Colin Powell's Complicated Legacy
By Keith Boykin
I first met General Colin Powell in 1993, when he served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Clinton administration.
At the time, I was one of the leading voices in the White House to get President Clinton to lift the ban on gays in the military, but General Powell was leading the opposition.
Because he was the highest-ranking Black military officer in the country, his voice carried far more weight than mine.
I believed the exclusion of LGBT people in the military was wrong and reminded me of the segregation of Black troops in the armed forces. But General Powell rejected this comparison, and I criticized him for that position in my first book in 1996.
Powell’s opposition to Clinton’s proposal ended up delaying the inclusion of LGBT service members for 20 years.
By the mid-1990s, Colin Powell was one of the most respected Black men in America and widely expected to be America’s first Black president (as a Republican), but he bowed out and decided not to run.
Years later, when he became Secretary of State under George W. Bush, he went to the United Nations and argued that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
He was wrong, and many of us called him out, even though Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld were the true architects of the war.
But even in the Bush administration, while Republicans were attacking affirmative action, Colin Powell defended it as an essential tool to promote racial justice.
Finally, by 2008, Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president and slowly began to evolve.
He was a Black Republican who ultimately left the Republican Party.
He supported the Iraq War but later came to regret it.
And although he once opposed gays in the military, he later endorsed the idea.
Powell’s legacy is a complicated one. Although I disagreed with him on fundamental issues, I believe he was a man of integrity. He was on the wrong side of history on some issues, but at least he was willing to learn from his mistakes and grow.