COVID-19 Claims 84Years Old U.S. Former Secretary Of State, Gen. Powell
84 years General Colin Luther Powell, who was the first African American Secretary of State on Monday bowed to the cold hands of death arising from COVID-19 complications. His family said that he was fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005, National Security Adviser, former diplomat and a four-star General (rtd.).
His speech at the United Nations in 2003 helped pave the way for the United States to go to war in Iraq,
Powell’s family said in a statement that he was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Colin Luther Powell was born on April 5, 1937, in Harlem and reared in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. His parents, Luther Powell, a shipping-room foreman in Manhattan’s garment district, and mother, Maud Ariel McKoy, a seamstress, were immigrants from Jamaica.
Powell graduated from City College of New York before joining the Army through the Reserve Officer Training Corps program.
From a young second lieutenant commissioned in the dawn of a newly desegregated Army, Mr. Powell served two decorated combat tours in Vietnam and was later National Security Adviser to President Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War thereby helping to negotiate arms treaties and an era of cooperation with the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Powell was the architect of the invasion of Panama in 1989 and of the Persian Gulf war in 1991 that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait but left him in power in Iraq.
Along with then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Mr. Powell reshaped the American Cold War military that stood ready at the Iron Curtain for half a century. In doing so, he stamped the Powell Doctrine on military operations — armed with clear political objectives and public support, use decisive and overwhelming force to defeat enemy forces.
While briefing reporters at the Pentagon at the beginning of the gulf war, Mr. Powell succinctly summed up the military’s strategy to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army thus; “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 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 one of the most popular public figures in America.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Mr. Powell analyzed himself saying; “Powell is a problem-solver. He was taught as a soldier to solve problems. So, he has views, but he’s not an ideologue. He has passion but he’s not a fanatic. He’s first and foremost a problem-solver.”
Once retired, Mr. Powell, a lifelong independent while in uniform, was courted as a presidential contender by Republicans and Democrats, and became America’s most political general since Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote a best-selling memoir, “My American Journey,” and flirted with a run for the presidency before deciding in 1995 that campaigning for office wasn’t for him.
Powell returned to public service in 2001 as Secretary of State to President George W. Bush, whose father Mr. Powell had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs a decade earlier.
But in the Bush administration, Mr. Powell was the odd man out, fighting internally with Mr. Cheney, then vice president, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for the ear of President Bush and foreign policy dominance.
He left at the end of Mr. Bush’s first term under the cloud of an ever-worsening war in Iraq, and growing questions about whether he could have and should have done more to object to it.
He kept a lower profile for the next few years, but with just over two weeks left in the 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Powell, by then a declared Republican, gave a forceful endorsement to Senator Barack Obama, calling him a “transformational figure.”
