“He was a man of ideas, but he wasn’t ideological,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Humility, so much at the core of Colin Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants and graduate of a City College of New York, was job one,” wrote former NATO commander and current Carlyle Group managing director James Stavridis. history.Īnd many remembrances went further in aggrandizing his character while overlooking his misdeeds.
Through Powell’s career, we can find a kind of counter-history of the past 50 years of U.S.
Born to Jamaican immigrant parents in the South Bronx receiving an officer commission from City College, setting him on a trajectory that would take him further than any Black man had previously gone in the U.S. Virtually every obituary of Powell, whose death from complications of COVID-19 was announced on Monday, dutifully lists the basic facts of his life and career. The fatuous and fulsome remembrances of “the General”-as many of his former deputies supplicatingly still refer to the former secretary of state-bear striking resemblances to the cults of personality in the sort of military dictatorships with which Powell allied and fought against his whole life. Bush administration political morass, speaks to the success of his mendacity and not the height of his virtue. His consistent popularity, even after the debacle of the Iraq War and the George W. Curtis LeMay (firebombed Tokyo nearly incited a third world war on multiple occasions), Douglas MacArthur (provoked the Korean War attempted to start nuclear war), and perhaps Tommy Franks (oversaw the invasion of Iraq), to name a few.īut Powell was uniquely bad, fundamentally a bureaucrat and public relations man for the American political and military establishment. There were many worse American generals in the last century than Colin Powell, men who also died, like Powell, largely celebrated for their accomplishments. Security Council in New York, in an electronics shop in Kiel, Germany, February 5, 2003. People watch Secretary of State Colin Powell deliver his speech to the U.N.
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