At Berlin event, students grill Powell
BERLIN -- When you want to send a message to a nation that gobbles up the anti-Bush ideas of Michael Moore, whom do you call to deliver it?
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, of course.
Powell, visiting Germany for a conference on Afghanistan, took time out of his schedule yesterday to answer questions for more than an hour from a group of high school students living in what was once part of East Berlin. Powell earned millions on the public speaking circuit before he joined the Bush administration, and this sort of question-and-answer session -- televised live on German TV -- plays to his strengths as a forceful, calming voice. Powell, aides say, also enjoys these events because students tend to ask the kind of impolite questions that make adults nervous.
Like, "What do you think of Moore's claim that President Bush invaded Iraq to grab its oil?"
Or, "Do you still experience racial discrimination in America?"
Or, "Aren't Europe and America drifting apart?"
The Max Planck School is a plain-looking high school in an area surrounded by Soviet-style apartment buildings.
About 100 high schoolers were selected for their command of English, and they showed it. Their poise and knowledge of US politics would have put many American high school students to shame.
Most were two or three years old when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; their parents had grown up under communism. Many told reporters they detested President Bush, and several said they learned a lot about foreign policy by reading Moore's books. Even those who hadn't said one of the school's music teachers manages to talk at length about Moore's condemnations of the Bush administration while kids are tuning their instruments.
Moore, a sharp-tongued filmmaker and author, has turned into something like a cult hero here, so much so that Publisher's Weekly compared his popularity to that of comedian Jerry Lewis in France. Three of his books hit the German top-10 list at the same time. His attack on Bush, "Stupid White Men," sold nearly 1.1 million copies in German -- one-third of the book's total global sales and almost double the sales in the United States. Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country?" also shot to the top of the best-seller list shortly after it was released.
Powell's appearance was part of a US Embassy-sponsored program to bring US officials into German schools to help counter the rising tide of anti-Americanism in Germany exemplified by the nation's embrace of Moore. Powell, sitting on a stool in the school's gym, admitted he isn't as avid a Moore reader as the Germans. And he insisted Bush did not invade Iraq for its oil. Iraqi oil sales are being used to rebuild the country, he said.
He added that the United States has to pay for oil on the open market just like every other country.
Powell's spiel to the teenagers often veered between pronouncements of policy ("We regret that Israel found it necessary to build a wall for its security . . .") and repeated references to the glories of democracy, as demonstrated in Germany and soon -- in Powell's telling -- in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also repeatedly stressed that strained US-German relations are on the mend.
Powell wouldn't bite when one student asked if he would "run for secretary of state" in a second Bush term. "I serve at his [Bush's] pleasure," he said. Powell, who has indicated in the past he plans to leave at the end of this term, then quipped, "That's called a slide-away."
Yet Powell was also drawn into revealing glimpses of his personal life.. Student Anne Burian, 19, first asked him how he balanced personal life with the demands of diplomacy and then later about his struggle with racism.
When she popped up with the microphone again, Powell said, "You're back"; "I got the mike again," she replied. (Later, Burian, an aspiring journalist, told a reporter she asked personal questions because she figured other questions would just get canned answers. "I was interested in the person, Colin Powell, not in the politician," she said.)
Powell shocked the teenagers by telling then he gets up at 5 a.m. to go to work and keeps working till 7 or 8 p.m., carrying home "two bags of homework." He said he tries to keep his weekends to himself but early on Sundays finds himself taking calls from foreign counterparts who have already completed their days. "I follow the sun, all around the world, with my phone calls," he said.
He also loves nothing more than tinkering with the old cars he likes to repair,
"because unlike political problems, which sometimes are very difficult to solve, when my car doesn't start, I know what I have to do."
Powell said he faced racial discrimination growing up as the child of Jamaican immigrants. Since there were only two motels he knew of that allowed blacks as he drove from New York to Fort Benning, Ga., in the early 1960s, he said, he drove straight through.
"I knew as a young man what I could do or not do in certain parts of the country," he said.
When the Civil Rights Act was signed into law in July 1964, "the next day I went back downtown and went to a restaurant and got a hamburger. I thought it was a great achievement. If I had done it a week earlier they would have arrested me."
