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."