Became instead a highly decorated military veteran receiving the Purple Heart for sustaining injuries and saving others in a helicopter crash.įrom there, in 1969, Powell won a White House fellowship and was moved over to the Office of Management and Budget. He endured racism both in the ranks and, for that matter, during training in Georgia but was not deterred by that. where he truly found his calling and from there became a member of the army and was deployed to Vietnam. Went to the City College of New York because he wasn’t interested in athletics. Was an undistinguished high school student. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants- a father who was a shipping clerk, a mother who is a seamstress. Powell’s history was a history unlike anything I think we’d seen before in America. Well, tell us about that history that he feared might be erased by an obituary that focused on his role in Iraq.
And he felt like that there was plenty more to say about Colin Powell, that he was not the sum total of a single fateful speech that he gave to the United Nations in February of 2003. It was to be his last year as Secretary of State in the Bush administration and the Iraq war was underway- well underway, but at that juncture it was already clear that Saddam, in fact, did not possess weapons of mass destruction contrary to the speech that Colin Powell had given in February of 2003, a month before the invasion, saying that he did.Īnd what Powell said to individuals was that he recognized that his obituary was going to begin with, “Colin Powell sold Americans on going to war in Iraq based on intelligence that turned out to be bogus.” In other words, Powell realized that the totality of an otherwise distinguished and even singular military and political career would forever be tainted and would, in a way, be sublimated to what had happened in Iraq. The first thing that came to mind, Michael, was a conversation that I learned that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had had with actually more than one individual. Robert, what were you thinking when you heard the news just a few hours ago that Colin Powell had died? robert draper I spoke with my colleague Robert Draper from The Times Magazine. His great fear was that he would be remembered for just one moment.
Today, across three presidencies, Colin Powell served as America’s top soldier, diplomat, and national security adviser.
Tuesday, October 19th, 2021 michael barbaroįrom The New York Times I’m Michael Barbaro. Transcript The Life and Career of Colin Powell Across three presidencies, he served as America’s top soldier, diplomat and national security adviser.
0 kommentar(er)
