AND ANOTHER THING
A deus ex machina for America's looming race crisis
PAUL JOHNSON
Colin Powell will make a fine president. He will give the United States the sureness of leadership it has conspicuously lacked since the retirement of Ronald Reagan, and the West as a whole the direction we have missed since Margaret Thatcher was untimely wrenched from power. Powell is smart, experienced, secure, relaxed and determined. He reminds me of General Eisenhower in many ways, notably in his concealed subtleties. Ike was much craftier than he seemed. Richard Nixon told me: `Ike was the most devious man I ever came across', which, coming from such a source, was quite an accolade. Powell's bland inno- cence also conceals great depths of astute- ness, in-fighting skills and subterfuge. Those Republican strategists who think they are buying a superb front man are in for a shock. But Powell is also a nice man and, I think, an unusually good one too; and his wife will make a wise and wary queen.
Powell will not find the Republican nom- ination easy. Unlike Eisenhower, he cannot just run in a token primary or two and then have the prize presented to him. He will have to go through the whole gamut and prove himself beyond peradventure a sure vote-winner and fund-raiser and a safe pair of hands. But the Republicans will be well advised to pick him, and the American vot- ers to elect him. He is certainly the best, and perhaps the only, chance of averting a fundamental race crisis in America. Those of us who interpreted the O.J. Simpson affair as a sign that it is coming have been accused of hysteria. But the fact is that organised and spontaneous black racism is now a fact of life in the United States, invading more and more spheres. It threat- ens, for instance, to destroy the judicial sys- tem, or at least the institution of the jury, as more and more blacks give verdicts solely On racial lines. When the liberals intro- duced the principle of Affirmative Action, that is discrimination in favour of blacks, and so undermined the fundamental princi- ple of equality before the law, they struck a deadly blow at everything America stands for. Blacks were taught to believe, and have come to believe so that it is now second nature to them, that any failures and mis- fortunes in life are the result of ill-treat- ment by whites, and that they have a right in natural justice to insist the rules be bent in their favour. They have been encouraged by the liberals to organise themselves on racial lines, so that there is an official Black Caucus in Congress, and openly organised and blatantly labelled black pressure groups in virtually every major workplace in the country, not least newspapers and broadcasting stations. Black racism is now institutionalised, officially encouraged in many ways, and cosseted by the liberal media. An exponent of black racist ideolo- gy like Farrakhan, who openly admired Hitler and voices anti-Semitic slogans unheard in the West since the 1940s, is per- mitted to organise an immense march of black racist males on Washington, some- thing the Ku Klux Klan was never allowed to do even in its heyday. Millions of black boys are being encouraged to hate white people entirely on racial lines, and not just whites: Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians too.
Where will it all end? It is here that the total failure of black leadership is revealed, in failing to warn their people where black racism must inevitably lead. Whether they are open racists like Farrakhan or more traditional leaders working through black caucuses, they are simply taking the black minority down a blind alley which must end in frustration and failure, or worse. Black racism is bound to produce a renewed white racism — there are already signs of it — and the whites will be joined by all the other racial minority groups, some of whom have far more cause than whites to fear vio- lent black militancy. The blacks are not much more than 10 per cent of the popula- tion and their numbers are in relative decline. They are bound to lose, in the long term, the short term or any term. Racism is not an option for a small, poor and often ill-educated minority.
The only way blacks will ever succeed in American society will be by forgetting colour politics, accepting total equality and trying to rise by their own efforts. That is why the Colin Powell presidency could be so important because he shows it can be done. Powell rose to the head of the US armed forces entirely because he was the best. So far as we know, he has never bene- fited by official Affirmative Action in any way. He has never been backed by a black caucus or nudged forward by racial favouritism or hobnobbed with the black institutional leadership. He has got where he is strictly on merit and if he becomes president he will enter the White House strictly on his own personal worth and not because of the colour of his skin. Because vast numbers of ordinary Americans of all classes and races recognise that Powell is evidence that the old melting-pot system still works if only people would give it a chance, they are buying and reading his book — showing how it was done — in extraordinary numbers. Most Americans want to believe that the American egalitari- an ideal still lives on.
My guess is that, if nominated, Powell will prove a popular and reassuring choice and will receive perhaps the biggest plurali- ty in American history. And the fact that a large majority of Americans elect a black as their president not because he is black but because he is outstanding will avert the threatened race crisis at one stroke. Blacks themselves will be given proof that it pays to turn from extremism and racism to the moderation and common sense for which Colin Powell stands. His election, I might add, will also be good for Britain. He repre- sents all that was best in the old British Empire. His country is the United States but his spiritual home is Jamaica. A year or more ago, when he was still very undecided about running, I begged him to do so, adding: 'If you get to the White House, think of what it will mean to all those poor kids in Kingston.' His eyes lit up. 'I do think of that,' he said, 'I do, I do.' And not only in Kingston, of course, will the kids marvel. If and when Colin Powell gets there, on merit, to the world's greatest elective office, the poor races all over the world will enter the new millennium with hope rather than despair.
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