WASHIINGTON —

       Colin Powell, who served Democratic and Republican presidents in war and peace but whose sterling reputation was forever stained when he went before the United Nations to justify an invasion of Iraq, has died of COVID-19 complications. He was 84.

       A veteran of the Vietnam War, Powell rose to the rank of four-star general and in 1989 became the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that role, he oversaw the U.S. invasion of Panama and later the U.S. invasion of Kuwait to oust the Iraqi army in 1991.

       He was appointed secretary of State by President George W. Bush in 2001, the first Black American to hold that position.

       But his reputation suffered a painful setback when, in 2003, Powell went before the U.N. Security Council at Bush’s behest to make the case for U.S. war against Iraq. He cited faulty information claiming Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed away weapons of mass destruction.

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       Iraq’s contention that it had not was “a web of lies,” Powell told the world body.

       In an announcement on social media, the family said Powell had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The family thanked Walter Reed National Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for its care of Powell.

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       “We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father and grandfather and a great American,” the family said.

       Powell was the first U.S. official to publicly lay the blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and made a lightning trip to Pakistan in October 2001 to demand that then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf cooperate with Washington in going after the Afghanistan-based group. Al Qaeda also had a presence in Pakistan, where bin Laden was later killed.

       As Bush’s first secretary of State, Powell led a department that was dubious of the military and intelligence communities’ conviction that Hussein possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction. Despite his reservations, he presented the administration’s case that Hussein posed a major regional and global threat in the speech to the U.N. Security Council.

       That speech, complete with his display of a vial of what he said could have been a biological weapon, was later cited as a low point in Powell’s career, even though he had removed some elements from the speech that he deemed to have been based on poor intelligence assessments.

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       Bush said he and former First Lady Laura Bush were “deeply saddened” by Powell’s death.

       “He was a great public servant” and “widely respected at home and abroad,” Bush said. “And most important, Colin was a family man and a friend. Laura and I send Alma and their children our sincere condolences as they remember the life of a great man.”

       Powell rose to national prominence under Republican presidents and considered a presidential bid of his own, but ultimately moved away from the party. He endorsed Democrats in the last four presidential elections, starting with former President Obama. He emerged as a vocal critic of former President Trump in recent years, describing him as “a national disgrace” who should have been removed from office through impeachment. Following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, Powell said he no longer considered himself a Republican.

       Powell rose from a childhood in a fraying New York neighborhood to become the nation’s chief diplomat. “Mine is the story of a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means who was raised in the South Bronx,” he wrote in his 1995 autobiography “My American Journey.”

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       At City College of New York, Powell discovered the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC. When he put on his first uniform, “I liked what I saw,” he wrote.

       He joined the Army and in 1962 was one of more than 16,000 “advisors” sent to South Vietnam by President Kennedy. A series of promotions led to the Pentagon and an assignment as a military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who became his unofficial sponsor. He later became commander of the Army’s 5th Corps in Germany and later was national security assistant to President Reagan.

       During his term as Joint Chiefs chairman, his approach to war became known as the Powell Doctrine, which held that the United States should commit forces in a conflict only if it has clear and achievable objectives with public support, sufficient firepower and a strategy for ending the war.

       Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, himself a retired Army general, said the news of Powell’s death left “a hole in my heart.”

       “The world lost one of the greatest leaders that we have ever witnessed,” Austin said while traveling in Europe. “Alma lost a great husband, and the family lost a tremendous father, and I lost a tremendous personal friend and mentor. He has been my mentor for a number of years. He always made time for me, and I [could] always go to him with tough issues. He always had great counsel.”

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       Colin Powell told Clinton he used personal computer for U.S. business

       Former secretary of state Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton in 2009 that he used a personal computer attached to a private phone line to do business with foreign leaders and State Department officials and was generally scornful of the notion that his mobile devices might be accessed by spies, according to an email exchange released by U.S.

       Powell’s appearances at the United Nations as secretary of State, including his Iraq speech, were often accompanied by fond reminiscing of his childhood in the city, where he grew up the child of Jamaican immigrants who got one of his first jobs at the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant directly across the East River from the U.N. headquarters.

       A fan of calypso music, Powell was the subject of criticism from, among others, singing legend Harry Belafonte, who likened Powell to a “house slave” for going along with the decision to invade Iraq. Powell declined to get into a public spat with Belafonte but made it known that he was not a fan and much preferred the Trinidadian calypso star the “Mighty Sparrow.”

       In a 2012 interview with the Associated Press, Powell maintained that, on balance, the U.S. had succeeded in Iraq.

       “I think we had a lot of successes,” Powell said. “Iraq’s terrible dictator is gone.”

       Hussein was captured by U.S. forces while hiding out in northern Iraq in December 2003 and later executed by the Iraqi government. But the insurgency grew, and the war dragged on far longer than had been foreseen.

       Former President Obama pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, but he sent advisors back in 2014 after Islamic State swept into the country from Syria and captured large swaths of Iraqi territory.