Colin Powell

Biography

Colin Powell was born in Harlem in 1937 to Jamaican immigrant parents and grew up in the South Bronx. He earned a geology degree at the City College of New York, where the Reserve Officers' Training Corps gave him his vocation, and was commissioned in the US Army in 1958. He served two tours in Vietnam, where he was wounded and decorated, and later took an MBA at George Washington University and attended the National War College.

His career alternated between commands and Washington staff posts: senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the years of the Iran–Contra affair, commander of V Corps in Germany, and then deputy and, from 1987 to 1989, national security advisor to Ronald Reagan. In 1989 he received a fourth star, briefly led Forces Command and became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the youngest officer and first Afro-Caribbean American in the post. He oversaw the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, and his insistence on clear interests, overwhelming force and public support became known as the Powell Doctrine.

After retiring in 1993 he wrote his memoir My American Journey, declined to run for president in 1996, joined the Republican Party and founded America's Promise. George W. Bush made him the first Black secretary of state in 2001. His February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council arguing that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction rested on intelligence that proved wrong, and he later called it a blot on his record. He left office in January 2005, broke with the Republican Party after the January 2021 attack on the Capitol, and died of complications of COVID-19 in October 2021.