Colin Powell Dead at 84
Former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff Colin Powell has died at the age of 84 from complications of Covid-19.
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.
Powell is survived by his wife, Alma Vivian (Johnson) Powell, whom he married in 1962, as well as three children.
Secretary Powell served his country in many roles with honor and distinction. The one stain – which he acknowledged often afterwards – was his full throated defense of a weak contrived “intelligence” brief on WMDs before we invaded Iraq. I still don’t know if he ever really recovered in public perception, but he tried to make it right often in the after years. And his autobiography is still a good read.
May he rest in peace.Report
That’s one really big stain. And it’s not the only one. His military career was covered in stains.
May he spend a separate eternity in hell for each of the millions of lives his lies ended or irreversibly altered.Report
I always think of that line from Apocalypse Now: “Convicted of murder…sh!t, that’s like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”Report
He always seemed like the kind of guy who comes off well in Woodward’s books, where a guy like Schwarzkopf ends up forgotten. I’d say the real blot on his record was the way he played the media game. But for his service, he deserves honor. RIP.Report
Though not going to express myself as bluntly as Chris did above, I, too, am very unwilling to give Powell anything near a pass for his “stain”.
When on February 5, 2003 Colin Powell addressed the United Nations, asserting that there was “no doubt in my mind” that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons, he was either willingly and knowingly giving his full support to what he should know it was, charitably, a massive exaggeration of the information available, or, less charitably, a blatant lie.
And if he didn’t know it, either he was the victim of a convoluted plan of the White House to dupe him into standing in front of the UN, to cravenly exploit the respect he commanded those days, or he, lazily or cowardly, decided he didn’t really want to ask questions and, as they say today, do his own research. If the former, his silence after finding out he had been tricked and used, instead of denouncing the lies and those that lied to him and the world, speaks volumes about him, . If the latter, well, really lazy and coward before the fact is hardly better than lazy and coward after the fact.
So Chris is right that Colin Powell has a lot of Iraqi ,and American, and coalition, blood in his hands, and whatever lame attempts he made afterwards to claim that he was not really responsible for his words did not impress meReport
I must, reluctantly, agree with Chris and J_A. One’s reputation doesn’t easily recover from midwifing easily the most cataclysmic foreign policy decision for the US since ‘Nam.
And I say that with a certain trembling because I can’t honestly say for certain that if I’d been old enough and on the internet enough in the early aughts to write down my opinion that I wouldn’t have supported the Iraq invasion. I loathed Bush W so I’d like to think I’d have opposed it but I don’t remember feeling very exercised in opposition to it and I certainly wasn’t opposed to Afghanistan before of Libya afterwards and both those also ended up being in error.Report
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One can and should hope, although it hardly sounds like the most interesting table.Report
From Public Enemy:
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Colin Powell became a brigadier because the military realized it didn’t have nearly enough black generals, searched for colonels who had been overlooked, found him, and promoted him. Powell, who’d benefited from Affirmative Action, was a strong proponent of it, as unpopular as that was in GOP circles.
So, say what you will about him, he was no Clarence Thomas.Report