated but it's very clear [00:15:21]there was no decision, no day, no meeting where the Bush administration sat down - cabinet level or whatever - and said, "we will we have decided to go into war in Iraq." What happened, and Colin Powell had a lot to do with this, what happened was that the summer before the invasion, Iraq begins to come to a head. And they're talking about it.

[00:15:55]And Powell says, if we're going to go to war, we have to take the case to the United Nations first. And they have arguments about that, Cheney is against going to the U.N.. He was against going to the U.N. during the first war with Iraq. And Bush decides he's going to take the case to the U.N.. And that puts off a decision on whether to go to war. And months go by with U.N. debates. And if you look at The Washington Post in the late fall, you'll find a huge story. 

[00:16:38] Powell wins because the U.N. voted 10 to nothing to support a resolution that was a little bit ambiguous. And while that is happening, while the U.N. is debating Iraq, the US is sending its forces to the region. Thousand after thousand after thousand. And so you get the beginning of 2003. There were tens of thousands of troops lined up in the desert ready to fight a war. Tommy Franks, the commander, has developed his war plan. And by Powell's own admission, it's almost too late to turn around and say "we were just thinking about this," and bring everybody home. So the war just, you know, they drifted into the war. You can't find a decision. That's the first thing.

[00:17:38] And then the second thing that turned up in an interview that I found fascinating. One of Cheney's people, I was having him take a standard interview. I had him take me through the chronology of the events that led to the war. And I'm saying, OK, so here's the Axis of Evil speech in 2002. Here's this. Here's that. And he very gingerly stopped me and said, "you know, all of this is right, but you're looking at Iraq in isolation. That's not the way it played out at the time.".

[00:18:20] That's not the way it went down because at the time, the divisions within the administration, the two factions, let's call them the Cheney faction and the Powell faction, were fighting week after week on two things, not one. One was Iraq, and the other was Israel and the Palestinians. And so the question of what to do about Israel, and the Palestinians, and Yasser Arafat was all mixed up in this. One side had a theory that the way to deal with Israel and the Palestinians was to intimidate the Palestinians and Arafat and isolate them with a successful war. That's kind of what had happened in 1991. And the other side felt that you really couldn't diplomatically or in any other way deal with Israel and the Palestinians while you had a war on, and that you needed to bring other Arab governments along on your side by getting a peace settlement first and then you dealt with Saddam Hussein. It's that mix of Middle Eastern politics that took me by surprise.

John Gans [00:19:41] It's fascinating. I think that people would be surprised, because I think you really do break it down. And I think the command of this sort of day in, day out drama of the Bush administration is kind of fascinating. You just know it cold and are able to sort of cut through the the day to day drama of it. And I think that you know, I've looked at the Gulf War and you do it again here, which is, in so many ways the antithesis of the later Iraq war just in how the decision was made, these people's opinions on it and things along those lines.

[00:20:21] Now, one issue you talked about Israel passing one issue that I was surprised, given your own writing in history and you lived in China for a long time, and have written the book with the sort of China fantasy, which is this idea that U.S. China relations was really especially compared to today, where it's a regular talking point of President Trump, was on the backburner for much of the Bush years. You don't really get into it much, but I was wondering, you know, what did Powell and China get wrong and what did they get right about China at a critical time where China was just joining WTO, just becoming more engaged with the West. What were what did they get right and what did they get wrong about China? Where did they agree and where did they disagree?

James Mann [00:21:16] It's a very good question. They kind of went beyond the scope of the book. They both got it wrong in different ways; they had different views. Looking back, the time to deal with some of the conflicts with China was in precisely that period of 2001-2008. China had just entered the World Trade Organization and was often in violation of of some of the rules, was sending its exports to the United States in ways that crippled American industries, sometimes manipulating its currency. Looking back, there's a famous study by a guy at MIT at the job losses in the millions. It was really in that concentrated period of 2001-2005.

[00:22:14] So Powell buys into the kind of traditional standard engagement policy. "We need to have good relations with China, we need to avoid conflict, there's nothing here that requires any major change in policy." [Powell] really continues the policies of the previous administration. Cheney also doesn't take any strong action. I think he you know, my sense, at least through his people, is that he he was more hawkish by instinct, but thought that the United States couldn't take on China at a time when it needed to concentrate on the Middle East. So he probably thought that things were not going well with China. But we'll deal with them later. So each in his own way came down on let's put China on the back shelf or let's keep going with the policies we have, at least for now.

John Gans [00:23:26] That's amazing. And then if I can sort of ask you, Donald Trump and the presidency of Donald Trump is sort of obviously looms over every book in bookstores these days and certainly sort of comes into this book at a couple of places, but not in any major way. But I guess my question, and I know you're probably getting this a lot, is at a moment where the United States is so divided at home and in many ways diminished on the world stage, [00:23:59]why does the story of Powell and Cheney and their unlikely partnership and their perhaps inevitable breakup matter when Donald Trump's president?

James Mann [00:24:10] They're the backdrop to Trump. Trump's policies could not exist except as a reaction to the first 20 years after the end of the Cold War, where there is a intense debate about America's role in the world and how it should carry it out. You had two different schools of thought: one was that the United States should keep on working with its allies in the way it had. That's Powell's. And the other is the United States doesn't need its allies as much as it did before, so we should aggressively seek to reorder the state of affairs in places like the Middle East. We should use our power. 

[00:25:02] [00:25:02] Trump comes in the wake of that and says, one, we don't need our allies. Even less than Dick Cheney and his allies thought. We have to go it alone in the world and two, we're not going to try and reorder things despite all of his threats and so on. Basically, Trump is harking back to old American policies of we're not going to try and affect change in the world, we're going to do it on our own. 

John Gans [00:25:46] So we're going to now go to a different statesman, one whose public record is probably only certain. One of the few that surpasses Dick Cheney and Colin Powell for service to their country, which is Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin, as you may know, was one of Penn's founders, one of Penn's first trustees. And he knew a thing or two about writing and about journalism. And he developed a questionnaire he used for conversations among fellow Philadelphians interested in current and global affairs some 300 years ago. We've updated it for use today to anchor our global podcast. These are short questions that can have short answers. So you have obviously interviewed or met just about everybody important in global affairs over the last 20 or 30 years. But I would ask who would you most like to meet today and why?

James Mann [00:26:44] I'd like to meet Barack Obama. I have not interviewed him yet. I did write a book on his foreign policy team. I didn't interview Obama then and would always like to get his memories and thoughts. But above all, I'd simply like to meet him.

John Gans [00:27:04] It's funny, we have not gotten that answer. So that's actually kind of fascinating in the whole course of this particular conversation - we're on our twenty fourth or twenty third episode. I don't think anybody's mentioned Barack Obama yet. Fair enough, that sounds good. Do you think he would complain about you calling your book The Obamians? Do you think he would give you a hard time for that book title?

James Mann [00:27:29] He might, I don't know! 

John Gans [00:27:32]  Cheney and Powell didn't like the book Vulcans, right? They didn't like the term?

James Mann [00:27:38] Powell didn't like it simply because he was included.

John Gans [00:27:45]  All right, I'm name-checking all your books at this point, I think I'm doing a good job.

[00:27:50] Since we've all been sort of locked inside for a few months, you know, this has actually become the best news people can use in this podcast, which is if you've read any articles, books, seen any movies, documentaries, Netflix shows or listened to any music, podcasts; anything that's related to world affairs that you think our listeners might be interested in?

James Mann [00:28:23] I've been reading two books in the last few weeks. One is a relatively new book called Hitler's First Hundred Days. It's a close look at Hitler coming to power and how he and the Nazis managed to consolidate power so quickly. I hope it's not relevant to current events, but it's a scary backdrop to them. The other book, I won't say too much about it because I'm back to review it, but it's a book called Wuhan Diary, and it's an account of the the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan and what went down on the ground. And I find that fascinating.

John Gans [00:29:14] That I've seen that book advertized, it looks great. That sounds good. All right. So do you know of any individual in the United States and Wuhan or elsewhere who's recently done something that deserves praise or imitation?

James Mann [00:29:29] I would say Lisa Murkowski. I'd be delighted to have what she just did two days ago imitated. I mean, I would also put Romney or James Mattis on the list. But more politically significant, I think was what Murkowski did.

John Gans [00:29:49] Which is she stood up last week, we're recording this in mid-June, so she stood up and criticized President Trump for his handling of the protests both in Lafayette Park and more broadly across the country in relations to the sort of killings of Floyd and others. Have you met Lisa Murkowski?

James Mann [00:30:14] I think I did interview her once, but nothing to report on. I mean, Maddox deserves praise in a different way. But since what? To my to my mind, what counts politically is that the Republicans in the United States Senate need to begin thinking clearly and about their lockstep with Trump. Murkowski's decision to depart was important, Romney had already done so.

John Gans [00:30:50] Yeah, I mean it's a fascinating moment. I mean, I think one of the things that's fascinating about you, and I should add in full disclosure that I was a researcher on one of your books so I've known you for a little while-

James Mann [00:31:04] My best researcher!

John Gans [00:31:04] I mean, definitely not your best, but I was researching and what I find fascinating is, is that you have spent a lot of times on a particular issue trying to understand the doctrine of these two foreign national parties and how they have evolved. Whether it's getting into the foreign policy debates of post-Vietnam Democrats and how that evolved to sort of produce the foreign policy of Barack Obama. And then the same thing on Republicans. The post-Vietnam Republicans and how they sort of built up to invade Iraq and things along those lines. And you continue that in this book. But I think it's kind of fascinating to see people step out from those parties, because as somebody who spent as much time in Washington and spent as much time understanding how these parties think, it's hard to sort of step away. And so it's an actual more of a a testament to character and courage than perhaps it should be. But it certainly is in modern Washington.

[00:31:58] Right. And then last question. Is there anything in can you think of anything which Penn and Penn students can do to be of service to the country and to the world at this current crazy moment?

James Mann [00:32:09] Well, this comes from the heart. It comes in the peak week of activism, of people protesting, people engaging in the Black Lives Matter movement. I'm a graduate of the class of 1968. So the events of 1968 I once witnessed as a college senior. I would say to people who are or who want to be politically active today that it's great to be politically active, but it's not enough. You also have to know things and know how to do things. So I watched in 1968 as some of my most politically active classmates moved to communes in rural New England or communes in America's leading cities to try to affect change. And that was great, but it kind of ran out after five or 10 years and the people who did that without learning anything else or doing anything else ended up stranded and isolated, because it's terrific to be politically active, but you still need skills and knowledge if you want to affect political change. So that's my lecture. This sounds unfortunately like my parents generation, "learn a skill, you got to know how to do something." That part of it, in my experience, is is accurate.

John Gans [00:34:04] That's great. Well, we appreciate your time, Jim, and certainly appreciate this great book, which is called The Great Rift, about the breakup and relationship between Colin Powell and Dick Cheney. Thanks so much for joining us here on the global cable.

James Mann [00:34:22] Thanks, guys. Been great to be on.