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You are here: Home / Featured / Colin Powell, first Black US secretary of state, national security shaper, dies of Covid-19 complications while battling cancer (ROUNDUP-UPATED)

Colin Powell, first Black US secretary of state, national security shaper, dies of Covid-19 complications while battling cancer (ROUNDUP-UPATED)

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General Colin L. Powell, the first black U.S. Secretary of State, and a major foreign policy national security shaper, has died of Covid-19 complications while battling cancer. His death unleashed a sea of bipartisan tributes. However, like most events in the early 21st century, it immediately became a kind of political football as some immediatedly noted that he had died after being vaccinated without mentioning his illness. This caused some news outlets to later mention his weakened immunity in their news headlines.

CNN:

Colin Powell, the first Black US secretary of state whose leadership in several Republican administrations helped shape American foreign policy in the last years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, has died from complications from Covid-19, his family said on Facebook. He was 84.

“General Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, passed away this morning due to complications from Covid 19,” the Powell family wrote on Facebook, noting he was fully vaccinated.

A source familiar with the matter said Powell had multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells that suppresses the body’s immune response. Even if fully vaccinated against Covid-19, those who are immunocompromised are at greater risk from the virus.

“We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” the family said.

Powell was a distinguished and trailblazing professional soldier whose career took him from combat duty in Vietnam to becoming the first Black national security adviser during the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the youngest and first African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. His national popularity soared in the aftermath of the US-led coalition victory during the Gulf War, and for a time in the mid-90s, he was considered a leading contender to become the first Black President of the United States. But his reputation would be forever stained when, as George W. Bush’s first secretary of state, he pushed faulty intelligence before the United Nations to advocate for the Iraq War, which he would later call a “blot” on his record.

Bush said in a statement Monday that Powell was “a great public servant” who was “such a favorite of Presidents that he earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom — twice. He was highly respected at home and abroad. And most important, Colin was a family man and a friend.”

Though Powell never mounted a White House bid, when he was sworn in as Bush’s secretary of state in 2001, he became the highest-ranking Black public official to date in the country, standing fourth in the presidential line of succession.

“I think it shows to the world what is possible in this country,” Powell said of his history-making nomination during his Senate confirmation hearing. “It shows to the world that: Follow our model, and over a period of time from our beginning, if you believe in the values that espouse, you can see things as miraculous as me sitting before you to receive your approval.”

Later in his public life, Powell would grow disillusioned with the Republican Party’s rightward lurch and would use his political capital to help elect Democrats to the White House, most notably Barack Obama, the first Black president whom Powell endorsed in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign.

The announcement was seen as a significant boost for Obama’s candidacy due to Powell’s widespread popular appeal and stature as one of the most prominent and successful Black Americans in public life.

New York Times:

Colin L. Powell, who in four decades of public life served as the nation’s top soldier, diplomat and national security adviser, and whose speech at the United Nations in 2003 helped pave the way for the United States to go to war in Iraq, died on Monday. He was 84.

The cause was complications of Covid-19, his family said in a statement, adding that he had been vaccinated and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Md., where he died. Mr. Powell had undergone treatment for multiple myeloma, which compromised his immune system, a spokeswoman said. She said he was due to receive a booster shot for his vaccine last week but could not because he had fallen ill.

Mr. Powell was a pathbreaker, serving as the country’s first Black national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state. Beginning with his 35 years in the Army, Mr. Powell was emblematic of the ability of minorities to use the military as a ladder of opportunity.

His was a classic American success story. Born in Harlem of Jamaican parents, he grew up in the South Bronx and graduated from City College of New York, joining the Army through the R.O.T.C. Starting as a young second lieutenant commissioned in the dawn of a newly desegregated Army, Mr. Powell served two decorated combat tours in Vietnam. He was later national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War, helping to negotiate arms treaties and an era of cooperation with the Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mr. Powell was the architect of the invasion of Panama in 1989 and of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, which ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait but left him in power in Iraq. Along with Dick Cheney, the defense secretary at the time, Mr. Powell reshaped the American Cold War military that had stood ready at the Iron Curtain for half a century. In doing so he stamped the Powell Doctrine on military operations: Identify clear political objectives, gain public support and use decisive and overwhelming force to defeat enemy forces.

When briefing reporters at the Pentagon at the beginning of the gulf war, Mr. Powell summed up the military’s approach: “Our strategy in going after this army is very simple,” he said. “First, we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.”

It was a concept that seemed less well-suited to the messy conflicts in the Balkans that came later in the 1990s and in combating terrorism in a world transformed after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

By the time he retired from the military in 1993, Mr. Powell was the most popular public figure in America, owing to his straightforwardness, his leadership qualities and his ability to speak in blunt tones that Americans appreciated.

CBS News’ John Dickerson discusses Powell’s legacy:

NBC News:

CNN:

BBC:

William Kristol, in a piece in The Bulkwark, begins with this:

Colin Powell was an impressive man. In private, as in public, he had a presence that was a bit intimidating, a bearing that set him a bit apart from most of the men and women one encounters in important positions in Washington.

Some of this came from his long years of distinguished service in the military. But some of it, too, came from a kind of inner strength and poise too rarely seen in recent years at the higher levels of American life.

It’s not that Colin Powell wasn’t at times thin-skinned. It’s not that he didn’t care about his press notices. It’s not that he wasn’t as capable of bureaucratic maneuvering as the best of them.

But he was more than all of those things, and more than an American success story or a four-star general officer or a well-spoken secretary of State. He was a man, whatever his faults and limitations, whom one felt one should look up to.

And so I did.

And he ends with this:

Colin Powell called his autobiography My American Journey. His life’s journey exemplifies much that has been admirable about the United States of America. His fellow Americans are in his debt, and honor his memory.

Powell was a favorite of independents and moderates. In my own case, I had been a conservative, liberal, Democrat and Republican but by 2000 was an independent voter. I always told people that I was where Powell was politically: to the point where when I’d talk politics and within weeks Powell would say something almost in the exact words as mine. Powell was also a favorite as a motivational speaker. Above all, he had dignity, a quality sorely missing in some political leaders. As Kristol noted, he was someone to look up to.

UPDATE:
The Daily Beast: Anti-Vaxxers Are Already Trying to Weaponize Powell’s Death

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