The General on the Edge
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Democrats wary of Dean are still searching for a savior. Is Wes Clark their man?
By Howard Fineman
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 8 issue
Wesley Clark always wants to be the leader, always wants to prove that he is as brave as he is brainy. In the summer of ’59, at the age of 14, that meant jumping buck naked off the top of an old railroad bridge into a stream of uncertain depth.
CLARK WAS IN training to be a counselor at the Boys Club camp near his hometown of Little Rock, Ark. To win that honor—and to do a penance for a prank—all the counselors-in-waiting were challenged by the camp’s director, a World War II Army veteran. The objective: to make a 40-foot leap into shallow Little Maumelle Creek. Only four of the 10 did so. “Somewhat to my surprise,” Clark recalled, he was one of them. “The afterglow lasted a good two weeks, at least. Or maybe 40 years. You have to have courage and faith,” he wrote many years later. “You have to expect to go through some trials to be a leader.”
Late last week, operating out of an unprepossessing office in Little Rock, Clark, now 58, was measuring another leap, this one into the Democratic presidential race. “He’s out there on the edge,” said a close friend. A retired four-star general, Clark was the first commander to lead NATO in war, a successful campaign against the Serbs in Kosovo in 1999. But he was relieved of his command, and forced to retire, by bad bureaucratic luck and top-brass resentment of his high-profile style and back-channeling with the Clinton White House. Since then, Clark has built himself into a national figure, generating an ostensibly independent movement to “draft” him—in the manner of his hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower—to run. He scoffs at the notion that it is too late. “I’ve got recon out there,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I’ve got some heavy artillery that can come in. I’ve got good logistics, and I’ve got strategic mobility.” By late last week his closest friends were saying it looked like a “go.” Hoo-ah!
Clark would get attention, and perhaps more. “There’s an opening,” says Jennifer Donahue of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics. “People here are still looking for a knight in shining armor.” In fact, what many Democrats are looking for is a credible alternative to Dr. Howard Dean, whose nomination they think would lead to a disaster akin to George McGovern’s humiliation at the hands of Richard Nixon in 1972. “The campaign is turning into Dean versus a player to be named later,” says a top strategist for one of the front runner’s rivals. But no one is sure any of the existing candidates can stop the former Vermont governor. Many yearn for Sen. Hillary Clinton—she was all the talk at Vernon Jordan’s party on the Vineyard recently, insiders say—and even Al Gore got yet another glance at a MoveOn.org speech in New York. But both say flatly that they will not run.
Which is where Clark comes in. He is as antiwar as Dean—and as liberal on social issues. He supports gay civil unions and abortion rights, and op-poses unspecified portions of Bush’s tax cuts. But Clark is from the other side of the ’60s: a West Pointer and a Rhodes scholar from the South who won a Silver Star for valor in Vietnam and who was despised by the Pentagon E-Ring for, if anything, being too gung-ho in Kosovo. A dedicated internationalist and critic of old-style ground wars, Clark opposed the invasion of Iraq and correctly predicted the problems the Coalition has been encountering there.
And he has the stars to go after the commander in chief. Clark harshly criticized George W. Bush’s speech of last week, in which the president portrayed Iraq as the central theater in the war on worldwide terrorism. “It was the best way to put a face on his hip-shot response of ‘bring ‘em on’,” he told NEWSWEEK. “You can’t win without a vision, and that means working with allies. It means using force when it is appropriate, and as a last resort, and not because it looks easy. Because, as we’re finding out in Iraq, it isn’t easy.”
Neither, he is sure to find out, is running for president. It is late. And though Clark might be able to raise lots of cash and promote himself in cable-TV debates, he has no organization up and running. Could he angling for the No. 2 job, or merely teasing the press in advance of his new book? West Pointers steeped in a lifetime of rigid military culture tend to drown in the muddy waters of electoral politics. Ike was one exception. Poised on the bridge, Clark was ready to see if he could be another.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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