WASHINGTON — Colin Powell has fired back at Dick
Cheney for what the former secretary of state calls “cheap shots”
directed at him and other members of the Bush administration in the
former vice president’s new book.
“In My Time: A
Personal and Political Memoir,” gives Cheney’s account of the eight-year
administration of President George W. Bush. Powell, a retired four-star
Army general, served as Bush’s secretary of state until January 2005.
Powell
complained Sunday to Bob Schieffer, host of CBS’ “Face the Nation,”
that in the book, Cheney takes credit for Powell’s resignation and
suggests that Powell wasn’t supportive of Bush’s positions.
“Well,
who went to the United Nations and, regrettably, with a lot of false
information?” Powell asked, referring to his 2003 visit to the U.N.
Security Council in which famously said there was “no doubt” that
then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was working to build nuclear weapons.
“It was me. That wasn’t Mr. Cheney.”
Powell also
blasted Cheney’s account of the Valerie Plame affair, in which covert
CIA operative Plame’s name was leaked to the media after her husband,
Joe Wilson, publicly questioned the rationale for going to war with
Iraq.
Cheney “tries to lay it all off on Mr. Rich Armitage and the State Department and me,” Powell said.
Cheney
and Powell may have served in the same administration, but their
relationship has soured over the years. The two have been trading jabs
on the Sunday talk shows for some time.
“The new
president is going to have to fix the reputation that we’ve left with
the rest of the world,” Powell said in October 2008 on NBC’s “Meet the
Press” when he was asked to reflect on having once declared that Cheney
was “one of the most distinguished and dedicated public servants this
nation has ever had.”
“I didn’t know he was still a Republican,” Cheney said of Powell during a May 2009 appearance on “Face the Nation.”
Cheney
told NBC News last week that there will be “heads exploding all over
Washington” when his tell-all memoir hits stores Tuesday.
“That’s
quite a visual,” Powell said in the Sunday interview with Schieffer.
“And in fact, it’s the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a
gossip columnist or the kind of headline you might see one of the
supermarket tabloids write. It’s not the kind of headline I would have
expected to come from a former vice president of the United States of
America.”
Powell also criticized Cheney for using
“an almost condescending tone” in the book when he described Condoleezza
Rice as “tearful.” Rice succeeded Powell as secretary of state.
“There’s
nothing wrong with saying you disagree, but it’s not necessary to take
these kinds of barbs and then try to pump a book up by saying heads will
be exploding,” Powell said. “I think it’s a bit too far. I think Dick
overshot the runway with that kind of comment.”
In the NBC interview, Cheney defended the description.
“She
was tearful,” he told NBC’s Jamie Gangel. “That’s what I wrote. If I
wanted to say she was crying, I would have said she was crying. … It is
an accurate description of what happened and what I saw.”
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©2011
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