Colin Powell died October 18, killed by Covid-19. In truth he was already a very sick man and being treated for multiple myeloma, a kind of cancer that attacks the immune system. Despite being fully vaccinated, Powell was extremely vulnerable to Covid. America in 2021 being a nation lacking in empathy, partisans are using Powell’s death to argue over vaccine efficacy.

The partisans will argue over Colin Powell's legacy as well. At his death, Powell is probably best remembered as President George W Bush’s secretary of state. In 2003 Powell made the Bush Administration’s case for war with Iraq before the United Nations General Assembly. He argued that Saddam Hussein possessed vast stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction and this could not be allowed in the post-9/11 world. We know now this was untrue.

But Powell was also part of a generation of officers that came out of the Vietnam War determined to fix the army then wrought by morale problems and racial divisions. The result of reforms and the Regan-era arms buildup was an all-volunteer force of can-do young people armed with the very best equipment in the world. That military utterly smashed Saddam Hussein’s army during the 1991 Gulf War.

During the war, Powell gave direct and bracing press conferences free of bluster. He was the anti-Patton. Brash press conferences were General Schwarzkopf's job. Powell came across as mild mannered and soft spoken. At the podium he stated simple, calculated facts. Powell matter-of-factly said about the Iraqi army ‘Our strategy to go after this army is very, very simple. First, we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it.’. Powell was right. The American led coalition severed communications between Iraqi units and Baghdad, pinned them in place along the Saudi border, and outmaneuvered the Iraqi army. American led coalition forces won a tremendously lopsided victory.

After the Gulf War Powell was a national hero and held up as an example of the American dream. Raised in the South Bronx, Powell was the son of working-class Jamaican immigrants. He did not attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. Instead, he went to the working class City College of New York where he enrolled in the Reserve Officer’s Training Program. Powell graduated in 1958. He served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War, in 1963 and 1968. 

Powell was something of a racial trail blazer. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan made then Lt. General Powell the first African American National Security Advisor. In 1990 President George Herbert Walker Bush nominated Powell to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He became the first African American to hold the position. In 2001 President George W. Bush nominated Powell for Secretary of State. The senate confirmed Powell easily, making him the first African American to hold the post.

Throughout the 90's Powell was a national hero, a pillar of rectitude. Republicans were delighted when he joined the GOP in 1995.  Today Powell is lumped in with the Neocons, who sought to remake the welfare state and slash whole departments from the Federal Cabinet.

But when Powell joined the GOP he declared himself a 'Rockefeller Republican'. A species that no longer exists, Rockefeller Republicans generally approved of the welfare state and argued they could run it better. As such the government slashing Conservative movement was never enamored with Powell. But the Republican establishment loved the possibilities of a Powell presidential run, and saw him as an Eisenhower-like figure, beloved and above the political fray.  Powell stayed out of presidential politics in 1996 (the Clintons were terrified of him) and 2000. The later was a wise decision, as the GOP base rallied around Texas Governor George W. Bush.

By the time Powell left the Bush Administration in 2005, his reputation was badly damaged by the Iraqi WMD fiasco. The Neocons who never fully trusted Powell thought him a weak secretary of state. He never did have a base within the GOP. In 2008 the Republican Party’s war hero presidential nominee was John McCain.

In the 2010s, Powell became a media friendly Republican. He endorsed Barrack Obama for president in 2008 and again in 2012, Hillary in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. By then his political stature was greatly diminished. The right saw Powell as a squish, the left as a purveyor of Bush’s bogus Iraq claims. At the time of his death Powell had been out office for a decade and half and was more an establishment figure than anything else, an elder statesman respected by apolitical Americans.