The General
Esquire Magazine August 2003, Volume 140, Issue 2
By Tom Junod
dg> Too long to post, but good reading
The smart money doesn't give the leading Democratic contenders much of a chance against W. Maybe no one has a shot. But there's one guy who can make it interesting.
OKAY, LET'S LEAVE ASIDE the question of which party in American politics represents the interests of the Philistines and which the Israelites, as well as the question of whether a president who dons a warrior's togs for the sake of appearance can reasonably be compared to the mighty Goliath. Let's put aside value judgments and stick to strategy. The Democrats are sore afraid. The Republicans have control of the battlefield and stand nearly unchallenged, hurling foul oaths. They stand behind their champion, and until the Democrats muster the courage to challenge him, the Republicans can plot their destruction outright. But who will make such a challenge? The Republican champion is, after all, the Commander in Chief. He has at his command vast armies. He has claimed victory in two wars. Eight men and one woman have signaled their readiness to join the fight, but, as it says in the Bible, the champion brandishes a sword, a spear, and a shield, while growling, through Karl Rove: "Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with Lieberman, and Edwards, and Graham, and Gephardt, and Dean, and Sharpton, and Mosley Braun, and Kucinich, and even Kerry? I curse ye, by your gods."
And the Democrats, when they saw this man, fled from him and wondered where they would find a warrior of their own, a man the Republican's equal in blood and his superior in vision and mercy.
They wondered who might challenge George W. Bush and be their champion.
WE ALL KNOW WHAT HAPPENED on September 11, 2001. It was the day that war came to our shores, and so it was the day that changed this country, if not the world. And of course we all remember where we were when we realized what had happened, not only to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon but to us . . . when we acknowledged, if only to ourselves, that things would never be the same. For instance, General Wesley K. Clark (Ret.), former Commander in Chief (or CinC) of the United States European Command and former Supreme Allied Commander (SACEUR) of NATO, remembers that he was in Little Rock, on the twenty-fifth floor of the Stephens Building, where he was working as a consultant for Stephens Inc., an investment bank. He'd retired the year before as a four-star general. He'd written a book on his experiences prosecuting NATO's 1999 war in Kosovo called Waging Modern War. He was serving on numerous corporate boards. He was making real money for the first time in his life. He was back in the town where he'd done most of his growing up. Hell, for the first time since he went off to West Point in 1962, he and his wife, Gert, had a real home, one outside the fluid environs of the U. S. Army. For thirty-four years, he'd been serving his country by studying, teaching, planning, or making war, and now he was finally putting war behind him. People still addressed him as General Clark and called him sir, but more and more he was able to reconceive the notion of public service along the lines of "making $40 million and giving it away, like George Soros." Then the planes hit New York and Washington and the Stephens Building in Little Rock was evacuated. General Wesley Clark (Ret.) was out in the street, along with everyone else, wondering what was going on. CNN—which had hired the general as an expert analyst in matters of war and national security—was calling, but, as he says now, "I didn't know anything. No one did. Was there some kind of biological agent on the plane that was now spreading in the wind? Did they have a bomb? Did they have the bomb? Was the entire country under attack? What I remember from that day was fear. Everywhere. We were in Little Rock, and they closed the building. . . ."
So, yes, the general remembers September 11. But he also remembers September 13, because on that day, as the shock began to wear off, some people in the ruling party started figuring out that it might not be such a bad thing if Americans were sore afraid. That was the day the general received a phone call from a friend of his, a Republican in Arkansas who'd heard talk that the general was contemplating running for office in his home state as a Democrat. "You going to come over to our side now?" is what the general remembers his friend saying. "Because there is no political future in the Democratic party. The American people are never going to trust the Democrats with national security now. The Democrats are done. The Democrats are over."
And so they are, unless . . .
BUT WAIT A SECOND. He's a general, for God's sake. Democrats are supposed to distrust generals. Generals are supposed to distrust Democrats. Military values are supposed to be antithetical to civilian values and vice versa. The general says it himself: "In the Clinton administration, any use of military force was regarded as a failure." Are the Democrats such a lost tribe that they could come to count on a man of war—a man who is virtually the embodiment of military force—to muster their challenge? Are they so hapless and defeated that they would pin their hopes upon a man who has known nothing but war for thirty-four of his fifty-eight years?
This is not to say that the general is not a nice man. He is a very nice man, earnest, eager to please, even kind of goofy, in the way of retired military men who still say things like "with it" and "neat." He just knows very little of civilian life, and even on returning home to Little Rock, he depended on an old rich man named Rollie Remmel to show him around, to introduce him to people and take him duck hunting. The general is a pretty good hunter, as might be expected, and typically gets his allotment of five birds with five shots. But old Rollie's an ebullient fellow, and when his ebullience rises up concerning the general's proficiency as a hunter, this is what he says: "But, now, hunting men! That's real hunting! And [the general] excels at it!" The general doesn't like this kind of talk and has to shush Rollie up, but that's the kind of life he's led. Look into his eyes. They're not eyes so much as scanning devices—not quite predatory, no, but sort of an odd combination of jittery and calm, of patient and imploring, alert and exhausted, set back there in the hollows and shadows of his lean, handsome, deliberate face.
He gets his hair cut every two weeks. He swims every day he can, even when he's on the road, and when he can't he runs. Indeed, from the general's head to the general's toes, there's no part of him absent the imprint of his overarching will: He's taut and springy, with wide and slightly hunched shoulders that flare from the constriction of his narrow waist. He is in the habit of sticking his hands in his pockets, especially when he's making a speech, but even his nonchalance is purposeful. People at his speeches can be heard to remark, "He's small" when he glides to the stump, but he's not really; he's around five ten and not so much diminutive as compressed, like a man who never exhales. His stride is at once jaunty and athletic and somewhat artificial, like the stride of a man who has devoted time to teaching himself how to walk . . . as, in fact, he has, after getting shot four times in Vietnam. Taught himself to walk again, without a limp, despite the fact that a quarter of his calf muscle was gone; taught himself to shake hands manfully, despite the loss of the muscle around his right thumb. He had to learn those things because, as his wife says, he was desperately afraid of being profiled out of the Army. Can't be a general if you're a gimp. The only thing he couldn't do was teach himself how to play basketball again, because no matter how many hours he spent alone in the gym practicing his foul shots, he couldn't stabilize the ball. . . .
And so, yes, Wesley K. Clark is what the people of the United States of America generally like their presidents to be—or at least feel comfortable with their presidents being: a veteran. But there's more to it than that, of course; he's more than just a veteran, a guy who heard the call of his country and marched and drilled and slogged and shot people and got shot at and did his time and opened up a nice little law practice somewhere. He chose the Army. He was offered scholarships everywhere, but he chose West Point, where he finished first in his class as a plebe, first in his class as a senior, and went off to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He loved the Army. He'll tell you he loved it: "I loved it too much! I loved it except for two days—the day I got shot and the day I was told I had to retire." Yes, he'll tell you that, too. He'll say that in his speeches to the adoring crowds: "I was fired." After he won the war in Kosovo. After he stayed the genocidal hand of Slobodan Milosevic. After he served as the very fulcrum of the tension between military and civilian that characterized the Clinton era. The Army broke his heart, but only because he loved it so much—and, anyway, that's the deal with the Army. Listen: "Right now, the military is the only action agency in the United States government, so any time anyone wants something done, the military is being called upon to do it. But that's the trouble. The military knocked things down in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's very good at knocking things down. But now we have to build things, and the military's not very good at building things. It's not about building things. It's about allowing what you've built to be destroyed. It's about allowing people you love to be killed."
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