Former US military leader from Tarboro reflects on friendship with Colin Powell

The death of Colin Powell is particularly hard for one eastern North Carolina man: Retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, who followed in Powell’s footsteps at the highest level of military leadership in the United States.

Shelton said he remembers Powell as a mentor and leader, and he’s also defending the legacy of his longtime friend.

“He’s just an all-around great American, and that’s the only way I think I could ever describe him," he said.

As much of the country remembered America’s first Black secretary of state on Monday, the loss of Colin Powell was personal for the Tarboro native.

“To be candid, it came as a real shock to me,” Shelton said. “I had no idea that Colin was sick and on the verge of succumbing to his illness.”

Shelton and Powell had known each other for decades, but this was no average friendship.

The two men were both four-star generals in the U.S. Army and among the architects of American national security over the past 30 years, with Powell being named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989 – a role Shelton himself would take over eight years later in the Clinton administration.

“It was very helpful to me, having a chance to talk to someone who had walked in those boots before, so to speak,” Shelton said. “[Powell] was a man of great integrity. He was my friend. He was a mentor in every sense of the word.”

Shelton said that friendship took on new importance in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, when some of then-President George W. Bush’s cabinet members were pushing the administration to pin the attacks on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as justification to invade Iraq.

“He was not responsible for 9/11. Colin and I both knew it, and so we teamed up,” Shelton said. “It was Colin and I telling the president, ‘Don’t do it. We ought not to do this,’ and we convinced the president not to do it.”

But two years later, in 2003, Powell went before the United Nations at Bush’s request and called for the U.S. to send troops to Iraq based on intelligence reports that claimed the country was gathering weapons of mass destruction.

Those reports would go on to be disproved, but Powell’s comments played a role in the U.S. going to war for eight years in the Middle Eastern country.

“It did haunt him,” Shelton said. “[Powell] told me later, he said, ‘Hugh, that was the worst decision I ever made, to agree to do that.’”

Shelton told WRAL News that, based on what the national intelligence community knew at the time, he would have done the same thing in Powell’s position, and Shelton believed the 2003 speech shouldn’t tarnish his legacy.

Instead, he planned to remember the brilliant man who broke barriers and valued his country above all else.

“He personifies the term ‘great American,’” Shelton said. “And that’s the way that I’ll always remember him.”