WASHINGTON (Reuters) – General Colin Powell, a former U.S. secretary of state and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, 84, died of complications from COVID-19 on Monday, according to his Facebook page. He was 84.
Powell was one of America’s foremost Black figures for decades. He was named to senior posts by three Republican presidents and reached the top of the U.S. military as it was regaining its vigor after the trauma of the Vietnam War.
Powell, who was wounded in Vietnam, served as U.S. national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan from 1987 to 1989. As a four-star Army general, he was chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War in which U.S.-led forces expelled Iraqi troops from neighboring Kuwait.
Powell, a moderate Republican and a pragmatist, considered a bid to become the first Black president in 1996 but his wife Alma’s worries about his safety helped him decide otherwise. In 2008, he broke with his party to endorse Democrat Barack Obama, who became the first Black person elected to the White House.
Powell will forever be associated with his controversial presentation on Feb. 5, 2003, to the U.N. Security Council, making President George W. Bush’s case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein constituted an imminent danger to the world because of its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
He admitted later that the presentation was rife with inaccuracies and twisted intelligence provided by others in the Bush administration and represented “a blot” that will “always be a part of my record”.
Bush had picked Powell, the top U.S. military officer during his father’s presidency, as secretary of state in 2001.
Powell endured four stormy years as the top U.S. diplomat, often outmaneuvered by Vice President Dick Cheney – with whom he had served closely under the first President Bush – and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
One of his chief military accomplishments was his development of the “Powell Doctrine” on the use of U.S. force, which arose out of the ambiguous objectives and erratic troop build-up of the Vietnam War era.
The doctrine states: war should be a last resort; force, when used, should be overwhelming; there must be strong public support for it and a clear exit strategy.
Powell was born in New York City on April 5, 1937, and raised in the South Bronx neighborhood, the son of a shipping clerk and a seamstress from Jamaica who arrived in America in 1920 aboard a “banana boat” – a United Fruit Company steamer.
Powell’s own ticket to success was the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), a program for university students that engaged his energies when he was, by his own admission, an otherwise uninspired student at the City College of New York.
He served 35 years in the Army, including two combat tours in Vietnam and postings in West Germany and South Korea. In Vietnam, he was wounded by a “Punji stick” booby trap near Vietnam’s border with Laos and injured in a helicopter crash.
He earned a White House fellowship while in the Army during Richard Nixon’s presidency and won the respect of officials who later would serve in senior posts under Reagan. He served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.
Powell became a celebrity during the 1991 Gulf War with crisp televised briefings, at one point saying of Iraq’s army: “First we’re going to cut it off, then we’re going to kill it.”
After deciding not to run for president in 1996, Powell gave a speech at that year’s Republican convention endorsing Bob Dole against Democrat Bill Clinton, who was president during Powell’s final months as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Powell married his wife Alma in 1962. They had three children, including Michael Powell, who served as U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman under George W. Bush.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Doina Chiacu)
