So who will answer the call to face the threat? The induction begins next week, when Powell goes to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall with: President and Mrs. Clinton; Vice President Gore; all the living ex-presidents (except Ronald Reagan, who will be represented by his wife, Nancy); Oprah Winfrey; John Travolta; Tony Bennett; 30 governors; 90 mayors; scores of CEOs, clergy and charity chiefs; plus hundreds of young volunteers.
If the era of big government is over, Clinton says, the era of big citizen is just getting underway. The nonpartisan Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future, chaired by Powell, aims to mobilize corporate America (chart) and a vast volunteer army to rescue “at risk” youths with tutoring, mentoring and other citizen service that brings caring adults directly into their lives. The battle plan is to get the public, the private and the nonprofit sectors all marching in the same direction at the same time on the same fundamental needs of young people. The troops are you.
Whoa. Saddam Hussein is not attacking the South Bronx. It’s a nice day for golf. With no immediate crisis, is it truly possible to galvanize Americans to confront a slow-motion threat? Or will this be just another splashy media event, forgotten by Memorial Day?
And isn’t Powell just using this to stay in the arena? Actually, the general, while not quite Shermanesque about his personal ambitions, seems truly uninterested in running for president. To the dismay of his boosters, he’s taking none of the necessary steps to convert this to a shadow campaign. Instead, Powell has a larger goal that lets him keep his $70,000-a-pop lecture fees and try to save the country at the same time. After the Summit, he will launch an umbrella group he’s portentously calling “America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth.” The use of the word Alliance is no accident. That was the name of the coalition of Western nations that won the cold war. The new threat requires a new alliance–one that’s grand enough to muster the troops, but practical enough to let them volunteer every other Tuesday night after racquetball.
What Powell–and Clinton–are talking about is not basic charity and good works. It’s not writing a check to a museum or volunteering to be an usher at the community theater. And of course they’re not talking about the massive, government-backed “Marshall Plan for the cities” once envisioned by liberals. Instead, it’s a marshaling plan–a still-chaotic yet surprisingly targeted crusade to save an additional 2 million young people by the year 2000.
Some basic facts about the threat: the United States has about 15 million at-risk kids–children from families that are poor and often dysfunctional. All start out bright-eyed and full of potential. Half overcome steep odds to lead productive lives. The other half are question marks. Every youth who takes the wrong road ends up costing society about a million dollars over a lifetime in jail and emergency-care costs. If half of at-risk kids go that route, that’s $7 trillion dollars by midcentury.
Crime may be down, but juvenile crime is way up, with homicide rates tripling in a decade. Some experts predict a huge new crime wave when a generation of “superpredators” comes of age. More than half a million teens–a historic high–belong to gangs, which now extend far into the heartland. Teen suicide has doubled; 3 million kids are abused every year. “No parent” households have increased by half; teen pregnancy by nearly 25 percent. While only 70 percent of eighth graders read at grade level, the figure for poor kids is well below 50 percent.
And not one of them will learn to read at some gassy confab in the City of Brotherly Love. The question is: why won’t this be another dutiful conference where politicians and foundation hacks piously exhort the audience to volunteer more while running up a big bar tab, all in the interest of “helping people”? The answer is: it will be. But the insistence on specific commitments from attendees as the price of admission offers a chance–just a chance - to kick off something big.
The good news is that mentoring can actually work when properly deployed. For years, the evidence for this was anecdotal. Then, in 1995, Public/Private Ventures published scientifically reliable findings based on a three-year study of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. The results were stunning. Because of a long wait list, the researchers had a control group. They found that those kids in the program (ages 10 to 16 in eight cities) were 46 percent less likely to start using drugs. African-American youths were a staggering 70 percent less likely to try drugs. Those with mentors also hit others less and skipped school less than the control group.
So why does Big Brothers/Big Sisters have only 100,000 adult mentors? Because American volunteerism, while vast, has been badly coordinated. Only 10 percent of American charities involve human service. The kind of volunteers needed most–those willing to work one to one–are the hardest to recruit.
What’s different about this Summit is that it’s targeted on pulling the overclass out of the glass towers and into service. Of the 250 corporate and nonprofit commitments received so far, some are off the point; most neglect to provide paid company time for the service activities, and almost all amount in dollar terms, in Powell’s words, to “golf fees” for corporations with stratospheric profits and CEO pay (page 34). But many of the commitments do attempt to connect adult volunteers to young people who need them most. And they’re adding up. (NEWSWEEK and Kaplan Educational Centers will provide an extensive training program for mentors.)
Still stung by last year’s welfare bill, many local nonprofits won’t be in Philadelphia: they’re grumbling that the Summit has become a big corporate PR-fest while they’ve been in the trenches for years. They’re right, but miss the point. The implicit deal is this: the corporations get most of the public recognition (and the marketing punch of looking concerned about kids) in exchange for providing much-needed bodies and dollars to the nonprofits that know how to make use of them. Millions of people will be directly asked for the first time to volunteer to help kids. And the research shows that when Americans are properly summoned, they serve.
Summit backers hope this partnership will open a whole new chapter in American social history. “We are trying to crack the atom of civic power,” former senator Harris Wofford, director of AmeriCorps, wrote in an internal memo last week to Summit organizers. “Achieving that goal will be much harder than the task of cracking the physical atom when Roosevelt secretly set that goal.” Wofford, who played a central role in the civil-rights movement, compares this moment to when Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers charted their course in 1955. To end segregation required millions to focus on the same ends at the same time. If the Summit succeeds, Wofford writes, it will be the first time since that era that Americans have set clear civic goals.
Hitting those targets, of course, is another matter, and that’s where some hardheaded business thinking comes in. Ray Chambers and his partner William Simon made hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street in the 1980s pioneering what came to be known as the leveraged buyout. Now Chambers works full time applying the idea of leverage to helping kids. “There’s leverage in having something analogous to a business plan that if properly executed will turn the tide,” says Chambers, who helped get the Summit going after former Michigan governor George Romney, the originator of the idea, died in 1995.
Volunteerism obviously has its limits. It’s not a cure for broken American families, spiritual deprivation and schools that commit educational malpractice. And charity must not be seen as a substitute for government, a point that Powell and other organizers keep making. One cannot replace the other because for all of American history they have worked together. Today’s human-service charities receive fully 40 percent of their money from federal, state and local government agencies. Catholic Charities USA, one of the most effective, reports that 62 percent of its budget comes from government.
But for now, the whole question of Washington’s role is being subordinated to building the movement. While the Summit is afflicted with usual small “p” politics of scheduling, seating and whether Al Gore’s staff is annoyed with Colin Powell’s, the big philosophical issues have lost their edge. Democrats no longer reflexively defend government; Republicans are wising up to the limits of the market. They’re meeting in Philadelphia somewhere in the middle.
Meanwhile, it’s put-up-or-shut-up time for those who have urged the private sector to take a greater role. CEOs who want to shrink government can’t very well turn around and argue that corporations are in business for profit and shouldn’t be involved. That leaves them arguing that nobody needs to pay attention to the community. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh who laugh at the Summit are themselves looking laughable. Alex Castellanos, a GOP media consultant, says of his colleagues on the right: “They’ve been against things for so long that even when it’s something they’re for, they can’t be for it. All we’ve got is a bunch of grumpy people left over.” Castellanos’s argument applies equally to the press, which is so obsessed with conflict that it has lost much of its ability to cover solutions.
Of course there are still a few things to be grumpy about, starting with what might be called “phony service.” That’s when we hear from polls that 90 million Americans are “regularly” engaged in volunteer activity. (If true, the Summit would be unnecessary.) Or when foundation executives expound on the need for “systemic” change while staying as far away from the streets as possible. Phony service is when corporations make commitments, then - after the press releases have gone out–claim that “circumstances have changed.” It’s when “volunteerism” is not only involuntary–coerced by the boss–but inept: the unenthusiastic visiting the unreceptive for unfocused, unctuous activity.
The real point of the Summit may be to share ideas on how to avoid that fate–in other words, to give networking its good name back. The whole volunteer sector needs infrastructure so that workable ideas are replicated more quickly and corporate commitments are actually implemented. In the 1980s, for instance, corporations sent thousands of computers to schools, where they often sat in boxes unopened. No one figured out how to connect them. The Summit’s strategy for connecting everyone is to keep the focus on prevention over intervention and on five basic needs of at-risk kids:
This is essential to success in life, and it’s something government simply can’t do. The problem is that most caring adults don’t have the time or patience for it. One of the reasons Big Brothers/Big Sisters has trouble getting volunteers is that so many drop out or are screened out.
But after Ray Chambers was screened out in the 1980s because he traveled too much on business, he joined those searching for alternative types of mentoring for busier people. The result is “site-based mentoring,” where youths go to corporations to see what the world of work is all about, or mentors are given “release time” by their companies to meet kids at their schools for counseling or tutoring.
This is something almost every company could do in partnership with nonprofits. It’s a way to dramatically increase the number of mentors by slashing administrative costs and making room for volunteers who can participate only a couple of times a month instead of every week. Another, newer option is “family mentoring,” where instead of taking just your kids to the zoo, you take an extra child or two, perhaps alternating weekends with other parents.
Sustained one-to-one contact is still the only kind that is proven to work, but the concept has to be made more flexible if the Summit is to expand the total number of mentors in the United States from 300,000 to its goal of 1 million by the year 2000.
Most of the trouble kids get into occurs between the end of school and evening. The inner cities have a severe shortage of after-school activities, and the welfare bill, which sends more mothers to work, will make the problem worse.
Former senator Bill Bradley, who cochairs the Summit task force in this area, says the goal is not simply a park or gym to play in, but a place supervised by adults. Volunteers need to focus especially on ages 12 to 18, when lots of kids who have participated in the past are dropping out.
The goal here is to have all kids recognize the link between education and work, and to drive the point home by sharply increasing the number of internships and “job shadowing” programs for teens, many of whom have seen a real workplace only on TV.
The aim is to provide medical care for children who are not quite poor enough for Medicaid. As even a conservative like GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch realizes, the private sector cannot be expected to cover the 10 million uninsured American kids. While private commitments help, this is mostly a job for government.
“You gotta get them before ninth grade,” Powell says. One of the best ways to save at-risk kids is to enroll them in service projects. Once they become part of the solution, they are less likely to go off track. “Service learning” is now a hot topic in school districts, many of which are making service projects like tutoring a part of their curriculum. Maryland has made service learning mandatory, with some success. Summit attendees will be sharply divided about the merits of government-sponsored national service.
But when the crowd leaves Philadelphia it will be with specific goals: 2 million additional youth who have all five of these needs met, and 5 million more who advance in at least one category. Chambers predicts that the 2 million will experience a 50 percent decline in teen pregnancy, drop-out rates and other pathologies.
This is an extraordinarily tall order. Corporations and nonprofits will inevitably play numbers games, double- and triple-counting volunteers. The press–if it’s interested at all - will face legions of publicists preventing them from finding out if the programs are working. And after the blush of enthusiasm fades, the same old local logistical and political problems will reassert themselves.
Skepticism about follow-through is important but cynicism and weary resignation come too easily. What’s harder–and more necessary–is to figure out how it might be different this time. At a minimum, Powell, Clinton, Gore, the governors, CEOs and nonprofit chiefs can now be held accountable for specific commitments. The bigger question is whether the American people can be inspired to hold themselves accountable for the future of their children. When we know the answer to that, we’ll know the end of this Philadelphia story.
Deploying 5,000 volunteers into the community; giving 500 inter-city youth mentors and jobs.
CHALLENGE: Embarrass banking buddies into similar community deposits.
Will enlist, with Points of Light Foundation, 150,000 families in volunteering by 2000.
CHALLENGE: Develop flexible models so busy families can work it into hectic schedules.
Will give every employee 40 hours per year in paid time for community service and ask all suppliers to do the same.
CHALLENGE: Get companies to offer candidates, pay screening expenses
Galvanizing state to expend from 65,000 to 250,000 mentors, serving 1 million young people; offering release time for state employees.
CHALLENGE: Press must treat it as a major campaign promise; other govs must follow.
Will expand its public-school tutoring to 10 cities this year, with employees bussed to inner-city schools on company time.
CHALLENGE: Spread the idea. If replicated widely enough, this model could re-energize public education.
Beyond $50 million in drug education, will use 2,150 stores as “safe havens” for at-risk kids.
CHALLENGE: Attention, shoppers! Aisle 1 is now a youth center!
Pledging to increase the number of youth served in centers by 500,000 by 2002.
CHALLENGE: This premier after-school model can show Kmart, other companies how to do it. And why aren’t there clubs in the schools?
Will serve an additional 1 million youth.
CHALLENGE: Target at-risk kids more, and persuade business executives to enlist retirees as well as their current employees.
Sustained assistance for one needy child per every 10 families in 450 parishes.
CHALLENGE: Get amen corner going so all churches in the United States adopt this ratio.
Its $100 million is top cash commitment, aimed at preventing child abuse, teen suicide.
CHALLENGE: Happy Meals would be happier if restaurants were assigned to recruit and give discounts to mentors, mentees.
Will train 2,000 Puerto Rican and other Latino parents in seeking high academic standards.
CHALLENGE: Bring other Hispanic groups into Senor Powell’s Alliance for Youth.
Will provide 1 million needy children with free eye exams, glasses by 2003.
CHALLENGE: Pearle Vision, other eye-care cos. still have blurry vision on helping fill gap.
Will launch a new School-Plus Mentoring program in partnership with Big Brothers/Big Sisters in 10 cities.
CHALLENGE: Doughboy’s aims still too modest, but sets good example of how to refocus on kids.
Indianapolis kids tutoring younger students at another school twice a month.
CHALLENGE: Why isn’t this the standard in all schools?
Pledging four hours per month of paid time for literacy tutoring.
CHALLENGE: Prove to other companies that paid release time so invigorates employees that it actually increases productivity.
National Assoc. for Equal Oppty. in Higher Ed (NAFEO) pledges that half of all students in black colleges and universities–140,000 students will tutor and mentor.
CHALLENGE: Paging the Ivy League, Big 10, Pac-10, ACC.
Will recruit active and retired players as mentors for Indian youth.
CHALLENGE: Develop prevent defense for other at-risk kids, too. Persuade agents, owners, unions in all sports to air more PSAs, huddle on other fresh ideas.
title: “Powell S New War” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-10” author: “Bernice Bailey”
Powell used his first visit to Africa as Secretary of State as the occasion to choose the issue-the HIV/AIDS pandemic now wracking the entire African continent. But in making the conscious decision to spotlight AIDS in Africa by stopping at AIDS clinics in each of the four countries he visited, America’s first black Secretary of State relegated other more traditional issues lower on the list of priorities.
Powell’s predecessor, Madeleine Albright, tried repeatedly-and unsuccessfully-to focus attention on wars destroying the continent, from Angola to Sudan. She twice visited Rwanda, location of one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. But Powell, a retired army four-star general, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and current chief of U.S. diplomacy, devoted most of his efforts and appearances to what ordinarily would be viewed as a public health issue.
Almost every other issue took a back seat: even the continuing war in the Congo. In the three years since 1998, according to a statistical analysis by the U.S. humanitarian group International Rescue Committee, some 2.5 million people appear to have died due largely to side-effects such as food shortages and lack of health care. Yet the war has been scarcely reported in the world’s news media.
“This is probably the greatest humanitarian disaster in Africa right now,” a top aide told reporters traveling with Powell. But Powell played it down, at least in public, even though he visited Uganda and Kenya-both of which have been affected by the war. The war in Congo had been a “terrible conflict,” and the loss of two million lives “is regrettable,” he told reporters in Kampala, Uganda. But he declined to pin any blame on Uganda and Rwanda, whose forces occupy much of Eastern Congo and who, together with allied rebel groups, control what there is of government. (Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni announced the day before Powell’s visit that he would withdraw most of his troops, but leave some inside the Congo border.)
A U.N. report issued in mid-April found Uganda and Rwanda shaped the rebellion in the zones they control and profited mightily by exploiting and removing resources like gold, diamonds, timber and coffee. But Powell said he was “pleased” with Museveni’s promise to appoint an independent investigation-overlooking the charge that Museveni’s relatives had profited the most. “Hopefully we can get this behind us,” Powell said.
Powell, it seems, feels the war in Congo, as well as the conflict in Sudan-which has left 2 million people dead in the last 19 years-and the other wars paralyzing so much of Africa, were not the priority. He put it this way to an audience in Uganda: “Even though there are wars in various parts of the world, even though there’s a crisis in the Middle East, even though people are dying in these conflicts around the world, there is no war that is more serious, there is no war that is causing more death and destruction, there is no war on the face of the earth right now that is more serious, that is more grave, than the war we see here in sub-Saharan Africa against HIV/AIDS.”
The statistics are indeed shocking. While in South Africa, he noted in a speech that 25 million Africans had been infected with HIV/AIDS, and over 17 million had died throughout the continent. In 2000 alone, there were almost four million new cases, and 2.5 million deaths.
Yet to relegate wars led by politicians, whom citizens cannot control, to second place after the “war” to promote responsible sexual behavior raised questions about his overall policy intentions. The answer emerged in bits and pieces, as Powell flew from Washington to Mali, from Johannesburg to Nairobi-and it appears to lie in internal Bush administration politics.
During the presidential campaign, Bush disagreed with Democratic contender Al Gore, when he said that under a Republican presidency, the United States will not send forces to intervene in African wars-even if there were another genocide as in Rwanda. Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, also did not intervene, but after the 1994 genocide he sent in U.S. forces to train African soldiers as intervention forces.
Powell repeated Bush’s position on a future genocide as he flew out of Africa on Monday. “I don’ t think the United States will be able to be the court of first resort whenever there’s a crisis like this [and] send in the American army to put down the conflict,” he told reporters on his Air Force plane.
Instead, he advocated training African troops, in line with Clinton’s policy. But even this is under attack. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “is always looking for opportunities to back off on some of the overseas commitments we have,” Powell said. He added: “There is really no disconnect between Don always trying to make sure it is the right mission and an important mission and worth our investing in it, and the State Department sort of anxious to move our foreign policy along by training these guys in peacekeeping units.” Powell said that under Bush, “we will always be overseas, but not quite as much.” Supporting the public health drive to counter AIDS fits that prescription.
title: “Powell S New War” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-18” author: “Anita Bowley”
As the secretary spoke, there was a stunned silence in the seventh-floor conference room at State. And as cables and alarmed media commentaries started pouring in from around the globe, they all realized they had a serious public-relations problem. Perhaps not since Ronald Reagan’s 1983 declaration that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” has the world had to contend with such a display of superpower pugnacity. There was, throughout the world, a nervous sense that Bush was declaring his right to bomb or invade any hapless country that, by his lights, might be deemed uncooperative or laggard in a fight the president has starkly cast as civilization vs. barbarism. “What was Don Regan’s expression? ‘The shovel brigade’?” former senator Sam Nunn remarked last Friday, referring to the jape by Reagan’s chief of staff who said he was always cleaning up after his boss. “I think the [Bush administration] has a lot of diplomacy to do to catch up with that statement.”
Not to mention a lot of explaining. That’s why Colin Powell will be busy with his shovel in coming weeks. Bush, somewhat like Reagan in ‘83, caught nearly everyone by surprise when he took the conflict to a new level rhetorically. Only a triumphant Donald Rumsfeld seemed to know quite what the president meant when he lumped Iraq, Iran (two sworn enemies of each other) and North Korea together as an “axis.” The Defense secretary, an ebullient warrior who has overseen the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, told reporters that the president’s speech “had near-perfect clarity.” National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the Bush alter ego who has veered between Rumsfeld’s hawkishness and Powell’s more moderate course since September 11, gave a speech reaffirming Bush’s warning that “our nation will do everything in its power to deny the world’s most dangerous powers the world’s most dangerous weapons.” In diplomacy, as in a Sherlock Holmes detective story, the giveaway clue is the dog that does not bark. It took several days for Powell, speaking at the World Economic Forum in New York, to declare that Americans would take on “evil regimes” to defeat terrorism.
Perhaps it was because Powell, the ex-general, was girding himself for what he knows is a formidable task. Even U.S. allies publicly, if gently, rebuked Bush after the speech. Jordan’s King Abdullah said an attack on Iraq would cause “immense instability.” On Capitol Hill, some of Bush’s fellow Republicans also questioned the president’s rhetoric. Sen. Gordon Smith, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the idea of putting the three nations in one category was “kind of disjointed.” Bob Graham, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, dismissed the notion with a smirk. “There is no discernible connection among the three countries in terms of coordination of terrorism,” the Democrat told NEWSWEEK. Foreign Relations chairman Sen. Joseph Biden added that even many Republicans “don’t know what this means… Does it amount to a new doctrine? Does this mean we can move pre-emptively against those countries?”
As yet, no one is quite sure. A senior administration official told reporters that the speech was mainly intended to get attention, rather than presage specific new action. Powell told worried foreign leaders that the door remains open to negotiations with North Korea, and he hopes to encourage Iranian reformers by isolating hard-line Muslim clerics. And while the Bush administration has signaled that it intends to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, no attack on Iraq is imminent, sources say. Powell’s aides, their boss’s admonitions notwithstanding, told reporters that the Bush speech was geared primarily to a domestic audience and intended to shore up the budget demands. They noted that the new defense budget devotes a significant chunk of funds (some $7.8 billion this year) for missile defense. And in the prism of domestic politics, the “axis of evil” metaphor also conveyed “perfect clarity.” Bush said the war may not be “finished on our watch,” and the unspoken subtext was that when the 2004 presidential election rolls around, America will still need its war president. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” another Democratic senator commented archly last week.
Some administration insiders, however, say that, in fact, the speech was about more than politics, missile defense or delivering a rhetorical punch. The Bush team believes that the terrorist threat is unlikely to go away soon, and Osama bin Laden, whatever his fate, has demonstrated that massive killings can be very effective despite the licking Al Qaeda took in Afghanistan. The next logical step, the Bushies believe, is for terrorists to seek weapons of mass destruction. In his speech Bush accused Iran, Iraq and North Korea of developing such weapons and implied that all three sponsor terror (though only Iran is known to do so actively).
What is new, too–and the biggest challenge for U.S. diplomats–is the blunt willingness to wield American power. Rumsfeld has been the main champion of missile defense. But the real subtext to Bush’s speech is that offense, not defense, has become America’s strategic posture. Rumsfeld, declaring that attacks “vastly more deadly” than September 11 may occur, said last week that “defending against terrorism and other emerging 21st-century threats may well require that we take the war to the enemy.” In part, Bush and Rumsfeld see this as a corrective to the Clinton years, when halfhearted reprisals seemed to only encourage bin Laden, who relished calling America a “paper tiger.” Also behind the shift is a sense that, to Powell’s disadvantage, diplomacy seems to have been less effective in the war on terror than the display of American might.
As a result of this changing geopolitical landscape, Powell faces new skepticism abroad. Increasingly, sympathetic foreign diplomats suggest that the administration’s chief coalition builder has been “marginalized.” In fact, Powell appears to be soldiering on loyally beside his chief–and still winning small but important internal battles. Aides say Powell is likely to gain the president’s consent to treating Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay under Geneva Convention rules–though not as prisoners of war. Rumsfeld is under pressure from U.S. military leaders, who worry that their own soldiers, especially nonuniformed Special Forces, might be mistreated if captured. Backed by Bush’s iron fist, Powell may even find it easier in some cases to press diplomatic initiatives. “It isn’t Powell who has been marginalized,” says an official who has been in two administrations. “It is the State Department.” And in a war presidency, things may stay that way for a long time.
