Powell, Colin Luther

▪ 2002

      On Jan. 20, 2001, the engaging former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell—whose leadership role in the 1991 Persian Gulf War had brought him to the attention of the American public—was sworn in as U.S. secretary of state.

      Born on April 5, 1937, in New York City, Powell was the son of Jamaican immigrants. While attending the City College of New York, Powell joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program and rose to become commander of the college's Army ROTC unit. After graduation in 1958, Powell was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and he served two separate tours (1962–63; 1968–69) in Vietnam. He earned an M.B.A. from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1971, after which he became an assistant to Frank Carlucci, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Powell later served as a battalion commander in South Korea (1973–74) and in positions at the Pentagon (1974–75). In 1975 he was promoted to the rank of colonel, and in the early 1980s he became a major general and the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense.

      In 1986 Powell was appointed deputy director of the National Security Council under Carlucci, who was then Pres. Ronald Reagan's national security affairs assistant. The following year Powell succeeded Carlucci, and in early 1989 he assumed command of the Army Forces Command. In April of that year he was elevated to the rank of four-star general, and in August he was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first African American and at age 52 the youngest person to occupy the highest post in the military.

      After retiring from the army in 1993, Powell remained active in politics, helping to broker a compromise in which Haiti's military regime ceded power to elected Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Popular with broad segments of the electorate, Powell was lobbied by both the Democratic and Republican parties to run for national office. Although polls in 1995 showed Powell a formidable contender for president, he declined to run. Nonetheless, he publicly declared himself a Republican, despite his support for abortion rights and affirmative action—two issues that put him outside the Republican Party's mainstream.

      As secretary of state Powell spent the early months of 2001 attempting to broker an end to hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians and to gain support for loosening the UN-imposed trade sanctions against Iraq. In June he attended a UN AIDS conference and pledged U.S. financial support for an international fund to combat the disease. Though he was scheduled to attend the UN World Conference Against Racism, which began on August 31, Powell led a U.S. boycott in response to Arab efforts to single out Israel as racist. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., Powell focused on building international support for U.S. actions against the Taliban to force it to cease harbouring Osama bin Laden, whom the U.S. blamed for the attacks.

Michael I. Levy

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