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. 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. government.
And many remembrances went further in aggrandizing his character while overlooking his misdeeds. “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. “He was a man of ideas, but he wasn’t ideological,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “He populated the arc of his light with people he was good to,” recalled Kori Schake, a former Powell subordinate now at the American Enterprise Institute, in The Atlantic. “We are heartbroken by the passing of our Salesforce family and board member, General Colin Powell,” posted the business software giant. “He was a remarkable leader who devoted his life to public service and was instrumental in shaping how we use our platform for change.”
Colin Powell was a bad general, not because he was single-handedly responsible for most of the horrors to which his name can be attached. And that is a long list: helping cover up My Lai; smuggling arms from the Army to the CIA for Iran-Contra deals; obliterating a fleeing Iraqi army on the so-called “highway of death” in the Gulf War; and, most infamously, lying for the Bush administration to generate the fig leaf of international support required to invade and occupy Iraq.
Through Powell’s career, however, we can find a kind of counter-history of the past 50 years of U.S. history. Not in the way that many of his obituary writers now claim, but sure, Colin Powell’s story can be mapped onto that of “America’s.” It’s a story of covert actions, overt lies and lies by omission, and, most of all, basic character tests of decency almost never passed. And of making out just fine in the private sector all the same.
POWELL’S MILITARY SERVICE began in Vietnam. As a major, he participated in the cover-up of the My Lai massacre, failing to investigate claims of atrocities reported by American soldiers to military leaders. Once stateside in the early 1970s, he got an MBA and a Nixon White House fellowship where became close with future Reagan defense secretary—and indicted Iran-Contra co-conspirator—Caspar Weinberger.