Word: alma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
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...
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...
...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...