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That doesn't mean there weren't long family conversations, weighing the pros and cons. But they were conducted in the Powell family style. "We're not the Brady Bunch," says Michael. "Nothing ever really got resolved." Michael generally leaned in favor of a run; his mother and sisters against. They would talk about the chance to do something really thrilling. "Then we'd make jokes about the funny things we were going to do to the White House," says Michael. "We were planning to shake up the place. We'd laugh again, and then my mother might say, 'This is really profound.' And we'd reflect on how truly historic it would be. Then nobody would say anything for a while, until one of my sisters said to my father, 'What do you want to do?' And he'd say, 'I don't know.' And that's the way it would end. To this moment--and he and I have had some of our warmest father-son talks over this--he has never said, 'What do you think I should do?' Never."
This was not the first time Alma and the family had wrestled with hard choices about service and sacrifice. "She has been down this road many times before," Michael says. "So has the family. When I was born, the man was in Vietnam. I met him when I was almost one year old. Four and a half years later he went back. Not knowing whether we're going to hear any day that he was never coming back--that's a real aspect of military family life. So how we went about this decision was unique, but not foreign to us."
Powell had lived, for roughly the past year, in the Haze. The crowds kept growing. Their praise and pleas were a river carrying him swiftly past all the rules and rites that attend a race for the presidency. Pundits talked of his star quality, the ability to make a room go quiet when he walked in. But it was not the bright beam of a supernova, a demagogue's dazzle. It was more infrared, the kind that warms without burning. He seemed comfortable, respectable, most of all normal--too normal to run for the White House, which meant that he became the most popular candidate on the landscape without lifting a finger or spending a dime.
It was an easy adoration that could have worked like a drug, even with Powell's political immune system. Michael watched his father wrestle with it. "I was very, very proud to watch him say, 'I've got to step out of this cloud for a moment and look inside myself.'" A race for the presidency, however easy the start, would become very, very hard. The general was enough a creature of the capital to know how it works. "The people who are sucking you in today will stick a knife in your back tomorrow if the boat starts to go under," Michael says. "They have personal interest in being attached to a phenomenon." His father had to be careful not to let that sweep past his instincts.
And as everyone now knows too well, those instincts are, above all, cautious. Campaign veterans observe that deciding to run for President is fundamentally an irrational act. Colin Powell, for all his candor and appealing humanity, has never been given to irrational acts. He decided to marry Alma only when she threatened to break up with him as he was heading for Vietnam. And so he went about weighing the White House bid very carefully. One of Powell's 13 Rules is "Check small things." He reviewed every pro and con, every poll, talked to a wide circle of friends and advisers. None of those details could ignite a fire in his belly.