Colin Powell

The career of this remarkable soldier-statesman, the first Black person to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, national security adviser and secretary of state, and the only person — period — to have served as all three, would have been unimaginable but for the greatest triumph of his era, the civil rights revolution. Yet Mr.

Powell, a retired four-star general who served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the early 1990s, had been treated for Covid at Walter Reed national medical center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he died. He was fully vaccinated against coronavirus but had a compromised immune system having been treated for blood cancer.

Announcing his death, his family said they had lost a “remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American”.