Colin Powell, Former Secretary of State, Dead at 84

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell died Monday morning at 84 of complications from COVID-19. “We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” his family wrote in a Facebook post announcing the news, noting that he had been fully vaccinated. Powell—the country’s first Black national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and leader of the State Department—was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, his family said. According to NBC News, he suffered from multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that makes it more difficult for the body to fight infections.

As secretary of State under President George W. Bush, Powell played an instrumental role in the country’s decision to invade Iraq—a move he came to regret. He threw his weight behind the false assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in a now-infamous speech before the U.N. Security Council in 2003, an address Powell later called a permanent “blot” on his public-service record. A year later, he resigned as secretary of State. “The event will earn a prominent paragraph in my obituary,” Powell, a decorated Army general, wrote in his 2012 memoir.

Powell’s career was covered extensively in the pages of Vanity Fair, where he is archived as a key player in the Bush administration’s historically hawkish path to war and its broader legacy. After returning to private life, he broke ranks by endorsing then-Senator Barack Obama as a “transformational figure,” and was later an outspoken critic of Donald Trump throughout the former president’s one-term presidency. Days after a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, Powell said members of the GOP who helped promote the Big Lie and contributed to its ensuing violence are “why I can no longer call myself a fellow Republican.”

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