Wednesday, October 20, 2021
The Death of Colin Powell
Gen. Colin Powell died this week at age 84. I didn't know him, but his son Michael was in my. class and president of my fraternity at William and Mary, so I glimpsed him a few times. He was a compelling and historic figure.
The obituaries (such as this one in the Times) note the trajectory of his life: Born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants and raised in the South Bronx, he went to the City College of New York as a ROTC kid. He served two tours of Vietnam, and during that second tour he saved three men from a wrecked and burning helicopter. He returned from the war, got an MBA from George Washington, and served as a White House Fellow in the Nixon Administration as a part of his continuing military career. By the early 1980's he became the military assistant to Caspar Weinberger, who was the Secretary of Defense. By the end of the Reagan Administration, he had ascended to a role as National Security Advisor.
His last military assignment, from 1989-1993 (through the Bush and Clinton administrations) was as Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most powerful position in the US military. In that role he oversaw the Persian Gulf War in 1991, which removed Iraq from Kuwait.
Later, under George W. Bush, he served as the first Black Secretary of State, and it was in that role that he made his ill-advised speech at the UN, where he falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
His political life was hindered by devotion to a Republican Party that by the 2010s had left behind some of the principles he most deeply believed in. One of those principles was civility in discourse.
Here, in turn, was former President Donald Trump's reflection upon hearing of the death of Gen. Powell:
