WHY ALMA DIDN'T WANT THE JOB

By ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON

SELF-POSSESSED AS USUAL, ALMA POWELL IGNORED THE little chair that had been set up for her onstage and took her place at her husband's side. She looked at him not with a stagy gaze of adoration but with the warm, sometimes amused expression that often flows from her blue-green eyes. She fielded questions easily, even had fun cutting off one of Sam Donaldson's follow-ups. But more revealing than anything she said was the superb little hip check she used to push Powell aside so she could step up to a question--a gesture so swift and subtle few in the audience noticed it, but one that summed up the marital dynamic behind the general's decision. The look on Powell's face said he was used to such tender assertions. Soon after, Alma did it again: she put a gentle hand on her husband's lower back, reminding him to Keep It Short. The press conference was a smashing success, she seemed to say, but it was time to head home.

"My mother is the ground wire in my father's electrical circuit," says Michael Powell, the couple's 32-year-old son. "She helps him not get so electrified that he does something against his better judgment. She will not get caught up in the carnival. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched in near embarrassment as she chastises him"--for believing his p.r., for getting windy or phony during a speech, for allowing Larry King to stroke him like a cat. "She gets ticked off," says Michael. "She'll say, 'My, that man of mine can be pompous,' and she'll let him know: 'That was stupid. You looked stupid.' He loves that about her. She helps him hold on to himself."

Colin Powell has needed a lie detector lately. "All these people were treating him as if he's on the right hand of You Know Who," says one of the Powells' closest friends. "That's seductive to Colin. It's not at all seductive to Alma. She's not ambitious either for him or for her. There was a part of him that wanted this, but there was no part of her that did."

That's because Alma's lie-detection skills extend to Washington at large. "In a town where people race around answering every bell because they're terrified they might miss their big chance, Alma answers only the bells she chooses," says her friend Elayne Bennett, the wife of former Education Secretary William Bennett. "There's nothing she's after here." (Not that she is idle: without fanfare, she sits on the Kennedy Center board, makes sandwiches at a Washington soup kitchen, and finds time for the Red Cross, CARE and Best Friends, Elayne Bennett's program for inner-city girls.) As her husband's career advanced, Alma had to perform a series of increasingly public roles. She excelled, but didn't always enjoy the social grind that might take her from the coffee held in honor of the fashion show held by the officers' wives, to the Red Cross lunch meeting, to the reception for the wife of the Trinidadian Security Minister. Alma leaves friends in stitches by describing hellish dinner parties at which Colin always seems to be sharing a private joke with Princess Diana across the table while Alma has to shout conversation into the ear of an octogenarian. "It's not easy being the tail on Colin's kite," says someone who has seen Alma in action. "But she is always graceful and at ease; she never complains."

Dime-store psychologists in Washington have tried to link Alma's much discussed clinical depression, which emerged in the mid-'80s, to the pressures of being the general's wife. Her family and friends sensibly reject the notion. "This is a medical condition that flares up and gets treated, the way a bad back gets treated," says Michael. "It's not central to her life." She is warm and outgoing, an attentive listener. She knows everybody but has just a few well-chosen close friends, most of them wives of current or former leaders of the defense or national-security apparatus: women married to men who can't talk about their work. When Colin retired, these wives got together and threw a bash for Alma--a slumber party with no husbands allowed.

It was a rare break from family, the abiding interest of her life. Last year Alma and Colin insisted that Michael and his family move in with them--for six months--while the young couple's new house was being built. Last week, shortly after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and just as Colin was making his big decision, Alma called her sister in Alabama. "It was nice to hear from her," says Barbara Greene. "We talked about the grandkids." Anything else? "Just the grandkids." Alma never brought up the decision, and Greene never asked. "It wasn't on her mind," Greene says.

Nor did Alma ever bring up the Rabin assassination in conversation, says Michael. "She already knew the world was like that,'' he says. "This is a family that knows. The stories of my mother and grandfather sitting in the house with guns in their hands ready to shoot whoever came up the driveway are true. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Little girls were blown up in churches for no reason."

In a segregated America, Alma Johnson was born into an extraordinary family, a tight-knit clan of teachers, principals, librarians and social workers, who helped form the core of Birmingham's black middle class. That community pushed the civil rights struggle as hard as any in America; the struggle was a fact of life, but it didn't define Alma. "We were going to school, falling in love, shopping for clothes, being teenagers," says her best friend from those days, Yvonne Hamilton. "Confronting white power wasn't high on our list." Whip smart, Alma graduated from high school at 16 and from college at 19, then went on to become an audiologist in Boston, where she met Colin. "She succeeded in part because she was mentored by powerful, directed adults who never for a moment considered themselves inferior to anyone," says Odessa Woolfolk, a schoolmate who is now the board president of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Another friend calls this "the key to Alma--the reason she can go out and meet chiefs of state and be totally comfortable."

After a decade of it, Alma wants a break from public life. No sooner did she get Colin back from the Joint Chiefs than she almost lost him to a presidential campaign. She was not so much worried about the dangers he would be exposed to, friends say, as tired of the intrusions. She'd had too many evenings alone while Colin worked late, too many security men in her kitchen while she made morning coffee. "I think she would like to go out to dinner with her husband without being bombarded," says Barbara Greene. Still, Alma weighed such annoyances against the broader question of her calling. "She never said, 'Wouldn't it be fun to be First Lady?'" says Michael. "But she did say, 'Is this more important than what I don't like about it?'"

Colin Powell did not force his wife to answer that question. In the blessed calculus of a married life, he loved her too much to ask her point blank, because she loved him too much to tell him how she really felt. After 33 years, words are scarcely necessary; they share a vocabulary of shrugs and knowing glances, a collection of quirks and foibles fully accepted. Colin's inability to please Alma with a birthday gift, for example, has become a running joke in the family. "He'd always present her with some lame appliance--a waffle iron, a potato peeler, a Ginsu knife,'' says Michael. "If it was advertised on late-night TV, he thought it was pretty neat. Of course she'd hate it, and of course he'd be crestfallen. It became an annual ritual: 'Is Dad going to blow it again?'"

At dinner one night in October 1990, as Powell was grabbing a break from deploying troops for Operation Desert Shield, he suddenly realized it was Alma's birthday. As a close friend tells it, the phone rang, and he used the excuse of answering it to get out of hearing distance. Then he phoned his personal shopper at a Nordstrom department store. "Susan, I've forgotten her birthday. Pick out something she'll like and get over here." The shopper came through with a nice warm-up suit, arriving just as the Powells were having coffee. Colin presented the gift to Alma, who loved it. "I thought you'd forgotten!" she cried. Her husband just smiled and kept his big mouth shut.