Powell is America's nowhere man
By Fred Kaplan
Special to the Los Angeles Times

It's been one year since Colin L. Powell left high office. Where did he go?

So sad, even tragic, is the tale of this man's evaporation. Once, he might have made a serious run for president, under either party's banner. Just a few years ago, he ranked among the most-admired Americans: a proud Jamaican immigrant who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, rose through the Army's ranks to general, then to White House assistant, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and finally the first black secretary of State.

It was from this pinnacle that he crashed and burned. Outmaneuvered at every turn by the tag team of Cheney & Rumsfeld, shut out of policy on the major issues of the day, bamboozled by false intelligence on Iraq and ordered to link his credibility to the public case for a war he didn't believe in, Powell left office in tatters after George W. Bush's first term. Republicans viewed him as too dovish. Democrats considered him untrustworthy. His pals on the Euro-diplomatic circuit saw that they had been dealing with a nowhere man, that his whispered assurances of moderation had reflected only his own views, not his government's.