The funeral for Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and national security adviser, brought out a Washington that barely exists anymore: Republicans and Democrats, including President Biden and two of his predecessors, uniformed military and diplomats, and people on all sides of the Iraq war.
No one would have been more amused by the assemblage than Mr. Powell himself, who often ran a smiling, half-whispered commentary on the city’s temporary loyalties and back-room machinations. Yet on Friday, the Washington National Cathedral was filled with them all — former officials who were at Mr. Powell’s side in the Persian Gulf War and on the seventh floor of the State Department, where he often waged a behind-the-scenes battle for influence in the George W. Bush White House.
Mr. Biden did not speak, nor did the two former presidents who attended, Barack Obama and Mr. Bush, who made Mr. Powell his first secretary of state. Instead, among the eulogists was a Democrat who had often clashed with Mr. Powell over the general’s reluctance to commit American forces to battles when the general, seared by the experience of his service in Vietnam, did not see a clear, successful outcome.
“He said I almost gave him an aneurysm,” the Democrat, Madeleine K. Albright, who served as secretary of state in the Clinton administration, told the mourners, recalling Mr. Powell’s reaction after she famously asked him, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”They argued and argued, and the argument delayed the American intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
But over time they also became close friends, which became critical after the disputed 2000 election. When Mr. Powell was named her successor, she said, he drove over to her house in Georgetown and together they began planning a succession — something that did not happen twenty years later, when President Donald J. Trump refused to admit his re-election defeat and his administration resisted a cooperative handover of power. (Mr. Trump, who denounced Mr. Powell a day after he died, was not present at the ceremony, and not mentioned.)
“He made pragmatism charismatic,” Ms. Albright said of Mr. Powell. “Beneath that glossy exterior of warrior-statesman was one of the gentlest and most decent people any of us will ever meet.”
Throughout the ceremony, there were similar stories from a seemingly lost era in Washington as participants described how a son of Jamaican immigrants, born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx, discovered his life’s mission in the Army, and rose through the ranks serving presidents of both parties. He became the first Black member of the military to serve as its top officer, and the first to serve as secretary of state. It was what his son, Michael K. Powell, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called a true “American journey,” a phrase drawn from the title of Mr. Powell’s autobiography.
There were tales of his affinity for ABBA, the Swedish pop music group whose popularity in the 1970s coincided with Mr. Powell’s moves around the world in the Army, including deployments in Europe learning how to use tactical nuclear weapons in the field. As guests took their seats at the funeral, the United States Army Brass Quintet, branching beyond its usual repertoire, played ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” a favorite of Mr. Powell’s.
Richard Armitage, who served alongside Mr. Powell in Vietnam and became his closest friend and his deputy secretary of state, recalled the time that Mr. Powell sang all of “Mamma Mia” to a “very amused foreign minister from Sweden and to a gobsmacked U.S. delegation, who’d never seen anything like it.”
While Mr. Powell identified himself as a Republican, few in the party’s current leadership were at the funeral. Mr. Powell, who had briefly considered running for president, endorsed Mr. Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden in their runs for the presidency, and in recent years had described the current Republican Party as unrecognizable to him.
But many of the leading figures in Mr. Powell’s public life were there, including Condoleezza Rice, who succeeded him as secretary of state, and Robert M. Gates, a former defense secretary and C.I.A. director.
None of the eulogists mentioned Mr. Powell’s speech to the United Nations in February 2003, when he presented what the Bush administration said was evidence that Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the underlying justification for the American-led invasion of the country the next month. Mr. Powell later blamed Vice President Dick Cheney and George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. chief, among others for sending him to the U.N. with a weak case that collapsed as soon as the Hussein government fell, and he left at the end of Mr. Bush’s first term under the cloud of an ever-worsening war.
He called the incident a “blot” on his reputation as a skilled warrior and diplomat, and it became a source of lifelong regret.
President Bush, who presided over that episode, and ultimately let Mr. Powell move on rather than ask him to remain for the second term, sat quietly with his wife, Laura, in the front pews, between Mrs. Clinton and the Obamas. Former President Bill Clinton remained at home in New York, recovering from a recent hospitalization for a severe infection.
The eulogies dwelled on Mr. Powell’s focus on leadership, down to his famous “13 Rules.” (“3: Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.” And “10: Remain calm. Be kind.”) Mr. Armitage described talking about his “secret of leadership,” with his close friend.
“You see some people, they look great,” he recalled Mr. Powell saying, with their impressive uniforms. “But the fact of the matter is that they can’t lead a horse to water.”
“You see some people who look like an unmade bed,’’ he continued. “But they can lead people anywhere.”
Michael Powell spoke emotionally of his father in his eulogy as he told stories of growing up in the Powell household. His father, he said, was as an inveterate tinkerer, including with a “cherished 1962 Impala” that did not survive Mr. Powell’s long weekend of work on the engine.
“The car whopped like a helicopter” when it was turned on, Michael Powell said to laughter, and when Mr. Powell, a car aficionado, tried to drive it, it would only go in reverse. He decided to donate the crippled vehicle to the local fire department, Michael Powell said, but “to get it there he literally drove the car backward, on public roads,” for three miles.
The younger Mr. Powell also asked the question that seemed to hang over the service: Could a city that has become more divided, and a nation that has seemed to lose a sense of common mission, create the likes of a Colin Powell again?
“The example of Colin Powell does not call on us to emulate his résumé,’’ he said. “It is to emulate his character and his example as a human being. We can strike to do that. We can choose to be good.”
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