Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled the official portrait of former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday, noting there were few Americans as admired and celebrated.
“There’s an elementary school named after him in Virginia, there’s a couple more named after him in Texas,” Clinton told a crowd in the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Room.
“A middle school in Illinois. A street in Gelnhausen, Germany, where Second Lieutenant Colin Powell reported for duty 50 years ago,” she said.
Powell, the son of Jamaican immigrants who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War, said the large oil painting done for the State Department was not the first portrait of him to adorn a government building.
“I have an official portrait at the Pentagon in the Hall of Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he said, noting it was done during the Clinton administration when Vice President Al Gore was doing a reinventing government program.
