Alma Powell, an advocate for children, literacy and military families who was the quiet force alongside her husband, Colin L. Powell, the revered military commander, secretary of state and national security adviser, and who played a crucial role in his decision not to seek the presidency in 1996, died on Sunday in Alexandria, Va. She was 86.
Her son, Michael, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not specify a cause.
When he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993, long before the full impact of America’s role in the Gulf War had set in, Mr. Powell, who died in 2021, was by all measures the country’s most popular political figure. A military hero and commander beloved by both Democrats and Republicans, he was often called the Black Eisenhower. As Washingtonian magazine once noted, Mr. Powell had “virtually no known enemies — in a town where everyone of consequence is disliked by someone else of consequence.”
Ms. Powell was the consummate military wife, an exemplar of resilience and discipline — Mr. Powell had served two tours in Vietnam at the start of their marriage — whose elegance and experience bolstered her husband’s mystique.
In Washington, the Powells were unicorns: a power couple who nonetheless disdained power.
“Neither of them wore their ranks on their shoulder,” said Sally Quinn, the longtime Washington Post columnist, in an interview. “I can’t think of anyone else in this town — ever — who had that kind of power and wielded it less. It just didn’t impress them.”
When Mr. Powell’s advisers and party members on both sides of the aisle clamored for him to run for president in the 1996 race, they held their breath and looked to Mrs. Powell. Her husband agonized for months, finally declaring a party affiliation as a Republican, albeit a moderate one, during which time the couple weathered blowback from a news article that Mrs. Powell suffered from depression and was taking medication for it — a report, which first appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and then Newsweek, that many felt was an underhanded attempt to derail Mr. Powell’s putative campaign.
It did not.
When Mr. Powell finally declared his decision not to run, in November 1995, saying that “such a life requires a calling that I do not yet hear,” Mrs. Powell was at his side.
“It was one we reached together as a team, as we have for 33 years, and I am very supportive,” she said at the time.
Mr. Powell was asked if his wife’s health had impacted his decision. Certainly not, he replied. “It is not a family secret.”
Mr. Powell declared his wife’s condition was as manageable as his blood pressure, for which he also took medication, and that he hoped news of her experience would help those who also experienced depression to “make a beeline to the doctor.” Mrs. Powell received many letters from those applauding their candor and wishing her well.
“I think she has that sort of dignity and grace that spin masters can’t create,” Carl Sferrazza Anthony, the author of a history of first ladies, said of Mrs. Powell in a Los Angeles Times article on the couple’s decision.
Norman Ornstein, a political consultant, also weighed in on Mrs. Powell’s tantalizing appeal.
“The things that led her not to say: ‘Oh boy! I could be First Lady’ are what make her so attractive,” he told the newspaper. “She is not consumed by ambition. She is not a Stepford wife.”
Alma Vivian Powell was born on Oct. 27, 1937, in Birmingham, Ala. Her father, Ronald Charles Johnson, was the principal of one of the city’s two Black high schools; her uncle, George Bell, ran the other. Alma’s mother, Mildred (Bell) Johnson, built and operated a day care center for Black families and formed one the first Black Girl Scout troops in the state.
Alma graduated from high school at 16, and from college at 19, earning a bachelor’s degree from Fisk University, a historically Black liberal arts institution in Nashville, where she studied speech and drama. She met Mr. Powell on a blind date in Boston, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in speech pathology and audiology at Emerson College; he was a second lieutenant in the Army, and stationed nearby. In his memoir, he recalled being mesmerized by her “luminous eyes.” She remembered the future general looking like a scared 12-year old. (Her suitors before him included a Nigerian prince and Earl Wilson, a star pitcher for the Chicago Red Sox.)
They married in 1962, and Mr. Powell was soon deployed to Vietnam. Mrs. Powell moved to her family’s home in Birmingham, which was in the middle of its own war. She was pregnant with Michael when Eugene “Bull” O’Connor — Birmingham’s notoriously racist police chief — met more than 900 Black students who were demonstrating against segregation with police dogs and fire hoses. Four months later, the church where they demonstrated was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, killing four teenage girls; Mrs. Powell was sitting in her own church, a few blocks away, with Michael on her lap. She recalled her father handing her a gun one night and telling her to shoot anyone that came down the driveway.
“It was like we had two wars going on at once,” she told Women’s Wear Daily in 1991. Mr. Powell did not meet his son, Michael, until he was 10 months old.
“Military spouses, male or female, are very special people,” Mrs. Powell said. “It takes a certain kind of temperament to accept that pattern of life. You have to be a very strong person yourself. You have to have a certain sense of adventure and an awful lot of patience.”
The family moved some 20 times before landing permanently in Washington in the late 1980s.
“We always called it ‘their career,’” said Michael Powell of his parents’ relationship. “Vietnam was a tougher choice than people think but she made that choice and never wavered or foundered through every test that followed. Many times he would be gone for a year.”
He added: “Like all military wives, she was scared that someone was going to ring the doorbell. I think that kind of life is pretty galvanizing of the way they saw each other, and the need for each other.”
In 1997, the Powells helped found the America’s Promise Alliance, an organization linking nonprofits that benefited young people. Mrs. Powell chaired the board for almost a decade and was the author of two children’s books connected with the organization: “America’s Promise,” a New York Times best seller, and “My Little Wagon,” both published in 2003. She was also vice chair of the Kennedy Center and a member of President Barack Obama’s board of advisers on historically Black colleges and universities for two years during his first term.
In addition to her son, Michael, a lobbyist and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mrs. Powell is survived by her daughters, Linda Powell, an actress, and Annemarie Powell Lyons, a life coach ; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
What was often lost in all the kudos Mrs. Powell received for her graciousness and her long public service was that she had a wicked sense of humor. “You wanted to be sitting next to her at a party,” Linda Powell said. “She hated hypocrites and egos.”
Her family also offered a slight corrective to her history-making role in 1995.
“She would go into any battle he wanted to,” Michael Powell said. “The idea that she stomped on something that he otherwise wanted to do is a misunderstanding of that relationship and her role.”
He added: “If he had come home and said, ‘I’m burning to do this,’ she would have said, ‘Come on, let’s go!’”
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