As secretary of state, when he was caught in policy struggles with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, his smile often looked tense, pasted on his face. But when he smiles now, his eyes smile as well, and he is clearly more relaxed, as though he realizes that history is proving him right about the bureaucratic battles he lost. When I came to visit him on a quiet Friday afternoon earlier this summer, he was more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him. He exudes the genial courtesy of someone who is comfortable in his own skin, and he has none of the insecurity that in Washington often gets displayed as assertions of ego. He settled in on a couch, produced a couple of cans of Diet Coke, and started talking about his life, the changes he’s seen in America, and the current situation in Iraq.

*****

In reflecting on the changes in America that have occurred in your lifetime, how important to you and the nation was President Truman’s executive order integrating the armed services in 1948?
Black people had served for 300 years, going back to the early Massachusetts militia. They had served the nation even when the nation had not served them. They chose a way to show their commitment to the nation, and that was to shed the same red blood that their white fellow citizens had shed. They did it time after time, through every one of our wars. And they did it knowing that while in the military, they would be discriminated against.

Truman changed that by executive order, because he knew that Congress would not approve it. When I came along in 1958, I hit the right timing. The army was leading the nation in integration. I was from a diverse neighborhood where everybody was a minority, and so I didn’t feel like a minority. All of us were immigrant-family kids from the West Indies or Eastern Europe or the South or Puerto Rico. And we called each other by our minority names, which you can’t use anymore. So when I entered the army, which then had essentially a white Episcopalian power structure, I had an advantage over some of the blacks who came out of the South. These were young men who had never been around the white power structure except to say “yes, suh.” And they were suddenly in an integrated environment. For them, the cultural change and the power-relationship change was shocking. They had never been to a lunchroom counter or a workplace or a school that was not segregated. They had been raised in an environment where white was power and black was not. It was a lot harder for them, yet many prevailed. I had the right mixture of diversity and education to enter a system that now said, You can go wherever you want inside the army as long as you can perform.