Colin Powell Dead of COVID-19 Complications at 84

Colin Powell, the first Black US Secretary of State as well as the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has died at age 84 due to complications from COVID-19, CNN reports. Powell was reportedly fully vaccinated.

“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,” the Powell family wrote on Facebook.”We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American.”

Powell became the first Black national security advisor during the Reagan presidency before becoming the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. However, his reputation took a major hit when in 2003, as George W. Bush’s secretary of state, he delivered a speech at the United Nations advocating for war in Iraq and pushing the false claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Powell himself would call the speech a “blot” on his legacy in later years.

“I regret it now because the information was wrong — of course I do,” he told Larry King in 2010. “But I will always be seen as the one who made the case before the international community. I swayed public opinion, there’s no question about it.”

Powell also addressed the UN speech in his 2012 memoir It Worked for Me, writing, “I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me. It was by no means my first, but it was one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact.”

“The event will earn a prominent paragraph in my obituary,” he added.

In later years, his political allegiance shifted to Democratic candidates, and he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, as well as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, respectively. (Powell called Trump a “national disgrace and an international pariah.”) After the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021, he announced that he could “no longer call myself a Republican.”

“I’m not a fellow of anything right now,” he told CNN at the time. “I’m just a citizen who has voted Republican, voted Democrat throughout my entire career. And right now, I’m just watching my country and not concerned with parties.”