Over the course of a lifetime of service to his country, Colin Powell became a national hero, a beacon of wise leadership and, according to polls, "the most trusted man in America." From his humble origins as the son of Jamaican immigrants to the highest levels of government in four administrations, he helped guide the nation through some of its most heart-wrenching hours. Now, in the first full biography of one of the most admired men of our time, award-winning Washington Post journalist Karen DeYoung takes us from Powell's Bronx childhood and meteoric rise through the military ranks to his formative roles in Washington's corridors of power and his controversial tenure as secretary of state.

With psychological acumen and a reporter's eye for detail, DeYoung introduces us to the racially integrated neighborhood where Powell grew up, his courtship of and marriage to Alma Johnson, and his years as a promising young Army officer. We are witness to the pivotal events that helped shaped his world view, including two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he was disillusioned by a breakdown in leadership and the lack of a clear objective, and a 1988 meeting as President Reagan's national security adviser with Mikhail Gorbachev, who looked at him dead-on and effectively declared an end to the Cold War. We are privy to his reasoning as the architect of Operation Desert Storm and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, a position that made him a household name and an international celebrity. And we experience his agonizing deliberations in the face of a groundswell of public desire that he run for the presidency.

Yet it was his capacity as America's chief diplomat in the administration of George W. Bush that brought Powell the most renown — and criticism. Charged with the formidable task of making the case for war with Iraq, he convinced a wary nation that it was both necessary and right, only to find his own credibility hanging in the balance as the justification for invasion began to unravel. At odds with the White House on a range of foreign policy issues, Powell's counsel went unheeded and his reputation was tarnished.

With dramatic new information about the inner workings of an administration locked in ideological combat, DeYoung makes clearer than ever before the decision-making process that took the nation to war and addresses the still-unanswered questions about Powell's departure from his post shortly after the 2004 election. Drawing on interviews with U.S. and foreign sources as well as with Powell himself, and with unprecedented access to his personal and professional papers, Soldier is a revelatory portrait of an American icon: a man at once heroic and all-too-humanly fallible.

"Washington Post reporter DeYoung covers Powell's entire career in this nuanced, comprehensively researched first complete biography to bring to life the Jamaican immigrants' son who became chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state and a widely supported potential candidate for president. DeYoung presents her subject as above all a soldier, with an ethic of honor and service shaped by his career in the U.S. Army, during which he brought a combination of intellectual force and moral courage to his senior military appointments that distinguished him among his contemporaries. DeYoung, who obtained six in-depth interviews with Powell, explains that he wrestled with whether or not he had the duty to run for president in 2000, but ultimately realized he didn't want the presidency from the 'depth of [his] stomach or soul.' She correspondingly demonstrates that his continuing commitment to public service drove his ascension to secretary of state — a commitment that was strained to the limit during Powell's four years in office. DeYoung paints a favorable but balanced portrait of Powell, and she avoids using him as an instrument for Bush-bashing. Powell emerges from her account as a person who grew to meet his wider responsibilities. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct. 10)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The subject of Karen DeYoung's new biography doesn't quite attain the stature that his many admirers might wish for him: that of a tragic hero. The Colin Powell portrayed in 'Soldier' comes across as a disciplined and talented beneficiary of genuine equal opportunity, an inspiring leader of bureaucracies, 'the world's best staff officer,' a cool operator in Washington's political wars, an uncommonly... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) decent man, a stellar product of great American institutions. But when those institutions failed — when the Bush administration took the country to war in Iraq, rashly and under false pretexts — Powell did not have the imagination to challenge or, finally, defy the system that had made him.

DeYoung, an associate editor at The Washington Post, had Powell's cooperation in the form of six extended interviews, but as she notes at the end of the book, they covered only the most recent ground — the years since Powell told his own story in his 1995 memoir, 'My American Journey.' For this reason, and because a man of Powell's supreme self-control is even more opaque than most public figures, her march through his early years and his rise through the ranks of the Army has a dutiful feel — a blur of promotions and Powell family relocations without any strong sense of his inner life. In spite of DeYoung's reportorial talents and sympathetic understanding of her subject, the first half of Soldier should have been greatly compressed; Powell's career is simply not important or interesting enough for a full-dress biographical monument. (Would anyone want to read 500 pages about Brent Scowcroft?)

DeYoung might have done better to limit herself to Powell's years as secretary of state. She imbues this story with narrative tension and a steady accumulation of detail that shows exactly how he allowed himself to be used, mastered and then cast aside by his antagonists in the administration, above all by his longtime colleague Dick Cheney, now the vice president. It illustrates what critics, including Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence B. Wilkerson, have described as broken policymaking, with disagreements turning poisonously personal and key decisions, such as the jettisoning of the Kyoto accords or even the historic decision to invade Iraq, made without the knowledge of leading officials, usually Powell himself.

Powell had the devotion of those below him, and his instinct for the right word and gesture was never surer than on Sept. 11, 2001, when, marooned in Lima, Peru, at a meeting of the Organization of American States, he insisted on staying long enough to cast the American vote in favor of a document called the Democratic Charter. 'He knew from the start that what we needed were friends,' his spokesman Richard Boucher told DeYoung. 'We didn't know who did it, we didn't know why. But we needed democratic friends — that was the only way, whatever this was, that we were going to beat it.'

It was the thinking of a moderate Republican member of the internationalist foreign policy establishment — one of the last. It was not the thinking of the president and his most influential advisers, especially the vice president and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who were more intellectually aggressive than Powell and far more ruthless in undermining their chief antagonist. In DeYoung's account, Powell believed for a long time that he was winning more than his share of interagency battles, partly because his meteoric rise through a system that operated in an essentially rational way had been almost untroubled. 'But past experience was turning out to be a poor guide to the new reality,' DeYoung writes, 'and Powell was slow to grasp the extent of his — and the State Department's — isolation within Bush's national security team.'

As the administration moved with blind self-confidence toward war in Iraq, Powell slowly became part of the machinery that he thought he was helping to brake. The process by which he began to accept the White House's terms of the argument makes for the best pages of Soldier, a fascinating study in bureaucratic maneuvering, groupthink and subtle self-deception. Powell's tactical successes obscured his larger strategic defeat: Once he persuaded the president to take his case against Iraq to the United Nations in September 2002, DeYoung writes, 'Powell quickly moved to protect his right flank by establishing his bona fides inside the administration as a believer in the Iraqi threat and a firm supporter — should diplomacy and international pressure fail — of the use of force. Almost overnight, his carefully couched assessments of the state of Saddam's weapons programs were transformed into certainty.' This change led directly to the moment for which Powell himself has said he will always be remembered: his dramatic speech to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, vouching for the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, later shown to be almost completely wrong. After that, the war was inevitable, as was the historical verdict on Powell's tenure in office.

His entire career had prepared him to be a first-rate secretary of state in a functional administration, and if he had had the good luck to serve under a better president, he might be remembered in the company of one of his heroes, George C. Marshall, another former general who became secretary of state, for Harry S. Truman. But as George W. Bush's principal cabinet officer, Powell was condemned by his own limitations. He took comfort in Marshall's reply to critics who thought that he should have resigned over his disagreement with President Truman's decision to recognize the newly created state of Israel in 1948. 'No, gentlemen,' Marshall is said to have replied, 'you don't take a post of this sort and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility to make decisions makes one you don't like.' To Powell, Marshall had 'done his job. He had given the President his best advice. He had presented it strongly ... (and) used every, every opportunity to press his case.'

It is easy to understand why this story inspired Powell. But there is a crucial difference. Powell never told Bush not to invade Iraq; out of a lifelong sense of propriety and restraint, he kept his best advice to himself. In 2003, the country needed someone more than the world's best staff officer.

George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is the author of 'The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.'" Reviewed by George Packer, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Much of Soldier retraces familiar ground....The second half... reiterates a lot of information in earlier books by reporters like Bob Woodward, Seymour M. Hersh and Ron Suskind, while echoing observations made more vociferously by Mr. Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence B. Wilkerson." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Powell sat for six interviews with DeYoung and gave her wide access to his papers. His family cooperated in the project, and he presumably encouraged the more than 100 officials and former associates who were questioned for this book." Los Angels Times

"Compulsively readable." Library Journal

"An excellent study in leadership — and the lack thereof." Kirkus Reviews

Award-winning Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung offers the first full, authorized biography of Colin Powell, one of the most admired, powerful, and, more recently, controversial soldier-statesmen of our time. 16 pages of photos.