Clark knows how to fight
_______________________________________
By Mark Silva
Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted October 12, 2003
orlandosentinel.com
FORT DODGE, Iowa -- Wesley Clark, retired four-star general and newest enlistee in the campaign for president, strides onto a basketball court in front of 250 curious Iowans. Loudspeakers pump the lyrics of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."
"If it's a ring of fire, by God, let's bring it on," Clark declares. "Let's take that ring of fire all the way to the White House. Let's put that current administration inside the ring of fire, and let 'em leave."
The newcomer to this ring is a compact combatant with a pointed chin and ready smile. He is humorous about past exploits and pranks. But he is humorless for the mission ahead, with a fire to win that has consumed him for much of his life.
A registered Democrat for just nine days and presidential candidate for a few weeks, Clark instantly has become a fearsome force.
With astonishing speed, Clark became a head-to-head competitor with President Bush and surged ahead of eight other long-running Democrats in national polling. He was even drawing fire from nervous rivals in the latest televised debate of the Democrats last week.
Clark, 58, may be a newcomer to professional politics. But he possesses obvious winning ways, a turn-it-on charm and quick candor under questioning. He also possesses the mind-set of the boy from Little Rock, Ark., who graduated first in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, schooled in the adage of the late Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "There is no substitute for victory."
"He's not a macho, swaggering type," says Ted Hill, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology who was Clark's roommate at West Point. "He's intense, but he's humorous and he's charming. He's extremely smart. When we were teenagers, he told me he was going to be No. 1 in the class. It wasn't a brag. It was a prediction."
Clark explains: "It's a way of just competing with yourself."
Clark reached the near-pinnacle of military power, supreme commander of American and NATO forces in Europe. Yet he won a 78-day air war in Kosovo only to be removed by a secretary of defense who chafed at Clark's penchant for cutting channels to pursue his agenda. Clark acknowledges in his own first book: "Four-star ego was a powerful and particularly dangerous force."
His own former commander has publicly questioned his integrity; other officers call him abrasive and even reckless. Yet others praise his leadership.
Clark started his campaign as a concept: a warrior who can compete with the president at a time of international conflict and economic problems at home.
But he swiftly has filled in the blanks on the campaign circuit, billing himself as "pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-health, pro-education" and an advocate of affirmative action. He is "uneasy" about capital punishment, arguing that it is meted out unfairly, and suggests a wholesale review: "Unpack all those cases on death row."
When he completed 34 years of military service, Clark wistfully told a college-campus crowd: "I was either going to be the loneliest Republican in America, or I was going to be a happy Democrat."
He is painting not-so-subtle contrasts with the Republican president.
"I'm reasonably intelligent," says Clark, a Rhodes scholar, when asked by one voter what qualifies him for the presidency. "I read."
With a comedian's timing, he repeats from city to city a line asserting that Bush will need more than a brother-governor in Florida to win re-election: "There are already some polls out that look pretty good. . . . If it keeps going like this, he's going to need brothers in the 49 other states to win this election."
'He speaks to you'
In encounters with voters, Clark exudes warmth and genuineness.
"I think the guy is real," says Dave Loney, a retired firefighter from Iowa City who drove three hours to see Clark in Fort Dodge.
"He hasn't wasted his life preparing himself to be a professional politician," Loney says. "He doesn't speak above you. He speaks to you."
Clark is saying what voters in the early-contest states of Iowa and New Hampshire want to hear: The war with Iraq was wrong. Yet, as one who has fought two wars, he maintains war should be the "last, last, last" resort -- as he tells airline mechanics filling an Oklahoma union hall: "Do anything else first."
Still, he is not saying what many Americans want to hear about a conflict claiming more American lives each week.
"Now we're there, and we need to make the best of it," says Clark, arguing that the United Nations must take control of the political redevelopment of Iraq but the American military must maintain security for now. "There is no easy way to an exit strategy. What we want is a successful exit strategy."
This is an unsatisfying answer for Howard Larson, an elderly Republican in Fort Dodge upset with the continuing death toll.
"But it's an honest answer," Clark says in an interview later. "You've got to tell the people the truth. My campaign is about telling the truth."
'Stand up for yourself'
His directness has rubbed some superiors the wrong way.
"The mission is never about getting promoted. It's about doing your job. . . . You give people your honest opinion in a direct way," says Clark, who considers his career basic training for leading a nation.
The last Supreme Allied Commander Europe who sought the presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, became the 11th general to win it.
"I'm not in this campaign just to make a statement," Clark tells the Orlando Sentinel. "It is my intention to become the next president of the United States."
Wesley Kanne Clark was born in Chicago on Dec. 23, 1944.
His father, Benjamin Kanne, was a lawyer and politician. His father died shortly before his son turned 4, and his mother moved him to live with her parents in Little Rock, where she married a banker named Victor Clark.
The boy's father was Jewish, but Clark was raised as a Baptist -- his mother explaining later that she wanted to protect him from prejudice.
He converted to Catholicism in Vietnam, and today speaks about political affairs in religious terms -- he calls the war in Iraq a "sin of commission," and the world's refusal to intervene in Rwanda's bloodshed a "sin of omission."
His senior year in high school, Clark and a friend both were nominated as homeroom representative to the student council. They agreed to vote for each other. But when they put their heads down, each raised a hand for the friend. Clark lost.
"I was just being nice," says Clark, explaining a lesson he learned: "If somebody nominates you for something . . . you should stand up for yourself."
He won scholarships at Duke and Georgia Tech but wanted West Point.
He was first in his class by the end of first semester, Hill remembers. On a scholarship to Oxford University in England, Clark earned a master's in philosophy and economics.
In the summer of 1969, Clark went to Vietnam and led an infantry company.
"I made it for seven weeks, and I came home on a stretcher," says Clark, who was shot in the hand, shoulder, leg and hip on patrol north of Saigon.
His roommate from West Point was in Japan, where Clark was convalescing.
"The ward was very depressing," says Hill, who showed up at midnight with a wheelchair. "We decided to make a break. We made it out of the ward and out of the hospital. We went to the Officers' Club. Neither one of us drink very much, but we got completely soused."
A lighter side
That wasn't the last prank the two friends played.
At their 20th West Point reunion, Hill, single, was staying with a girlfriend on campus, a rule-breaker. Clark was in Europe, uncertain he could make the reunion. In the middle of the night, Hill heard pounding on the door: " 'We know you're in there.' It was Wes Clark, and about a half-hour later he sent the MPs."
"It was an ambush," says Clark -- he and his wife, Gertrude, remembering well Hill's revenge. "He glued the lock on my room so I couldn't use the deadbolt. At three in the morning, the phone rang: 'Mr. Clark, this is your wake-up call.' Then he walked in with a bucket of water and dumped it on me."
This was the light side of an officer making heavy gains in the Army. Clark made brigadier general at 43 and became commander of the National Training Center and then the 1st Cavalry Division. As director of planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he helped negotiate the 1995 Dayton Accord for peace in Bosnia.
One admirer, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, told The Washington Post: "This is no insult to Army culture, a culture I love and admire, but he was way too bright, way too articulate, way too good-looking and perceived to be way too wired to fit in with our culture. He was not one of the good old boys."
Another fan, then-Defense Secretary William Perry, overrode Army recommendations of other candidates and insisted on Clark to lead the U.S. Southern Command in 1996. Another, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili, overrode the Army and made Clark the Supreme Allied Commander Europe in 1997.
Conflicts
But from the start, Clark crossed swords with the next chairman, Gen. Hugh Shelton, and then-Defense Secretary William Cohen. Clark wrote about their conflicts in his first book, Waging Modern War, published after his retirement in 2000.
Much of this involved the run-up to war with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, with Clark maintaining that NATO forces must plan for and execute a ground war if necessary.
"The Pentagon wanted success . . . but sought to keep the mission as limited and as risk-free as possible," Clark wrote. "Secretary Cohen wasn't comfortable with my making the kind of statement that I believed was required to warn off Milosevic and his thugs. . . . These were differences that would bedevil my command."
Clark, concerned that bombing was not working, pressed for low-flying assaults with Apache helicopters. This could have meant American casualties.
Clark's insistence on a riskier strategy and his direct dealings with White House staff, angering Pentagon leaders, came back to haunt him after winning the air war in June 2000. The next month, Shelton removed him from NATO's command.
Shelton, also retired, has made his dislike for Clark publicly known. Shelton spoke at a public forum covered by the Los Altos Town Crier in California:
"I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. I'm not going to say whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat. I'll just say Wes won't get my vote."
Clark replies: "Well, he never said anything like that to me when we were working together. . . . The basic thing is, I was always the kind of military guy, I told the boss what I thought. . . . Some people probably took it personally."
Observers say Clark's conflicts are part of the military's own politics.
"Anyone who can command NATO . . . knows what it's like to hold political office," says Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.
GOP voting record
Clark's first mission is convincing Democrats he is one of them. Clark has voted for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and even George H.W. Bush. His vote for president turned Democratic with Bill Clinton, and later Al Gore.
He didn't register as a Democrat until Oct. 3, nonpartisan before that.
In this campaign, Clark has confronted the obstacles of unfamiliar territory. He has agreed to repay colleges and other hosts that paid him to speak since becoming a candidate, for fear of violating finance laws. He lost his first manager when a cluster of advisers drawn mostly from Clinton's team promoted their own choice.
Retired Army Maj. Jeff Showers, an instructor in military science at Drake University, has welcomed Clark twice in Iowa -- once when the university conferred an honorary degree, and then the day Clark returned to town as a candidate.
"There's going to be a lot of controversy about him running for president," Showers says. "But most military people have an end-state in mind. They know where they want to get us, and they have a plan. I think he can get us there."
Mark Silva can be reached at msilva@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5034.
Copyright © 2003, Orlando Sentinel |
