war with saddam a second time, a war that s a glaring stain on an otherwise remarkable career. powell s path from from the bronx to combat duty in vietnam, to national security adviser to president ronald reagan, to serve vinagre as the youngest and the first black chairman of the joint chiefs to two american presidents and then to foggy bottom as the first black secretary of state. president biden george w. bush this morning in a statement calling powell, quote, a family man and a friend. that statement framing the four-star general s legacy this way. he was such a favorite of presidents that he earned the presidential medal of freedom twice. with us to share his insights on this somber day is bill smallin who served as chief of staff to the former secretary of state at pentagon and was his principal adviser, a retired military general with 30 years of active service. colonel smallin, it s a sad day as i m grateful for your insight and sorry for your loss. first, just tell u
Biden to take that more leadership role. a lot of democrats on the hill eager to see him do it. watching this see out publicly and with the speaker and crunch time, it gets more intense. if you look at where sinema and manchin are, democrats they can be as mad as they want. they need their votes. they cannot do anything without their votes. just over the weekend, maybe means testing of one of the child care benefits. you have the clean energy proposal. senator manchin says, no, no, no, we don t want to do what you want. should the government negotiate prescription drug prices. senator sinema doesn t like the way it s worded. the progressives are saying they are not democrats. president biden is not somebody who wants to negotiate in general. any time a question is asked it s completely struck down and swatted away so what i m struck down is negotiation between sanders and manchin sparring in public. that s not the president s style and to your point a lot of
Fo former president george w. bush and after that let me hand it off to my colleague john king. inside politics begins right now. hello, everybody, and welcome to inside politics. i m john king in washington. thank you for sharing this day with us. we begin this hour with sad breaking news and a most painful reminder of are our pandemic reality. colin powell has died of covid complications. general powell, secretary powell, was 84. he was a trailblazer whose public service spanned four decades, the first african-american to sever as national security adviser, then the first african-american chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and then the first african-american secretary of state. as america s top general he was the architect of an overwhelming victory over saddam hussein s iraq in the first persian gulf war but then a dozen years later as america s top diplomat secretary of state powell was a critical salesman of going to
Things like that. i want you to listen to your friend talking about politics. i have voted democratic over the years. i ve voted republican. i always try to find the person that i think is best qualified for the highest office in the land. i believe that our country is best served when there are two strong parties. that s what makes this country great, and they can debate those points of view. i think we run into dangerous territory in this country when the two ends of the political spectrum become so dug in and nasty and everything is ad hominem and driven by cable television and blogs and all kinds of other things that our positions get so hardened that we can t find a way toward the center which is where the country is. that was 12 years ago, rather prescient of where we are now, even worse on steroids in terms of our political conversations, but to it the idea of politics and colin powell, he got pretty serious thinking about it but then decided he didn t want to get in, why?
General powell and knew general powell, i say general powell. i asked him after he was secretary of state which do you prefer and he said general. that doesn t mean he didn t diminish his work as secretary of state but he just liked general because he was general all that time. you were talking about the personal part of t.tell us a little bit more about that, about being friends with your dad in the sense that, you know, america saw him, americans old enough remember him, i first came to washington, he was serving in the reagan white house, a friend of the bush family, interesting that a person who was a staffer became a very close friend of george h.w. bush and george w. bush but for him to rise up and become a friend of a president from a junior officer to a friend of a president told you about the power of the person. one of the things that general powell never forgot was that he knew that he was breaking ground, that he was an african-american that was making history and he did