General Colin Powell

General Colin Powell was the first black officer to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This accomplishment came after a long history of discrimination and abuse of blacks in the U.S. military, extending even into the early part of Powell's career in the army. Powell worked his way up though the system to become a general, but it was his performance and prominence during the Desert Storm situation that catapulted him to national prominence as the news media centered on this leader, the highest-ranking African-American in the history of the country. Powell's story is a truly American version of success. He was born of immigrant parents form Jamaica and grew up in moderately poor circumstances. His education was in average public schools. He succeeded through his own hard work, though, to overcome whatever limitations this placed on him. Powell was the first black American to serve in sensitive and key positions of government, and he did so through the administrations of five presidents. He was the first black appointed to the post of national security advisor to the White House. He was the first Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) officer named to the chairmanship of the Joint chiefs. He was further the youngest chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, being appointed to the post when he was only 52. He achieved all of these first because of "his distinguishing qualities of character, coupled with an abundance of skills for solving prob

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stayed with her parents in Birmingham: in effect, Colin and alma Powell had gone to the separate fronts of the two wars America would wage in the 1960s. Powell was leading a combat unit near the North Vietnamese border when his son was born. Like many soldiers at war, he wouldn't find out he was a father until more than two weeks after the fact. Meanwhile, alma Powell was holed up in a city being torn apart by racial violence--"I probably saw more action than he did," she says (Means 119). MILITARY CAREER The United States became involved in the situation in Vietnam during the Eisenhower Administration, but it was during the Kennedy Administration that U.S. involvement increased and American troops were committed to the support of South Vietnam. Wars like that in Vietnam were being fought as surrogate wars. Nuclear war between the principals was unthinkable, and this mean that surrogate wars were fought in which second parties substituted for the superpowers. President Eisenhower was the first to formulate the "falling domino" theory of how communism might spread from one country to another (Newhouse 100), and this view was repeated by later U.S. administrations as they fought to keep each perceived domino from falling und

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