Former US secretary of state and joint chiefs of staff Colin Powell has died of complications from the coronavirus, his Facebook page announced on Monday. He was 84.
“He was fully vaccinated. We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment. We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” Powell’s family said in a post on his Facebook page.
Powell was the first Black US secretary of state and served between 2001 and 2005 under the Bush administration. He was known as a moderate Republican. Prior to that, he served a tour in the Vietnam War as well as a White House Fellowship under president Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1973.
He also became Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor in 1987, while maintaining his military position as a lieutenant general in the US Army. As a four-star Army general, he was also chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff under President H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War in which US-led forces expelled Iraqi troops from neighbouring Kuwait.