Powell’s Book Launch May Recast Presidential Politics : Media: General hasn’t said if he’s running. But the stir around him has the attention of campaign tacticians.

The four-star launching this week of retired Gen. Colin L. Powell’s memoirs may move this season’s presidential politics onto a new battleground.

With 950,000 copies of Powell’s book, “My American Journey,” scheduled to appear in bookstores this weekend, some of the nation’s top political journalists have been scrambling to read the 613-page work and interview its famous author. They have been nudging and scooping each other in daily skirmishes over Powell tidbits and giving the general and his autobiography front-page headlines, top radio news slots and prime-time television.

Powell has not announced that he is running for President, mind you. Technically, he is only selling a book. But tacticians from other political camps can’t help but notice how many of the nation’s cameras and tape recorders are now aimed at Powell.

All of which has caused political wizards and campaign hopefuls to wonder: Is the book tour the political gimmick for 1996, the way the talk show circuit was in 1992?

“In the media age, it may be that Colin Powell is not going to New Hampshire; he’s publishing a book,” says Howard Fineman of Newsweek.

The tour “will be the first test of him as a politician, whether he has declared or not,” says Tony Blankley, the spokesman for House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

Gingrich, of course, is another example of a politician who has tried to ride the book circuit this pre-presidential season. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) has redone the introduction to his 1976 basketball memoir and may be taking it on the road if he takes a shot at the presidency. Texas billionaire Ross Perot has a book on Medicare that follows him wherever he speaks, and even former Vice President Dan Quayle is said to be working on a manuscript that could be just the thing for clarifying his ideas and values.

Other politicians, of course, have written books before they ran for President--from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s World War II memoirs to Jimmy Carter’s “Why Not the Best?”

But mostly the media digested those works as merely one slice of a candidate’s background. Powell’s book tour, by contrast, has the feel of a campaign launch. The tour “is a sort of coming-out party for me,” Powell told Time magazine. “The last two years I’ve done no interviews, no television, and people are wondering what Forrest Gump Colin Powell stands for.”

Now he has begun to answer that question, revealing uniformly cautious and moderate views.

In an interview with Barbara Walters, which ABC News released in part Monday, Powell said he supports a woman’s right to have an abortion, although he would “hope she would carry the child to term and then put the child up for adoption”; that he “benefited from affirmative action” but dislikes quotas; that he supports gun control, although he owns guns, himself, and that he opposes organized prayer in schools but supports moments of silence.

To gain maximum publicity for such revelations, the general and his publishers at Random House have spent months of strategic planning, coupled with a few tactical adjustments in the last few days. The publicists have laid on everything from the obligatory television talk shows and a New York media party (where Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw mingled with Bianca Jagger and Norman Mailer) to a book-signing tour that includes not only famous national bookstores but also a Wal-Mart in Ft. Worth and a Price Costco in Orange County.

Random House Publisher Harry Evans likened the wave of media attention to a kind of storybook miracle--one that may be necessary for the publishing house to recoup the $6-million advance for the book. “We planted the seed two years ago. Now, suddenly, it’s Jack and the beanstalk.”

The overnight growth of interest in Powell and his book is partly luck. For all Evans’ pre-publication maneuvering, Random House could not have known two years ago that the press and public in late 1995 would be desperately searching for an inspiring new presidential candidate. But the publisher and Powell have also exploited this political vacuum--in part by keeping Powell from saying whether his book launch is really targeting the White House.

Not revealing any political plans appears to be part of the Powell strategy. If he announced that he would be running, candidate Powell immediately would become a target for investigative reporters whose job is to ferret out embarrassing details in a potential President’s background. If he said he would not be in the race, the general could become just another old soldier trotting around the country selling war stories.

Asked whether Random House advised Powell to keep his presidential plans a mystery, Evans said he told the general: “I can’t control your life, but from my point of view, I’d rather this not be seen as a political book and not be a platform for public office.”

Recognizing that they had a “hot” author, Random House last month also asked those who requested advance copies of the book to sign elaborate confidentiality agreements prohibiting reporters from confirming any part of the manuscript with other sources or from disclosing “either the terms or the fact” of the agreement.

Some reporters balked, particularly at efforts to stop them from checking the facts or some of Powell’s assertions in the book. At the Boston Globe, for example, Benjamin Bradlee Jr., assistant managing editor in charge of projects, said he signed the agreement understanding that it meant that he would withhold the information until the agreed publishing date, a standard practice in journalism.

“But there’s no way I’m going to stop calling sources,” he said.

After extended negotiations with Random House, both the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal late last week were promised books in advance and interviews with Powell. Both newspapers agreed to delay talking to sources until Monday, but told Random House they would not keep the agreement secret and would check the book’s assertions before publishing their stories.

The full range of orchestration by Random House and Powell has already hit a few sour notes. Time originally bought the first rights to publish excerpts starting this Sunday, but Newsweek found a bootleg copy of the book and published a cover story a week early.

In the ancient tradition of walloping the competition and also belittling it, Newsweek described the book as being “as carefully worded as a diplomatic communique.” The description comes perilously close to suggesting that the media may be making an enormous fuss over a big, dull book.

Newsweek’s scoop irritated Time editors, who demanded a last-minute interview with Powell and pared their payment for the excerpts down from $300,000 to $75,000.

In soothing Time by granting an interview, Powell and his handlers ruffled feathers at ABC News, where Walters had expected to air the first interview with Powell. Walters spent five days interviewing Powell for an hourlong program set to air Friday.

In response, Walters released portions of the interview Monday. That, in turn, perturbed other news organizations that had interviewed Powell but had agreed to embargoes.

“We’re just now thinking about it all over again,” said Andrew Rosenthal, Washington editor of the New York Times. “Either this is the most adroit or the most clumsy publicity campaign I’ve seen in a long time.”

Whichever the case, many of those watching this launch are betting that it is really aimed for Pennsylvania Avenue.

After Random House’s private dinner Wednesday in New York, for example, several in the crowd described his toast as a “a pure campaign speech.” One listener, Toni Goodale, a Republican activist who is working for California Gov. Pete Wilson’s campaign, said that although the political ambition was there, the general also sounded like a man selling a book. “Really, he performed both missions at once. “He covered both bases.”