Just a couple of days before, Powell had been boisterous and playful. “Yo!” he exclaimed to Marybel Batjer, a former Pentagon aide and member of Powell’s small inner circle. “I feel great! I’ve got the fight!” True, there were threats from some quarters. “We’re going to get your boy,” a conservative senator had warned another of Powell’s advisers. (“Don’t ever call him ‘boy’,” the friend replied.) Powell told intimates that he could “visualize” being president. “Leadership” and “duty” he understood; he had spent time in the Oval Office, had known and worked with three of its occupants. It was running for that office that seemed so alien and daunting.
And so the mood had swung during the last week of Colin Powell’s wrenching self-examination. He was buffeted by an outside political world that wanted what it hoped would be his clarifying grace; yet inside, close to home, the costs just seemed too high. “He’d get up for it during the day, reading his mail, talking on the phone. But in the quiet of the night, waking up in the morning, it wasn’t there,” said a friend who spoke with him several times a day. In the end, the decision was “personal, not political,” said this adviser. Powell believed that he probably would win the GOP nomination and that if he did, he would win the election. But he lacked the passion to put himself–and his wife and children–through the ordeal of a campaign.
Painfully human: In the hyper world of politics, Powell’s decision seemed to take forever. But in the more orderly and measured universe of Colin Powell, where progress has always been marked slowly, by the steady march of efficiency reports, three weeks was not time enough to think through a life change. Between Oct. 20, when Powell finished his book tour, and last Wednesday, when he announced he would not run, Powell changed his mind over and over again. His private and public deliberations, reconstructed by NEWSWEEK from interviews with his closest advisers and several family members, were painfully human. Powell tried, with all his heart, to see himself as a paradigm-shifting politician, but he never quite got past his background, perhaps better suited to his temperament, as a careful, prudent staff officer.
Powell was “incredulous” about the adoring crowds who showed up on his book tour waving homemade POWELL FOR PRESIDENT signs. His sense of duty was stirred by conversations with three former presidents–Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush–not because they urged him to run (none did, in so many words), but, rather because they spoke so seriously about the burden of the office. At the same time, however, Powell was bothered by what he called the “incivility” of politics. Powell was deeply offended when he heard that Frank Donatelli–a former colleague in the Reagan White House–had taken on the task of digging up dirt on Powell’s private life for the Bob Dole campaign. “Oh, God,” Powell sighed to an old friend, “this is what you’ve got to go through.” Powell regards himself as “thin-skinned,” said this adviser, and he worried that he would let himself be “baited” by the far right. He also knew the press would revisit questions like his murky role in the Iran-contra affair.
Powell fretted, too, about the logistical details of mounting a late-starting campaign. An independent candidacy was out of the question; the general was more comfortable within the structure of a party, and he has privately considered himself a Republican since at least 1988. He had no shortage of offers of help from the GOP. Resumes poured in from would-be Powell pollsters and media consultants. But this consummate military bureaucrat was bothered that “the political game is something he knows nothing about.” His “kitchen cabinet” advisers, Richard Armitage and Batjer, were former Pentagon aides with little experience in electoral politics; his spokesman, Bill Smullen, was a career soldier. The expertise of a fourth, former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein, comes more from Belt-way lobbying than running campaigns. Powell’s “headquarters” was distinctly morn-and-pop: a basement office next to the rec room at home and a single computer, fax, and two phone lines in an office at the Armed Forces Benefit Association in Alexandria, Va. His aides later said they felt guilty they had not done more sooner to prepare for a run. But it may be that Powell didn’t really want them to.
After all, the ever-cautious Powell has always attributed his success–even his survival-to his careful attention to detail.
In his memoirs, he writes candidly about his fear of parachuting. Unlike the macho rangers who leapt into the blue shouting “Airborne!”, Powell admitted that he would advance to the door of the plane with “little baby steps.”
Powell felt he was not prepared for the jump into presidential politics. He was disturbed during his book tour when he was asked on “CBS This Morning” whether he favored federally funded abortions. He first said he didn’t and then caught himself, saying he’d have to think about the effect on the poor. The slip reminded him that there were scores of similar questions he had yet to think through.
Larger issues: Professional politicians have well-rehearsed positions on even the tiniest issues. A few weeks ago, Dole dared Powell to come to Iowa and talk about hog price supports. Yet as Powell listened to Dole and others quibble, he would sometimes shake his head and say that most Americans aren’t talking about arcane legislative minutiae. Powell was fascinated watching a tape of Dole at the first New Hampshire debate in October. The senator had to refer to note cards when he was asked why he wanted to be president. Despite reports last week that Powell was having trouble finding a rationale for a candidacy, insiders say the general believed that he could more persuasively talk to voters about larger issues, like reinstilling a sense of personal responsibility. At these moments, Powell felt he could rise above politics as usual–and win.
Powell’s family, however, resisted. On the weekend of Oct. 28-29, the clan gathered at the McLean house. After nearly 20 moves and several wars, the Powell family was accustomed to sacrifice, but Powell’s approach this time was different. “All the other times he just told us. This time, it was ‘What do you think?’ “son Michael told a friend. Michael, a young lawyer, was favorably inclined. But Powell’s two daughters, Linda, 30, and Annemarie, 26, were strongly opposed. They did not like the idea of losing their privacy. And Alma–who friends say is not as enthusiastic about the GOP as her husband is–was adamant. She was afraid for
Powell’s safety and worried about giving up their quiet new life. As her husband won his stars, they had moved into ever larger quarters, but there were always sergeants bustling around her household. Powell told one adviser, “This is the first time Alma’s had her own house. She’s not a general’s wife anymore, and she wants to be able to do things her way.”
The general was shaken by his family’s opposition. “I’m struggling,” he told a close confidant that Monday. At times, the friend said, “he could hear the engines roaring. But then he’d be left alone quietly with his thoughts and he’d think, ‘God, I don’t know. I’m trying to force myself to do something unnatural’.”
Racial healer: Yet outside the family circle the pressure to run grew. Though insiders say Powell never openly discussed race as a factor in his decision, much of the country saw him as a potential racial healer. That Wednesday, GOP Chairman Haley Barbour appeared at Powell’s office. Barbour’s message was clear: the party would welcome Powell. At the same time, Duberstein was meeting Newt Gingrich on Capitol Hill, to see whether the speaker would try to stand in the way. The word came back that Gingrich did not regard Powell as an obstacle to the Republican revolution. Powell was enormously encouraged. He felt that GOP ideologues could be outflanked. “I think I can see my way clear” to running, he told his kitchen cabinet on Wednesday. “We’re getting there.”
The next day, Powell learned about a delegation of GOP right-wingers trying to scare him off with a press conference at the National Press Club. Powell was especially irked by Gary Bauer, a former Reagan White House colleague, who referred to Powell as “Clinton in ribbons.” That morning Powell spoke with his cousin Bruce Llewellyn, a multimillionaire entrepreneur. Llewellyn, who didn’t know about the conservative event, was determined to persuade his cousin not to run. He appealed to Powell’s sense of precision. “You can’t do this thing in a haphazard way,” Llewellyn told him. There was too much to do. “It will take a miracle to get it done; it’s impossible,” he said. The GOP doesn’t even want you, Llewellyn went on. “Yeah, they’re having a press conference right now to do me in,” Powell replied. “That only proves my point,” said Llewellyn.
Llewellyn thought he was beginning to sway his cousin. Alma pushed Powell most of the rest of the way the next morning as they sat in bed. Powell described the conversation to a close friend as “tearful” and “prayerful.” If there was any chance left that Powell might still run, it evaporated the next day. Flying home from a speech to Pontiac dealers in Florida, Powell called a distressed Alma and learned that reporters and cameramen had staked out their house. He had to sneak in through his neighbor’s backyard to escape detection. He arrived to the news that Israeli Prime Minister Rabin had been murdered. The invasion of her privacy and the assassination of a world leader was the end for Alma. She turned to her husband and said, “This ain’t going to happen.”
The inner circle–Duberstein, Armitage–met Monday night in Powell’s study. Alma joined the group after an hour, and Smullen was on a speakerphone. At last, the general made his decision. With little discussion, Powell also flatly ruled out a vice presidential candidacy. “Colin, is it over?” asked Duberstein. “It’s over,” replied Powell, softly. Duberstein took a melancholy drive in the rain around the Virginia suburbs the next morning, looking for a place to stage the exit press conference. In the end Smullen set the plans with a Ramada hotel near Powell’s office and swore the manager to secrecy.
Batjer, who now lives in California and watched the announcement on TV, was startled by how tired Powell looked. He had lost eight pounds and seemed exhausted. Powell sighed when he called her afterward. “There’s a lot of relief around the house,” he said. Powell felt some of it himself. “How do you feel, Uncle Colin?” asked his niece Lisa Berns. “Like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” he answered. “I’m a young man,” Powell, 58, told one well-wishing pol who called him after he dropped out. “There will be other opportunities.” But there may never be another quite like this.
