For Harvard, Gen. Colin Luther Powell, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has come to personify the struggle over gays in the military, a struggle which has been played out at the national level since the inauguration of President Clinton.

Since the announcement of Powell as Commencement speaker, it sometimes has seemed on campus as though Powell's entire person and career can be summed up by one statement: He does not believe that gays and lesbians should be in the military.

Powell, however, is more than simply a supporter of the ban. Long before the issue grabbed national headlines, when Clinton was still just an Arkansas politician, Powell was a presence in the upper echelons of government. Whatever his supporters and opponents may argue over, all agree that when it comes to national security policy, Powell is a force to be reckoned with.

Powell's story is one that has been retold many times. Born in Harlem on April 5, 1937, he grew up in the South Bronx and graduated from the City College of New York in 1958. Afterwards, he became a second lieutenant in the Army through ROTC.

Powell came into the tradition-ruled armed forces without a West Point ring and as a Black man just 10 years after the military was integrated by executive order.

It was not an easy time for Powell, according to former Secretary of Defense Casper W. Weinberger '36 who worked with Powell for several years.

"When he was over in Vietnam, his wife and family stayed behind at home in Alabama and were treated miserably, as was common at the time," Weinberger says. "He never let it affect what he was doing or how he felt about America."

While Powell has publicly discussed the hardships of racism at times, says Weinberger, it is not a subject that dominates his interaction with others. "He simply rises above such ignorant people and goes about his business," says Weinberger. "He is not a man consumed with bitterness."

If anything, says Weinberger, Powell is consumed with a desire to do his job in the best way he can--a desire which led him from the fields of Vietnam to the Office of Management and Budget in 1972, where he served for a year as a White House fellow, After returning to active military service, he went back and forth between active military duty and government policymaking positions until 1989, when he succeeded Admiral William J. Crowe as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Before long, Powell became well-known to the public for his role in orchestrating the military movements of the U.S.-led coalition that drove Iraq out of Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm.

But ironically, despite the cries of protesters who have called him "bloodthirsty" and "warmongering," Powell was reluctant to engage in military warfare with Iraq, according to Bob Woodward's book The Commanders.

His opposition, however, was not based on the moral questions that many anti-war activists claimed for their motivations. Rather, he was moved by the same characteristics that have shaped his military and government style--caution and success.

"He was always extremely well-prepared--he knew more about everything than anybody else," Weinberger says. "Everything he did, he did extremely well. In everything he did, he succeeded."

It was a lesson first taught to Powell in the jungles of Vietnam in the 1960s, when the results of poor military planning were evident.

"[It was a] war where the American military felt let down by the political leadership," says Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, director of the National Security Program and adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. "Colin Powell, like most military men of the time, took the position of, 'Never again."

More than a decade after Powell left Vietnam, Weinberger made a speech laying out certain tests for the use of military force abroad--a policy which Powell helped formulate, according to Trainor.