Colin Powell, the retired four-star general who became the country’s first Black secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, died Monday due to complications from Covid-19, his family said in a statement on Facebook.
Powell, 84, was fully vaccinated from Covid-19, his family said, and had been treated at Walter Reed National Medical Center, but was suffering from serious underlying conditions.
Colin Powell dies of complications from COVID-19
“We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” the family said.
Powell and his wife, Alma, were tested for Covid last Monday and both tested positive, a family spokesperson told NBC News. Powell was then hospitalized at Walter Reed. Powell had multiple myeloma, a cancer of a type of white blood cell, which can harm the body’s immune system, surgery for prostate cancer when he was Secretary of State and, more recently, Parkinson’s disease.
Powell became the first Black secretary of state under President George W. Bush. As the nation’s chief diplomat, Powell delivered a well-known speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 laying out the White House argument for invading Iraq and stating that there was intelligence that the country had weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. troops launched an invasion the following month. The evidence he presented about Iraq having biological weapons was later proven to be incorrect. Powell left the administration shortly after Bush’s re-election in 2004.
Powell later expressed regret over the remarks before the U.N., saying in a 2005 interview with ABC News’ Barbara Walters that it would tarnish his reputation and describing it as a “blot” on his record that “was painful then” and “painful now.”
Powell was born in 1937 in Harlem, New York, to immigrants from Jamaica and grew up in the South Bronx, going on to get a bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York.
He is survived by his wife, their three children and multiple grandchildren.
— NBC News
