AARP Hearing Center
When Colin Powell was 16 and living in the South Bronx, he wrote an essay about himself as part of an application to the City College of New York, which he would enter just shy of his 17th birthday. Almost 40 years later, the first Black U.S. Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs was writing a book, My American Journey, and retrieved that essay, along with his kindergarten report cards and transcripts of grades, from the board of education.
“What was so striking about it,” Powell, who died at 84 on Oct. 18 of complications from COVID-19 and multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood, told AARP in 2012, “is that I’m pretty much the same person [now]. What I see in the mirror is still that 16-year-old kid going to college, and that 21-year-old lieutenant going in the army, and that 25-year-old lieutenant getting married. I have said to many people over the years that I have worked hard to not be terribly different.
“Yes, I now have four stars [as a general]. Yes, I’m a cabinet officer, but I’m still that 16-year-old kid. And I have found that not just to be a nice way to be, but a very effective system of leadership and management.”
The son of Jamaican immigrants who rose to the highest levels of the federal executive branch, Colin Luther Powell, by all accounts, achieved his goal of remaining humble, accessible and kind (he also possessed a quick sense of humor), even as he balanced the enormous responsibility of his positions and his role as a trailblazer for people of color.
When word of his death came today, politicians and public figures of both major parties honored the towering figure as a patriot, military leader, and shaper of domestic and international relations in his role as statesman. Powell, a Republican who valued common sense and fairness over party, had argued for social progression on such issues as women’s right to choose and gay rights, more typically associated with Democrats.
