November 29, 2004, 8:21 a.m.
A Conservative Departs
About Colin Powell.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the December 13, 2004, issue of National Review.

Colin Powell left office with the jeers of his liberal friends and admirers ringing in his ears. In an unusually vicious New York Times editorial titled "Good Soldier Powell," the retiring secretary of state was told that he would be remembered solely for having given false information to the U.N. Security Council about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

It seems an odd assertion from a newspaper that had, after all, published the very same claims on its front page long before Powell spoke. If Powell is culpable for relaying false information, the Times is presumably even more culpable for making that information available in the first place. Should we therefore forget every other story in the Times, and remember only its "false" reports of WMDs?

Well, I — for one — won't do it. No, no. I insist on remembering many other Times reports, including the denials of Stalin's contrived Ukrainian famine (and of the millions of deaths it caused) that the Times published from its Moscow correspondent (and Soviet agent) Walter Duranty in the 1930s.

Nor were Duranty's reports merely "false." They were outright deliberate shameless lies concocted to cover up mass murder. Yet the Times was, until recently, boasting of the Pulitzer Prize that Duranty received for them; only this year it fought to prevent that prize from being rescinded by the Pulitzer committee.

So how can the newspaper that is bravely standing by its very own Holocaust denial wax so indignant about Secretary Powell's retailing intelligence reports that everybody believed to be true at the time and that he later disavowed when some of them proved to be false? It is possible, of course, that the Times has simply forgotten its role in the downfall of Saddam Hussein. More likely, however, is that the ill temper of the Times had little to do with the merits of Powell's speech to the U.N. The paper wished to cause Powell pain because he had not played the role they had hoped in the Bush administration.

The Times, the Washington Post, the Democrats, the Europeans, the liberal foreign-policy establishment, the media in general, and all the usual suspects believed that Powell was their man inside the administration — their Duranty, so to speak — who would cleverly frustrate the neoconservative designs of the Bush team. So when he advanced those designs instead — and, worse, publicly defended them — they felt doubly betrayed. Their hostility to him now reflects that sense of betrayal.

But it is misplaced. Powell never betrayed them because he was never the dissident liberal statesman of their hopes or of conservatives' fears.

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