When retired four-star general, former US secretary of state and former national security adviser Colin Powell succumbed to Covid-19 on 18 October (he was simultaneously being treated for cancer and Parkinson’s, the former affecting his resistance to Covid despite having been vaccinated), he was lauded by his many admirers and colleagues worldwide, as well as legions of former subordinates within the US military and government. As he approached his end, he did it unflinchingly, just as he had led his life.

Bob Woodward wrote of him in the Washington Post, “As death approached, Colin L. Powell was still in fighting form. ‘I’ve got multiple myeloma cancer, and I’ve got Parkinson’s disease. But otherwise I’m fine,’ he said in a July interview. And he rejected expressions of sorrow at his condition. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me, for God’s sakes! I’m [84] years old,’ said Powell, who died on Monday. ‘I haven’t lost a day of life fighting these two diseases. I’m in good shape.’”

Powell’s life had demonstrated the promise and possibilities of America, even as it included a deep regret over one monumental decision taken by him.

Born to Jamaican-immigrant parents who were working-class but ambitious, and brought up in the Hunt’s Point neighbourhood of New York City, young Colin Powell thrived in that multicultural, multiracial environment.

Life for that young man included part-time jobs that included work in a baby clothing and furnishings store where he learned some Yiddish (the expressive mix of German, Polish and Hebrew often spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants) from the store owner and his customers.

Years later, he once startled Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in a meeting when he said the two men could converse in Yiddish if Peres so wished. Powell had even worked as a “Shabbos goy”, the nickname for a Christian who comes into the home of pious Orthodox Jews or their synagogues to switch on the lights during the Sabbath, when religiously observant Jews are abjured from touching machinery.

That baby-store owner had a deeper influence on Powell’s future as well. He told Powell he was pleased with him as an employee, but because the owner’s sons would need to inherit the business, he could not offer Powell a share of it, despite Powell’s work ethic. He encouraged Powell to go to college instead — a choice that was not automatic for a black teenager of distinctly modest means back in the 1950s.

Powell enrolled in City College of New York, home of the “New York intellectuals” in the 1950s. But rather than being drawn into their endless arguments about the future of socialism or existentialist philosophy, Powell studied geology, even though he later acknowledged he had been a mediocre student at best.

Nevertheless, at university he found his life’s path, joining the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Through ROTC, after four years of military training while in university, a cadet was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the army on graduation.

Back then, army strategists were largely concerned with the possibilities the Cold War might suddenly turn hot, most likely in some place like the Fulda Gap, the rugged corridor between East and West Germany, and Powell’s early service was in a combat unit stationed in Germany.

People who didn’t know Powell’s background but who knew of him as a military commander sometimes asked him which class he had graduated from at West Point. He would laugh and reply that, back then, he never would have been admitted there and had joined the army through ROTC.

There was, of course, another deep influence. When he became an officer, the US military was only a decade away from a history of segregation. Young black officers like him on the fast track to promotion would still have been somewhat rare.

Six decades later, the military is usually seen as the most meritocratic large organisation in America, but when Powell was commissioned as an officer, there would have been many officers above him (and below him as non-commissioned officers) who were steeped in those older racial verities.

As Powell moved up the ranks, from small unit commands in Germany and two tours in Vietnam, and as a military aide to civilian leaders in the Pentagon, he was always clear-minded about what he would mean to those coming after him.

Throughout his life, it was a career of firsts. He was the first African-American, and youngest, chair of the US military’s joint chiefs of staff, appointed ahead of a dozen higher-ranking generals. He was the first African-American national security adviser to a president. And he was the first African-American secretary of state.

As Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan observed, “For a generation of Black Americans who came of age during the civil rights era, success was accompanied by a singular phrase often repeated by friends and family, and total strangers, too: Don’t forget where you came from. Colin Powell exemplified the power, the complexity and the grace in those words.

“They’ve been uttered as a warning and a plea. But they’re also a gift. They’re a way that Black folks have of sending their brethren out into the wider world with something akin to an amulet… That phrase is a call back to the ancestors and an acknowledgment that you were not raised to be fearful and irresolute. Remember: you did not come from a people who quit or who turned back at the slightest hurdle…”

For those who knew him, watched him or worked for him, Powell, as a leader, worked to motivate subordinates and demonstrate appreciation for their efforts, rather than simply insisting they follow orders, qualities so many retired state department and military officers attested in social media posts, virtually the moment his passing became known. In one of the years when he was between positions and in the private sector, I heard him speak in Tokyo on the nature of leadership to a room of hundreds of Japanese business figures. Even through the simultaneous interpreting, the sheer force of his vision was like a wave hitting the shore. His audience was spellbound.

Throughout his life, it was a career of firsts. He was the first African-American, and youngest, chair of the US military’s joint chiefs of staff, appointed ahead of a dozen higher-ranking generals. He was the first African-American national security adviser to a president. And he was the first African-American secretary of state.

As chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff during President George HW Bush’s presidency during the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had occupied neighbouring Kuwait, he had a key role shaping the strategic response for the international military coalition that took action.

Powell became the key public face of the coalition, explaining the strategy to be employed and cementing that role with a concise explanation that the military’s task was to cut off the Iraqi army and then kill it. But the strategic aim was not regime change, an occupation of Iraq, or nation building.

In George W Bush’s administration, Powell’s role became secretary of state. But that second Persian Gulf war was a very different conflict. This time, the administration he served was insistent there were weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical or biological. Despite the ongoing American military engagement in Afghanistan against Al-Qaeda, the Bush administration hoped to build the case for a second Iraq invasion.

Powell was tasked with making that case to the world at the UN, justifying the impending invasion. But there was no real case to be made, despite his presentation. In the years following the invasion, after he had resigned as secretary of state, Powell acknowledged his error, and that he had too easily accepted as true the deeply flawed intelligence presented to him.

Ultimately, no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (or, as critics dubbed them, weapons of mass deception) was ever found.

In the end, yes, from that war, Saddam Hussein’s appalling government was deposed, but the damage from the ensuing war, and a civil war that followed, was devastating. Worse, it opened the path for the birth of Isis – and the campaign to crush it brought yet more devastation on Iraq.

Powell did not foist the blame for his mistake on others, instead accepting that his error had been the failure to push much harder on the flawed – or fraudulent – data. Sadly, despite his long, illustrious career, for many, that mistake may be the first thing people remember about him.

At the height of his popularity, there was talk about his becoming the Republican candidate for president.

Many Democrats also wanted him as their own nominee – echoing how both parties had vied for the affections of another general, Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952.

Powell declined the suitors, perhaps because he knew it would have been the wrong fit, or, as it has been said, due to his wife’s fears that as the first black candidate for president, he would have been stalked by would-be assassins.

Speaking out

By 2008, as an elder statesperson, he had moved past allegiance and service to Republican presidents, supporting Senator Barack Obama for president, despite friendship with Senator John McCain. Four years later, he supported Obama again, and in 2016, the Democrats as well.

In 2020, he spoke out against Donald Trump’s candidacy – and backed Joe Biden. For Powell, the Republican Party was no longer the party he had served for so many years in his appointed senior positions for Republican presidents.

By contrast to the acclaim Powell’s life received elsewhere, with Powell’s death, Donald Trump demonstrated his usual grace: “Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday. He was a classic RINO [Republican in name only], if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!”

But for the rest of America, and for many elsewhere (if not Saddam Hussein’s surviving sons), Colin Powell was that most American of heroes: a man who had come from a modest background to the heights of power, who had been an inspiration to many by virtue of his achievements, and then, after he had made a serious error, had owned up to it like the adult he was.

Farewell General Powell, and thank you for your service. DM168

COLIN POWELL’S 13 LESSONS FOR LEADERS:

1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.
2. Get mad, then get over it.
3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
4. It can be done!
5. Be careful what you choose.
6. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
7. You can’t make someone else’s choices.
8. Check small things.
9. Share credit.
10. Remain calm. Be kind.
11. Have a vision. Be demanding.
12. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.
13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.