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Colin Powell, the influential former U.S. secretary of state who played a pivotal policy role during the George W. Bush administration, died Monday due to complications from COVID-19, his family said in a statement. He was 84.
Powell, the first African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, had been fully vaccinated, according to a statement on Facebook. He had been receiving treatment at Walter Reed National Medical Center in Maryland.
Powell’s longtime aide Peggy Cifrino said he had been treated over the past few years for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. The Powell family’s social media post did not address whether Powell had any underlying illnesses.
“General Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, passed away this morning due to complications from Covid 19. He was fully vaccinated,” the family statement reads. “We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment. We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American.”
Multiple myeloma impairs the body’s ability to fight infection, and studies have shown that those cancer patients don’t get as much protection from the COVID-19 vaccines as healthier people.
Powell first fought in combat during the Vietnam War and rose through the military ranks to become the first Black national security adviser during the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term in the late 1980s. He became the first Black, and the youngest, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under former President George H.W. Bush in 1989.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Powell was a key part of George W. Bush’s initiation of the war on terror, first in Afghanistan and then Iraq. His presentation at the United Nations Security Council in New York City in 2003, in which he argued that dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was a major influencing event that drew support from Americans and Western allies for the Iraqi invasion.
Powell later told a Senate panel that the sources of his information about Hussein were wrong and that it was unlikely at the time that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Powell was highly critical of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, at one point calling him a “national disgrace,” during the 2016 campaign and warned that the Republican Party was veering dangerously to the right. He voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
He said he voted for Biden in the 2020 election, chastised the GOP for not standing up to Trump’s extremism and ultimately left the Republican Party after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by radical Trump supporters.
President Joe Biden, who ordered the American flags at the White House lowered to half-staff in Powell’s honor, called him a “patriot of unmatched honor and dignity.”
“He believed in the promise of America because he lived it,” Biden said in a statement. “Colin was always someone who gave you his best and treated you with respect.”
