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On the Bush team, Powell finds himself operating across a fault line. In shorthand, it is attitude. The differences within the team are not about goals so much as about the manner of accomplishing them. Powell is a multilateralist; other Bush advisers are unilateralists. He's internationalist; they're America first. If you wanted to put a label on Powell's foreign outlook, you could call it "compassionate conservatism"; the others share the second notion but not the first. He is often seen as the Administration's force of moderation, charged with checking its more extreme enthusiasms. Even when winning, he seems to prevail against the tide. Though a star of global magnitude, he is the one doing the saluting.
It has to be frustrating. Naturally his aides say, "Powell doesn't give a damn about that. He doesn't care if Powell gets his way. That is not what he is about." When TIME asked him point-blank last week, he gazed back and said, "I'm not frustrated. There are problems to be solved. And my job is to help the President find the right answer to the problems he faces. It's not for me to be frustrated; that's not an option."
But friends say different. A Republican Senator who knows him well says flatly, "He's frustrated. I know he's not happy." A close associate at State says, "Sure, there's frustration--especially when you didn't have to do this and you're working your buns off at it." It has got bad enough for his intimate aides to wonder aloud whether Powell will serve out his full term. "You gotta wonder," says one, "whether you're still having fun or not."
All this has left a vast audience of admirers at home and abroad wondering what all that Powell charisma and celebrity and promise are being used for. What has happened to make the Bush Administration's ace look like its odd man out? Is it Powell, or the circumstances he's in? Is it something in the Powell makeup, or some combination of rivalry and situation, that holds him back?
It was probably impossible for Powell to live up to expectations. "He ascended to his position with almost a godlike reputation," says Senator Chuck Hagel, a senior Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee. The hero of the Gulf War flirted with running for President in 1995, and both parties wanted him. When he agreed to grace Bush's Cabinet, it was widely assumed that he would run both foreign and defense policy.
So far, Powell seems vicar of neither. That could change in time. You hear his friends say he is just sitting back while he marshals his forces for a takeover. In the Washington cosmos, the stars are always in motion--falling, rising, colliding--and it can take the political telescope eons to determine which.
But nothing in Powell's situation makes it easy. He works for a man who doesn't tolerate being upstaged. The Administration Powell agreed to join has turned out to be full of rivals for predominance who are more hellbent on victory than he is. And the corridors of his own department, as much as the Pentagon and the White House, are salted with people who are not and never have been fans of his act.