Powell, former top diplomat, U.S. military leader, dies at 84

Phillip Bradley, with the National Park Service, lowers American flags around the Washington Monument to half-staff in honor of Colin Powell, former Joint Chiefs chairman and secretary of state.  Powell has died from COVID-19 complications. In an announcement on social media Monday, the family said Powell had been fully vaccinated. He had also been treated over the past few years for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. He was 84. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Phillip Bradley, with the National Park Service, lowers American flags around the Washington Monument to half-staff in honor of Colin Powell, former Joint Chiefs chairman and secretary of state. Powell has died from COVID-19 complications. In an announcement on social media Monday, the family said Powell had been fully vaccinated. He had also been treated over the past few years for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. He was 84. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

WASHINGTON -- Colin Powell, the trailblazing soldier and diplomat who served Republican and Democratic presidents, died Monday of covid-19 complications. He was 84.

A veteran of the Vietnam War, Powell spent 35 years in the Army and rose to the rank of four-star general before becoming the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His oversight of the U.S. invasion of Kuwait to oust the Iraqi army in 1991 made him a household name, prompting speculation for nearly a decade that he might run for president, a course he ultimately decided against.

Powell instead joined George W. Bush's administration in 2001 as secretary of state, the first Black person to represent the U.S. government in that position on the world stage. His tenure, however, was marred by his 2003 address to the U.N. Security Council in which he claimed that 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.

In announcing Powell's death, his family said he had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Peggy Cifrino, Powell's longtime aide, said he had also been treated over the past few years for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that impairs the body's ability to fight infection. Studies have shown that those cancer patients don't get as much protection from the covid-19 vaccines as healthier people.

President Joe Biden said Powell "embodied the highest ideals of both warrior and diplomat."

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Powell's time as secretary of state was largely defined by the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He was the first American official to publicly blame Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. He made a lightning trip to Pakistan to demand that then-President Pervez Musharraf cooperate with the United States in going after the Afghanistan-based group, which also had a presence in Pakistan, where bin Laden was later killed.

But as Washington's push for war in Iraq deepened, Powell sometimes found himself at odds with other key figures in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld also died this year.

Powell's State Department was dubious of the military and intelligence communities' conviction that Saddam possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction. But he presented the administration's case that Saddam posed a major regional and global threat in a strong speech to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. The next month, Bush gave the go-ahead for the invasion.

The U.N. speech, replete with Powell's display of a vial of what he said could have been a biological weapon, was seen as a low point in his career, although he had removed some elements from the remarks that he deemed to have been based on poor intelligence assessments.

2012 INTERVIEW

The U.S. overthrow of Saddam ended the rule of a brutal dictator. But the power vacuum and lawlessness that followed unleashed years of sectarian fighting and chaos that killed countless Iraqi civilians, sparked a lengthy insurgency and unintentionally tilted the balance of power in the Middle East toward a U.S. rival, Iran. No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

Still, Powell maintained in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press that on balance, the U.S. succeeded in Iraq.

"I think we had a lot of successes," he said. "Iraq's terrible dictator is gone."

Bush said Monday that he and former first lady Laura Bush were "deeply saddened" by Powell's death.

"He was a great public servant" and "widely respected at home and abroad," Bush said. "And most important, Colin was a family man and a friend."

Condoleezza Rice, Powell's successor at State and the department's first Black female secretary, praised him as "a trusted colleague and a dear friend through some very challenging times."

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a retired Army general and the first Black Pentagon chief, said the news of Powell's death left "a hole in my heart."

"The world lost one of the greatest leaders that we have ever witnessed," Austin said while traveling in Europe. "Alma lost a great husband, and the family lost a tremendous father, and I lost a tremendous personal friend and mentor. He always made time for me, and I could always go to him with tough issues. He always had great counsel. We will certainly miss him."

Vice President Kamala Harris, the highest-ranking Black woman in U.S. history, also noted Powell's racial firsts.

"Every step of the way, when he filled those roles, he was by everything that he did and the way he did it, inspiring so many people," she said. "Young service members and others not only within the military, but in our nation and around the globe, took notice of what his accomplishments meant as a reflection of who we are as a nation."

Jack Straw, Britain's former foreign secretary and Powell's counterpart, called him "a brilliant diplomat because he always had time for people." They last exchanged messages a month ago.

Powell was "indefatigable in the amount of work that he put in. My wife nicknamed him 'the other man in her life'" because he used to call at 11 p.m., Straw said to the BBC.

He said that Powell regretted the way he presented the case for the invasion of Iraq: "He did regret it, as did I."

"He felt rather personally that this had been a blight on an otherwise impeccable reputation," Straw said, "but it is my belief that people will see his career in the balance and put that against all his other extraordinary achievements."

"He could have been president," Straw said. He said he and Powell talked "a number of times" about his decision not to run and that "the reason, he told me ... was because of his wife."

AMERICAN SUCCESS STORY

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., celebrated Powell's journey as a testament to the American Dream.

"It is hard to imagine a more quintessentially American story: A son of Jamaican immigrants who learned Yiddish from his boyhood neighbors in the Bronx becomes a four-star general in the United States Army and serves four presidential administrations, including as National Security Advisor, the youngest-ever Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the first Black Secretary of State," he said in a statement.

Powell often framed that biography as 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," he wrote in his 1995 autobiography, "My American Journey."

When he appeared at the United Nations, even during his Iraq speech, he often reminisced on his childhood in New York City, where he grew up the child of Jamaican immigrants and got one of his first jobs at the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant directly across the East River from the U.N. headquarters.

Powell's 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 he 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, who became his unofficial sponsor. He later became commander of the Army's 5th Corps in Germany and later was national security assistant to President Ronald Reagan.

Though he gained national prominence under Republican presidents, Powell ultimately moved away from the party.

He endorsed Democrats in the past four presidential elections, starting with Obama. He emerged as a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, describing him as "a national disgrace" who should have been removed from office through impeachment.

Information for this article was contributed by Robert Burns, Eileen Putman, Steve Peoples and Lauran Neergaard of The Associated Press; and by John Wagner, John Hudson and Karla Adam of The Washington Post.

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