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Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, dies at 84

By Scott Neuman,
Don Gonyea
Published October 18, 2021 at 8:29 AM EDT
Former Secretary of State and Bloom Energy Board member Colin Powell speaks during a Bloom Energy product launch on February 24, 2010 at the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.
Justin Sullivan
/
Getty Images
Former Secretary of State and Bloom Energy Board member Colin Powell speaks during a Bloom Energy product launch on February 24, 2010 at the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.

Colin Powell, who served as secretary of state during the presidency of George W. Bush and led the first Gulf War as chairman of the joint chiefs, has died at age 84 of complications from COVID-19, his family confirmed.

Powell, the first African American to serve in both of those senior posts, died Monday morning, they said, adding that "he was fully vaccinated."

"We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment," the family said in a Facebook post. "We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: October 18, 2021 at 12:00 AM EDT
An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that Colin Powell grew up in Harlem. Powell was born in Harlem and grew up in the South Bronx.
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Scott Neuman
Scott Neuman is a reporter and editor, working mainly on breaking news for NPR's digital and radio platforms.
See stories by Scott Neuman
Don Gonyea
You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.