Colin PowellI read biographies of key officials as a means of trying to understand how they make decisions, and on what basis of fact or fancy they make decisions.
Colin Powell is a great man, and I hope he returns as Secretary of State under a transpartisan team. He was destroyed by Dick Cheney and his own confusion of loyalty versus integrity.
Here is the sentence, on page 293, that made my day:
when he was Military Assistant to then Sectary of Defense Casper Weinberger, he preferred the Early Bird with its compendium of newspaper stories to the “cream of overnight intelligence” which was delivered to the Secretary of Defense by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) courier each morning.
See also:
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Price of Loyalty : George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
