Colin Powell, who served Democratic and Republican presidents in war and peace but whose sterling reputation was forever stained by his faulty claims to justify the U.S. war in Iraq, 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.
In 1989 he became the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that role he oversaw the U.S. invasion of Panama and later the U.S. invasion of Kuwait to oust the Iraqi army in 1991.
But his legacy was marred when, in 2003, he went before the U.N. Security Council as secretary of state and made the case for U.S. war against Iraq at a moment of great international skepticism.
He cited faulty information claiming Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's claims that it had no such weapons represented ``a web of lies,'' he told the world body.
In announcing his death on social media, Powell's family said he had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.
``We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father and grandfather and a great American,'' the family said. Powell had been treated at Walter Reed National Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Peggy Cifrino, Powell's longtime aide, 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.
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.
At the White House, President Joe Biden said Powell ``embodied the highest ideals of both warrior and diplomat.''
Noting Powell's rise from a childhood in a fraying New York City neighborhood, Biden said, ``He believed in the promise of America because he lived it. And he devoted much of his life to making that promise a reality for so many others.''
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.''
Powell's appearances at the United Nations as secretary of state, including his Iraq speech, were often accompanied by fond reminiscing of his childhood in the city, where he grew up the child of Jamaican immigrants who got one of his first jobs at the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant directly across the East River from the U.N. headquarters.