Colin Powell’s Rule

A confession. Every morning we sat together, many afternoons – on US soil and elsewhere. He had been Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor, 35 years in the US Army, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and was now Secretary of State. Colin Powell expected results from me: Train the Iraqi, Afghan, Kosovar, and Colombian police, stop drug traffickers, run the department’s air wing, and get it done.

Together, we did all that. In the process, he taught. He did not teach politics or share his views there. He did not indulge in carping, that common, easy, but lazy act of just criticizing others, finding fault, thinking we know what ails them, can assess their ghosts and demons, and do better.

That was not him, not Colin Powell. To him, that wasted time. That attitude also conflicted with his view that we each live but one life, our own. We are ultimately able to control just one person, the one in the mirror every morning. That is where solutions start, holding that person accountable.

 No, the lessons Colin Powell taught daily were more personal, lasting, even timeless. By the time we worked together, he had lived long. He knew of what he spoke. He took nothing personally. Harsh words  – and we got them daily – were water off a duck’s back. He would seek only the truth within them, understand the problem, and solve it.  Then he would move on.

Hundreds of lessons came that way, but one sticks out, as we wrestle with gushing information and misinformation. We see – we all know it – an acrid mix each day of false claims, rank prejudice, things people refuse to believe or unlearn, signs of widespread distrust in everything, frustration with government, ignorance, and criticism – all pretending to be incontrovertible fact.

We hear people say the craziest things, begin to hear them closer to home, and find it hard to respond to them because the assumptions or willing acceptance by others of untruths as truth is arresting.

But as new as all this seems, it is not new. Societies go through phases, more and less centered and cohesive, more and less uneasy, more and less sure of things –  that the Earth is flat then round, that wars end quickly then never do, that we can trust government, and can never trust it.

In the professional setting, Powell had a system for getting good information. While hard to implement across society, it is worth knowing, as it may help in daily interactions. He wrote words that hung on the wall in our US Navy Intelligence spaces, long before I came to work directly for him.

When getting information from his military intelligence team, he had four rules: (1) Tell me what you know, (2) Tell me what you do not know, (3) Tell me what you think, and (4) know the difference between what you know, don’t know, and think.

Unpacking this, you can see what he was after. He would say, “What you know” means you are being honest with yourself and are relatively sure of this. You questioned it objectively, checked it with multiple credible sources, are not circular reporting. If not certain, you are highly confident.

Equally important was knowing – for him and for us – all the things that, being honest with ourselves, we really did not know, had not been able to confirm, might be wrong about, could not say we know. There is, he would say, nothing worse than acting on wrong information while thinking it is right.

In the “what you think” category, we saw his openness to our guesses, hunches, surmises, and inferences – made with very different life experiences. He wanted us to put those before him. This was him asking our best assessment of what the combination of knowing and unknowing meant.

He would listen, and he might accept or reject it, would often ask us why, cross-examine us, make us defend the position, but if he then made a decision on our guess, that was on him, not on us. On the other hand, if we offered something as knowledge and were wrong, that was on us.

So, as we go about our daily lives now, the thought that resonates is this: We are each responsible for what we claim we know, for what we fail to admit we do not know, and for our guesses or inferences. We owe it to ourselves, even as I owed it to him, to distinguish between the three: knowledge, unknowing, and what we think. That is how we keep that person in the mirror honest.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!