Colin Powell, Former Joint Chiefs Chairman, Has Died At Age 84

ACROSS AMERICA — Colin Powell, the first Black U.S. secretary of state and and Joint Chiefs chairman, has died of complications of COVID-19, his family said Monday on social media. The 84-year-old died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Powell was fully vaccinated, the family said.

Flags were lowered to half-staff at government buildings, including the White House, Pentagon and State Department. At the White House, President Joe Biden said Powell "embodied the highest ideals of both warrior and diplomat."

"He was committed to our nation’s strength and security above all," Biden said. "Having fought in wars, he understood better than anyone that military might alone was not enough to maintain our peace and prosperity. From his front-seat view of history, advising presidents and shaping our nation’s policies, Colin led with his personal commitment to the democratic values that make our country strong.”

Powell helped shape American foreign policy through several administrations, serving Republican and Democratic presidents through war and peacetime during the last years of the 20th century and into the early 21st.

"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 in a statement. "We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American."

The family did not say if Powell had any underlying illnesses, but longtime Powell aide Peggy Cifrino said he had been treated over the past few years for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.
Multiple myeloma impairs the body's ability to fight infection, and studies have shown that those cancer patients don't get as much protection from the COVID-19 vaccines as healthier people.

• Related: 11 Photos: Remembering Gen. Colin Powell

Former President George W. Bush said he and former first lady Laura Bush were “deeply saddened” by Powell's death, The Associated Press reported.

“He was a great public servant” and “widely respected at home and abroad,” Bush said. "And most important, Colin was a family man and a friend. Laura and I send Alma and their children our sincere condolences as they remember the life of a great man.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Monday on CNN "the world lost one of the greatest leaders that we have ever witnessed.

"I feel as if I have a hole in my heart just learning of this just recently," he said. "First African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs, first African American secretary of State, a man who was respected around the globe. Quite frankly, it is not possible to replace Colin Powell. We will miss him. Again, my thoughts and prayers go out to the family, and we're deeply, deeply saddened to learn of this."

Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, said in a statement that Powell "lived a life of honor and integrity" as "a four-star general, the first Black US Secretary of State, and an NAACP Spingarn Medal recipient."

The Congressional Black Caucus said Powell’s “legacy of valor, and integrity will resonate for generations to come.”

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair described Powell as "a towering figure in American military and political leadership, a hugely likable and warm personality and a great companion, with a lovely and self-deprecating sense of humour."

"He was wonderful to work with, he inspired loyalty and respect, and was one of those leaders who always treated those under them with kindness and concern," Blair said. "His life stands as a testament not only to dedicated public service but also a strong belief in willingness to work across partisan division in the interests of his country."

Powell was a trailblazing professional soldier whose distinguished career began in the combat fields in Vietnam. He joined the Army and in 1962 was one of more than 16,000 military advisers sent to South Vietnam by President John F. Kennedy.

A series of promotions led to the Pentagon and assignment as a military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who became his unofficial sponsor. He later became commander of the Army's 5th Corps in Germany and later was national security assistant to President Ronald Reagan. Toward the end of Reagan's presidency, he became the first Black national security adviser.

He rose to the rank of four-star general and, in 1989, became the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and its youngest. In that role, he oversaw the U.S. invasion of Panama and later the U.S. invasion of Kuwait to oust the Iraqi army in 1991.

In 2001, when he was confirmed in the Senate as Bush's secretary of state, Powell was the highest-ranking Black public official in the country.

Powell was the first American official to publicly lay the blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. He made a lightning trip to Pakistan in October 2001 to demand that then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf cooperate with the United States in going after the Afghanistan-based group, which also had a presence in Pakistan, where bin Laden was later killed.

But his reputation suffered a painful setback when, in 2003, Powell went before the U.N. Security Council and made the case for U.S. war against Iraq. He cited information — later acknowledged to be faulty — claiming Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed away weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s claims that it had not done so represented “a web of lies,” he told the world body.

Powell maintained, in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press, that on balance, the United States succeeded in Iraq.

"I think we had a lot of successes," Powell said. "Iraq's terrible dictator is gone." Saddam was captured by U.S. forces while hiding out in northern Iraq in December 2003 and later executed by the Iraqi government. But the insurgency grew, and the war dragged on far longer than had been foreseen. Obama pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, but he sent advisers back in 2014 after the Islamic State group swept into the country from Syria and captured large swaths of Iraqi territory.

Powell became disillusioned with the Republican Party as its ideology shifted further right, and he used his stature as one of the most prominent and successful Black Americans to help elect Barack Obama to the White House in 2008.

He emerged as a vocal Donald Trump critic in recent years, describing Trump as "a national disgrace" who should have been removed from office through impeachment. Following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, Powell said he no longer considered himself a Republican.

Powell rose from a childhood in a fraying New York neighborhood to become the nation's chief diplomat. "Mine is the story of a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means who was raised in the South Bronx," he wrote in his 1995 autobiography "My American Journey."

At City College, Powell discovered the ROTC. When he put on his first uniform, "I liked what I saw," he wrote.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.