Military service (1939–1945) During World War II, he first tried to join the
United States Navy but was rejected because of poor eyesight, so he joined the
US Army Air Forces as an
Intelligence officer. After receiving his commission as a
first lieutenant in 1942, he completed training at bases near
Miami, Florida and
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was assigned to the
319th Bombardment Group, which moved to England later that year. He served in North Africa during
Operation Torch and was later assigned to the Headquarters of the Northwest African Air Forces. There, Powell served in Sicily during the
Allied invasion of Sicily. In August 1943, he was assigned to the Intelligence staff of the
Army Air Forces in
Washington, D.C. Slated for assignment as an instructor at the facility near Harrisburg, he worked instead on several special projects for the AAF headquarters until February 1944. He was then assigned to the Intelligence staff of the
Department of War and then the Intelligence staff of
United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe. While there Colonel Powell wrote in the aftermath of the 13–15 February 1945
Bombing of Dresden that "Personally, I consider this very fortunate indeed as the German people are being taught for the first time in modern history what it means to have war on their own soil." Powell was assigned to the
Ultra project, as one of the officers designated to monitor the use of intercepted
Axis communications. He worked in
England and in the
Mediterranean Theater and ensured that the use of Ultra information was in compliance with the
laws of war, and that the use of such information did not reveal the source, which would have alerted that the code had been broken. Powell advanced through the ranks to
colonel, and received the
Legion of Merit,
Bronze Star Medal, and French
Croix de Guerre with bronze palm. He was discharged in October 1945.
Legal career In 1941, Powell served as Chairman of the
American Bar Association's Young Lawyers Division. Powell was a
partner for more than a quarter of a century at Hunton, Williams, Gay, Powell and Gibson, a large
white shoe Virginia law firm, with its primary office in
Richmond, now known as
Hunton Andrews Kurth. Powell practiced primarily in the areas of
corporate law, especially in the fields of
business acquisitions,
securities regulation,
bankruptcy,
real estate and railroad litigation. From 1961 to 1962 Powell served as Chair of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Economics of Law Practice, which later evolved into the ABA Law Practice Division. During his tenure as chair of the committee,
The Lawyers Handbook was first published and distributed to all attorneys who joined the ABA that year. In its preface, Powell wrote, "The basic concept of freedom under law, which underlies our entire structure of government, can only be sustained by a strong and independent bar. It is plainly in the public interest that the economic health of the legal profession be safeguarded. One of the means toward this end is to improve the efficiency and productivity of lawyers." From 1964 to 1965 he was elected President of the ABA. Powell led the way in attempting to provide legal services to the poor, and he made a key decision to cooperate with the federal government's
Legal Services Corporation. Powell was also involved in the development of
Colonial Williamsburg, where he was both a trustee and general counsel. From 1964 until his court appointment in 1971 he was a board member of
Philip Morris and acted as a contact point for the tobacco industry with
Virginia Commonwealth University. Through his law firm, Powell represented the
Tobacco Institute and various tobacco companies in numerous cases.
Virginia government (1951–1970) Powell played an important role in local community affairs. From 1951 to 1961, he served on the
Richmond School Board and was its chairman from 1952 to 1961. Powell presided over the school board at a time when the Commonwealth of Virginia was locked in a campaign of defiance against the
Supreme Court's decision in
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which desegregated public schools. Powell's law firm, although not Powell himself, represented one of the defendant school districts in
Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which was consolidated later into
Brown. The Richmond School Board had no authority at the time to force integration, however, as control over attendance policies had been transferred to the state government. Powell, like most white Southern leaders of his day, did not speak out against the state's defiance, but he fostered close working relationships with many black leaders, such as
civil rights lawyer
Oliver Hill, some of whom offered key support for Powell's Supreme Court nomination. In 1990, Powell swore in Virginia's first black governor,
Douglas Wilder. From 1961 to 1969, Powell served on the
Virginia Board of Education; he was president from 1968 to 1969.
Powell Memorandum (1971) On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor
Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum for the chamber entitled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," an
anti-Communist and anti-
New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America. It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist
Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on
General Motors,
Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the
American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and a step toward
socialism.
CUNY professor
David Harvey and sociologist Thomas Volscho trace the rise of
neoliberalism in the US to this memo. Historian
Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms." Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program, including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books, papers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, and influencing public opinion. This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's court opinions, especially
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission relied on the same arguments raised in
Bellotti. Although written confidentially for Sydnor at the Chamber of Commerce, it was discovered by
Jack Anderson, a columnist with
The Washington Post, who reported on its content a year later, after Powell had joined the Supreme Court. Anderson alleged that Powell was trying to undermine the democratic system; however, in terms of business's view of itself in relation to government and public interest groups, the memo could be alternatively read to simply convey conventional thinking among businessmen at the time. The explicit goal of the memo was not to destroy democracy, though its emphasis on political institution-building as a concentration of big business power, particularly updating the Chamber's efforts to influence federal policy, has reportedly had anti-democratic effects. Here, it was a major force in motivating the Chamber and other groups to modernize their efforts to lobby the federal government. Following the memo's directives, conservative
foundations greatly increased, pouring money into
think-tanks. This rise of conservative lobbying led to the conservative intellectual movement and its increasing influence over mainstream political discourse, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, and due chiefly to the works of the
American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. During the
2024 presidential election season, the Powell memo was called out as the basis for the Heritage Foundation's audacious and wide-reaching
Project 2025 agenda for their hoped-for next Republican administration.
Supreme Court tenure (1972–1987) In 1969, Nixon asked him to join the Supreme Court following the resignation of
Abe Fortas, but Powell turned him down, and Judge
Harry Blackmun of the
Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals was appointed instead (following Senate rejections of Judges
Clement F. Haynsworth and
G. Harrold Carswell). In 1971, Nixon asked him again. Powell was unsure, but Nixon and his Attorney General,
John N. Mitchell, persuaded him that joining the Court was his duty to the nation. One of the primary concerns that Powell had was the effect leaving his law firm and joining the high court would have on his personal financial status, as he enjoyed a very lucrative private practice at his law firm. Another of Powell's major concerns was that as a corporate attorney, he would be unfamiliar with many of the issues that would come before the Supreme Court, which then heard very few corporate law cases. Powell feared that that fact would place him at a disadvantage and make it unlikely that he would be able to influence his colleagues. Nixon nominated Powell and
William Rehnquist to the Court on the same day, October 21, 1971. Powell's nomination generated no controversy and he took over the seat of Hugo Black after being confirmed by the
Senate 89–1 on December 6, 1971 (the lone "nay" came from
Oklahoma Democrat
Fred R. Harris). On the day of Powell's swearing-in, when Rehnquist's wife Nan asked Powell's wife Josephine Powell if this was the most exciting day of her life, Josephine said, "No, it is the worst day of my life. I am about to cry." Lewis Powell served from January 7, 1972, until his retirement on June 26, 1987. Powell voted with the 7–2 majority who legalized
abortion in the United States in
Roe v. Wade (1973). Powell's
pro-choice stance on abortion stemmed from an incident during his tenure at his Richmond law firm in which the girlfriend of one of Powell's office staff had bled to death from an illegal
self-induced abortion. Powell dissented in the 1972 case
Furman v. Georgia, striking down
capital punishment statutes, and was a key mover behind the Court's compromise opinion in
Gregg v. Georgia (1976), which allowed the return of capital punishment but only with strengthened procedural safeguards. In
Coker v. Georgia (1977), in which the Court held that the death penalty was an unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment for the rape of an adult woman, a convicted murderer escaped from prison and, in the course of committing an armed robbery and other offenses, raped an adult woman. The
State of Georgia sentenced the rapist to death. Justice Powell, acknowledging that the woman had been raped, expressed the view that "the victim [did not] sustain serious or lasting injury" and voted to set the death penalty aside. In that same case, Powell also wrote to rebuke the plurality's statement that "for the rape victim, life may not be nearly so happy as it was, but it is not over and normally is not beyond repair," instead stating that "some victims are so grievously injured physically or psychologically that life is beyond repair." Powell joined the majority in
Milliken v. Bradley (1974) which struck down a
school busing plan which was designed to racially integrate Detroit-area public school districts across district lines. Powell dissented in
Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (1977), which held that advertising by lawyers was protected free speech under the First Amendment. He wrote that because lawyers offer professional services rather than standardized products, lawyer advertising was inherently misleading and had the opportunity to deceive the public. Powell's plurality opinion in
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), not joined in full by any single other justice, represented a compromise between the opinions of Justice
William J. Brennan, who, joined by three other progressive justices, would have upheld affirmative action programs under a lenient judicial test, and the opinion of
John Paul Stevens, joined by three other justices, who would have struck down the university's use of racial quotas at issue in the case under the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. Powell's opinion striking down the law urged "
strict scrutiny" to be applied to affirmative action programs but suggested that some affirmative action programs might pass Constitutional muster. Powell wrote the majority opinion in
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), which overturned a Massachusetts law restricting corporate contributions to referendum campaigns not directly related to their business. In spite of supporting legal abortion, Powell ruled with the majority in
Harris v. McRae (1980), which held that states participating in
Medicaid are not required to fund medically necessary abortions for which federal reimbursement was not available after the
Hyde Amendment restricted the use of federal funds for abortion. The Court also held that the funding restrictions of the Hyde Amendment did not violate the
Fifth Amendment or the
Establishment Clause of the
First Amendment. In the controversial 1980 case
Snepp v. U.S., the Court issued a
per curiam opinion upholding the lower court's imposition of a
constructive trust upon former CIA agent Frank Snepp and its requirement for preclearance of all his published writings with the CIA for the rest of his life. In 1997, Snepp gained access to the files of Justices
Thurgood Marshall (who had already died) and William J. Brennan Jr. (who voluntarily granted Snepp access) and confirmed his suspicion that Powell had been the author of the
per curiam opinion. Snepp later pointed out that Powell had misstated the factual record and had not reviewed the actual case file (Powell was in the habit of writing opinions based on the briefs alone) and that the only justice who even looked at the case file was John Paul Stevens, who relied upon it in composing his dissent. From his days in counterintelligence during World War II, Powell believed in the need for government secrecy and urged the same position on his colleagues during the Court's consideration of 1974's
United States v. Nixon. Powell joined the 5–4 majority opinion in the 1982 case
Plyler v. Doe holding that a Texas law forbidding illegal immigrant children from public education was unconstitutional. Powell was the deciding vote in the 1986 case
Bowers v. Hardwick, in which the Court upheld Georgia's
sodomy laws. He was reportedly conflicted over how to vote. Conservative clerk
Michael W. Mosman advised him to uphold the ban, and Powell, who believed he had never met a gay person while not realizing that one of his own clerks was a closeted gay man, voted to uphold Georgia's sodomy law. However, he expressed concern in a concurrence at the length of the prison terms prescribed by the law, criticizing them as excessive. The Court would later expressly overrule
Bowers in the 2003 case
Lawrence v. Texas. In 1990, after his retirement from the Court, Powell said "I think I made a mistake in the Hardwick case," marking one of the few times a justice has expressed regret for one of his previous rulings. Scholars would later conclude that Powell unknowingly hired more gay clerks than any other Justice.
Paul M. Smith, the gay attorney who successfully argued in favor of overturning
Bowers in
Lawrence, was a clerk for Justice Powell in 1980–81. Powell also expressed post-retirement regret over his majority opinion in
McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), where he voted to uphold the death penalty against a study that demonstrated that, except as punishment for the most violent of crimes, murderers sentenced for killing white victims were up to forty times more likely to receive the death penalty than people who killed black victims. In an interview with his biographer
John Calvin Jeffries, he stated that he no longer supported the death penalty. ==Retirement and death==