Colin Powell, the retired Army general and former secretary of state who died on Monday, Oct. 18, was a trailblazing soldier and statesman.
Powell died of complications from COVID-19 at age 84. He had been vaccinated, but his family said his immune system had been compromised by multiple myeloma, a blood cancer for which he had been undergoing treatment.
The retired general was a barriers breaker. He was the first Black person to serve as U.S. secretary of state and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His rise to prominence as a soldier and a diplomat was a historic example to Blacks and other minorities.
Powell joined President George W. Bush’s administration in 2001 as secretary of state. His tenure was marred by his February 2003 U.N. address in which he cited faulty information to claim that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons never materialized, and though the Iraqi leader was removed, the war devolved into years of military and humanitarian losses.
Powell’s remarkable rise from humble beginnings to the pinnacles of power is an American success story.
“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,” Powell wrote in his 1995 autobiography, “My American Journey.”
The child of Jamaican immigrants, his path toward the military began at City College, where he discovered the ROTC. When he put on his first uniform, he wrote, “I liked what I saw.”
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. He later became commander of the Army’s 5th Corps in Germany and was national security assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He spent 35 years in uniform.
During his term as Joint Chiefs chairman, which started in 1989, his approach to war became known as the Powell Doctrine, which held that the United States should only commit forces in a conflict if it has clear and achievable objectives with public support, sufficient firepower and a strategy for ending the war.
Powell considered running for president in 1996 but he ultimately decided against it. He described himself as “a Republican of a more moderate mold.”
Despite his GOP affiliation, Powell put country before party when he announced his support for Democrat Joe Biden over Republican President Donald Trump in the 2020 race. Powell bravely urged the Party of Lincoln not to become the Party of Trump.
Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune
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