Powell’s book tour was closely scripted but attracted diverse crowds of admirers — “black and white, old and young, affluent and unemployed,” as the Times reported.

The book tour, the newspaper added, projected an “air of a political campaign — not the flesh-pressing campaign of a hungry primary candidate, but rather the roped-off, walkie-talkie-directed campaign of a sitting President. … Before each book-signing, the general [gave] a brief news conference, with reporters and cameras sandwiched between racks of calendars and cookbooks.”

Powell, who had never sought public office, was regarded as a very promising prospective candidate against Bill Clinton, who at times during his first presidential term seemed adrift and not quite up for the job. Powell-mania, John F. Harris, a Clinton biographer recalled years later, “was driving Clinton to distraction.

“The interest in Powell was an implicit rebuke of the incumbent,” Harris wrote in The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. “It was all the more maddening for Clinton because he, too, generally respected Powell, even as he thought his reputation was overblown.”

In any case, the “symbolism of an African American under serious consideration for the presidency makes the Powell phenomenon historic even before he decides his course of action,” as the Baltimore Sun observed in October 1995.

During those heady days, Powell seemed “ever-cautious and invariably hedged when asked about seeking the presidency in 1996,” as I noted in 1995. Powell’s moderate-to-liberal views on social issues didn’t quite coincide with mainstream Republican thinking in the mid-1990s. But his standing and broad popularity easily eclipsed the appeal of other leading Republicans, including Bob Dole.

Powell had written in his memoir that were he to enter politics “it will not be because of high popularity ratings in the polls. . . . And I would certainly not run simply because I saw myself as the ‘Great Black Hope,’ providing a role model for African Americans or a symbol to whites of racism overcome. I would enter only because I had a vision for this country.”

Finally, in early November 1995, Powell announced he would seek no elected office in 1996, declaring that a run for the presidency was “a calling that I do not yet hear.”

In reaching the decision, the New York Times said, Powell had resisted “an enormous popular drumbeat for his candidacy” and had “spared Clinton what … might have been the political fight of his life.”

Clinton easily defeated Dole in the 1996 election.