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| PROFILE |
| Last update 14 Dec. 2003 |
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PROFILE: Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander
Copyright © 2000 Nando Media
Copyright © 2000 Reuters News Service
BRUSSELS (March 23, 1999 3:18 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - As NATO Supreme Commander
Europe., U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark faces the sobering
prospect of directing NATO air forces in the first attack on a
sovereign state in the 50-year history of the U.S.-European alliance.
His staff respectfully refer to him as "The Boss."
Clark, 54, is gray-haired, muscled and lean with a profile
you might find on an old Roman coin. He swims every morning
wherever his busy travel schedulers can locate a pool. Plain,
freshly made popcorn is one of his preferred snacks.
He weighs his words extremely carefully and directs a
penetrating stare at his audience from large, steady eyes,
gauging whether they have got the message or need to be told
again.
The tight restrictions placed on him by his role prevent the
general from speaking openly about NATO politics. He plays
strictly by the rules and at times his replies to questions that
stray beyond the purely military can be cryptic to the point of
bafflement. But strong opinions clearly lurk.
Clark graduated first in his class at the U.S. military
academy at West Point and went on to study politics, philosophy
and economics at Oxford University under a Rhodes scholarship.
But the greatest influence in his youth was the Vietnam War,
the watershed experience for most American males coming of age
in the 1960s. As an infantryman in command of a mechanized company, Clark
saw combat in Vietnam and was wounded in action, receiving the
Silver Star.
He was schooled in combat of a different sort as a White
House aide in the 1970s and is rated for his political and
diplomatic skills, as well as his soldier's four stars.
Like President Clinton, a fellow Rhodes scholar only
two years his junior, Clark was brought up in Little Rock,
Ark.
The two men never knew each other in their youth but Clark
became Clinton's military adviser for Bosnia as the United
States involvement in trying to end that war deepened.
Along with Balkans troubleshooter Richard Holbrooke and his
aide Chris Hill, Clark knows Yugoslavian President Slobodan
Milosevic from previous battles. He went the distance with the Serbian leader
during the Dayton talks that brought peace to Bosnia.
He does an amusing impression of Milosevic. But he has not
been amused by his behavior in Bosnia or Kosovo, and recently
he gives the impression of having lost hope of convincing the
man by words that he cannot hope to defy NATO this time.
Deeply committed to the process of forging a peaceful and
prosperous Bosnia out of the ruins and lingering hatred in 1995,
Clark now faces the risk that Kosovo could wreck one of his
proudest achievements, unless the allies can check it.
He does not seem like a man who would flinch.
Clark was chosen to succeed Gen. George Joulwan who
retired two years ago.
"He's the man for the job," said a senior Pentagon
official at the time of the appointment. "Clark is bright,
scholarly and affable. And he can negotiate with presidents and
governments as well as dealing with military counterparts."
Clark moved to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe
(SHAPE), outside the Belgian town of Mons, from Panama, where he
was commander of U.S. forces in Latin America.
The general and his wife, Gertrude, have one son.
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| Newsweek |
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April 5, 1999
For Wes Clark, the U.S. general directing NATO's campaign against the Serbs, this fight is personal
By Christopher Dickey
The man called SACEUR—Supreme Allied Commander in Europe—brings a lot of personal history to the war he launched last week. Clark not only knows the rugged terrain of Yugoslavia, he knows the men he's attacking: he even talks to them on the phone. On the first day of fighting, hours before the bombs began to fall, Clark called a man he knows, the chief of the Yugoslav defense staff. Clark warned the general to keep the Yugoslav Navy in port, or else. The Serb officer listened and the ships stayed put.
Clark knows Slobodan Milosevic, too. As military adviser to U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Clark spent hundreds of hours with Milosevic and his staff during the negotiations that led to the Dayton peace accords. Holbrooke credits Clark with
a small but important break in the Dayton negotiations: finding a land route to serve as a safe corridor between Sarajevo and the town of Gorazde that would be acceptable to the Serbs. On the U.S. team, this path was known as "the Clark corridor."
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| On August 27, 1994, Clark, then director of strategy, plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Banja Luka, Bosnia, and met with Ratko Mladic |
And the general was once accused of being too civil to one of the region's worst villains. In a bit of bonhomie, Clark exchanged hats with Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander who was later indicted for some of the worst atrocities of the war. (Mladic is still at large.) But the hat exchange, Clark's associates say, only shows the general's determination to succeed as a diplomat.
His credentials as a warrior and military leader are impeccable. Because he's from Arkansas, because he, too, was a Rhodes scholar, and because, at 54, he's almost the same age as Bill Clinton, Clark is sometimes depicted as a Friend of Bill. Clinton knows Clark and likes him, a former Pentagon official told NEWSWEEK, but Clark's real ally at the White House is national-security adviser Sandy Berger. "Clark is very smart, quite political and will tend to be aggressive" as NATO commander, this source said. "He believes that this strategy will work—he's committed to it."
After graduating first in his class at West Point ('66) and finishing his master's at Oxford, Clark went to Southeast Asia. He won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart—he was wounded four times—in combat in Vietnam. In 1975-76, Clark became a White House fellow and worked for a while as an aide to the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In the Army, his career field has been in armor—tanks.
So Clark knows what heavy metal can do, and he also knows just how vulnerable a tank can be. Both understandings will serve him well in the difficult days ahead.
With Gregory L. Vistica in Washington
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| The New Republic |
Wes Clark wages a two-front war.
General Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme allied commander, is one of the few American military officers who really knows Slobodan Milosevic. In fact, he's been dealing with the Serbian leadership longer than almost anyone else in the Army or the Clinton administration. As a result, explains a State Department official, "Wes is someone who really understands the Serbs' evil." And, in his initial briefings on Operation Allied Force, Clark made that understanding abundantly clear. "President Milosevic and his military leaders should understand that there is no sanctuary for them," Clark declared to reporters in Brussels on March 25, right after the first night of bombing. Yet, as the air war drags on, Clark himself might need sanctuary--from his many detractors within the U.S. military.
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Almost as soon as the bombs started falling on Belgrade, harsh--and usually unattributed--words began to seep out of the Pentagon and other redoubts of the U.S. military, and the sniping has only increased in recent weeks. Clark is "elitist and aloof," a colonel who worked for him told me. "Frankly, he's more Westmoreland--handsome, attuned to political considerations--than Schwarzkopf," says a retired general. Not surprisingly, conservatives in the press have chimed in. Robert Novak derided Clark, who grew up in Little Rock and won a Rhodes Scholarship, as "the perfect model of a 1990s political four-star general"--someone who earned his stars by being a Clinton crony. David Hackworth, the retired colonel turned pundit, went even further, dubbing Clark the "ultimate perfumed prince." Hackworth's insult, according to a retired Army officer, "has shot around the military."
Take these critical words with a grain of salt. Sure, the air campaign over Yugoslavia has, to this point, been a failure, which means Clark, as the campaign's commanding officer, must take his share of the blame. But is Clark really a new Westmoreland? Or is he something else--a casualty of the military's antipathy toward intervening in foreign conflicts at the behest of a civilian leader it doesn't particularly like or respect or even trust?
Part of the disdain for Clark among many military types comes down to plain jealousy. As an all-American swimmer who graduated first in his class from West Point in 1966, Clark has always been an object of envy. "The Army, like the church, has a hierarchy of seven layers," says retired Lieutenant General Theodore G. Stroup Jr., who attended West Point with Clark. "Some guys move up to be a bishop faster than others. Clark moved very fast." After serving in Vietnam, where he was wounded while leading a heroic assault on a North Vietnamese encampment, Clark came home to plum assignments: first a 1975-76 White House fellowship in the Office of Management and Budget, then a stint on the staff of Alexander Haig, at NATO, before joining the elite office of the chief of staff of the Army in 1983. He earned his third star in 1994 with a promotion to director of strategy for the Joint Staff, and his fourth came as commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama from 1996-97.
Along the way, Clark's cerebral approach did not endear him to the Army brass or foot soldiers. "He's not the kind of guy that inspires a willingness to get yourself killed on principle," says one officer. An order from Clark, the officer adds, "is just an order." Clark also weakened his standing in the Army when he accepted the appointment with the Joint Chiefs. Since his joint position required him to work in tandem with all four branches rather than representing the Army's interests alone, resentment of him within the Army only intensified. John Hillen, a retired Army captain and currently a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, admires Clark but admits that many in the Army don't; in their minds, he says, Clark is "outside the system."
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But petty jealousy and personality conflicts alone cannot account for Clark's difficulties. Clark is mainly reviled by those who believe that, in leading the current Kosovo campaign, he has strayed from the "Powell Doctrine," which holds that, if and when the United States fights, it should apply overwhelming force suddenly and swiftly. Ironically, Clark--like many officers shaped by the Vietnam experience--subscribed to this doctrine long before it bore Powell's name. As an Army captain in 1975, he wrote an Army Command and General Staff College thesis (excerpted in the April 26 Time magazine) arguing that "once committed to actual combat, anything less than overwhelming and rapid military success for the intervening power will be diplomatically disastrous." Later, as commanding general at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, Clark trained troops in the techniques of breaching trench defenses that would help win the Gulf war. "Wes Clark's military enjoyed a great renaissance," says Boston University's Andrew Bacevich, himself a former Army colonel (and TNR contributor). "If you wanted to see that renaissance, Fort Irwin was the place to go.... That renaissance was guided by the absolute determination of officers never to let Vietnam happen again."
But Clark's experience in the Balkans shook him up. Clark learned that the Powell Doctrine, while sound in theory, could be a cover for inaction--armor-plated isolationism. With his appointment to the Joint Chiefs as the strategy officer, Clark was fated to be involved in the Balkan mess. At first, things didn't go so well. In 1994, for instance, Clark infamously exchanged gifts with Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, who was later indicted for war crimes. Clark handed Mladic his hat; Mladic gave him his--plus a bottle of plum brandy and a handgun with a Cyrillic inscription.
But Clark eventually found his footing. He worked closely with Richard Holbrooke, then assistant secretary of state for Europe and the Clinton administration's point man for the Balkans. The bond between the two men was forged on August 19, 1995, when they were traveling over Mount Igman, a famously dangerous road to Sarajevo. A French armored personnel carrier, which was transporting several of their colleagues and traveling behind them, plunged down the mountainside. Clark bravely rappelled down the mined area only to discover that three of his colleagues had perished. "He and I were bonded from that moment," says Holbrooke. "Clark is Mount Igman. He is a can-do general."
Indeed, Clark was a key ally to Holbrooke--one of the few military officers who supported his relentless efforts to deal forcefully with the Serbs and end the war in Bosnia. Clark was instrumental in arranging for the August and September 1995 air strikes against the marauding Bosnian Serbs. And, according to Holbrooke's memoir To End a War, Clark clashed with his superior in rank, the crusty Admiral Leighton Smith, when Smith sought to extend a brief bombing pause. Holbrooke recalls Clark sat in an American Embassy car on the Cologne airfield, while Smith yelled at Clark on the telephone for disagreeing with him. General John Shalikashvili, then head of the Joint Chiefs, went so far as to tell Holbrooke that the Army could remove Clark. But Holbrooke stood by the general. In the end, Shalikashvili made sure Clark got his fourth star.
At the Dayton negotiations in November 1995, Clark dismayed his fellow military officers by arguing for a strong civilian presence along with the multinational peacekeeping force in Bosnia, and he advocated a robust police force that would have authority to make arrests. Clark also persuaded Milosevic--with the help of a classified imaging system called PowerScene that created a video-game-like three-dimensional map of Bosnia--to allow for a substantial corridor between Sarajevo and Gorazde.
Today, Clark is experiencing numerous frustrations. Certainly, in his public statements, he has shown a willingness to wage war against the Serbs. But a number of those statements have been contradicted by NATO officials--sometimes in the span of minutes. Asked on CNN on the third day of the campaign whether he would bomb Serbian troops, Clark responded, "We will do this." But, just an hour later, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea demurred, "We are not going to systematically target troops." Then there was Clark's contention that "we are going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, and devastate and ultimately ... destroy these forces and their facilities and support." A NATO official told The Washington Times Clark's statement was "a slip of the tongue" and added, "No one's going to destroy the armed forces" of Serbia.
Even worse, Clark doesn't appear to be getting the tactical support he needs. Clark wanted Apache helicopters at the beginning of the campaign; the Apaches didn't arrive for four weeks--and they still haven't seen battle. Given Clark's eagerness to take on the Serbs, it's hard to believe that he wouldn't put ground troops in if he could.
Some in the military liken Clark's predicament to the one generals faced during Vietnam. In his recent book Dereliction of Duty--which has achieved a cult following among many junior officers--fast-rising officer H.R. McMaster portrays the Vietnam-era generals as a cowardly lot who chose to execute incompetent civilian orders rather than resign in protest. Indeed, the only thing that might endear Clark to his critics at this point would be his resignation.
Fortunately, Clark is not about to throw his stars on the table in a fit of pique. That would amount to ratifying a steady and dangerous trend in civilian-military relations over the past decade--namely, the loss of civilian control. It is true that Clark is taking orders from a civilian leadership--both in the United States and in Europe--that remains maddeningly equivocal. But it is just as relevant that Clark is contending with an increasingly independent military brass whose obsession with avoiding another Vietnam has helped trap the Clinton administration into avoiding ground troops, thereby rendering defeat more likely. Clark's impressive record suggests that, given the right tools, he is one of the few military leaders--or perhaps the only one--who could make a go of it in the Balkans. And yet, for all the talk of Clark being Clinton's pet, the irony is that Clinton's own inept strategy may end up delivering Clark into the hands of his Pentagon enemies.
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
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By Teya Vitu
BARSTOW, Calif. - Even as a one-star general in 1990, today's NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark carried the aura of a rising star in the Army.
Nine years ago, Clark commanded the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, 300 miles southeast of Carson City. The buzz among locals in nearby Barstow, Calif., was that Clark was on the fast track to four stars.
No other Fort Irwin commanding general since the NTC opened in 1982 has generated such attention. Several went on to three-star rank but Clark so far is the only Fort Irwin commander to reach the rank of full general.
While at Fort Irwin, Clark was among the youngest one-star generals in the Army. The local community sensed that Clark was on the way to becoming Army chief of staff.
Clark has yet to obtain that post but he has held high-profile positions since his Fort Irwin assignment from October 1989 to September 1991.
Clark went on to command the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, as a major general.
His promotion to lieutenant general in March 1994 took him to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as director of strategic plans and policy, called J5. He reported directly to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Shalikashvili.
The fourth star came in June 1996 and now Clark is supreme commander of the NATO forces engaged in battle in Yugoslavia.
Clark also played a key role the last time the United States military had a major engagement. During Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Clark headed the "enemy" forces training Army troops in war games at Fort Irwin.
The soldiers stationed at Fort Irwin serve as the opposing forces or OPFOR, and during Clark's tenure fought visiting Army troops using Soviet tactics. In the months following the invasion of Kuwait, the OPFOR adopted Iraqi tactics.
"We set up trench lines and obstacles that we believed would be over there," Clark said in a 1994 interview.
Following the Iraqi conflict, many soldiers who fought in the Persian Gulf claimed that the OPFOR at Fort Irwin was the most formidable enemy the Army could face. The Nevada Army National Guard has 49 of its 60 tanks stationed at Fort Irwin to fight alongside the OPFOR, manned with National Guard troops, spokeswoman Maj. Cindy Kirkland said.
Clark is a touch less personable and media savvy than other generals. His description of himself reflects that.
"I am a kind of hard-nosed, dusty boots armor man who knows what it takes to maneuver men," Clark said.
President Clinton nominated Clark for J5 and NATO positions. Both are Arkansas natives but Clark did not know Clinton while growing up.
As young men, both studied at Oxford University as Rhodes scholars but Clark left in August 1968, just before Clinton arrived. Clark did meet Clinton at a student conference in 1965 while he was a cadet at West Point and the future president was a student at Georgetown University.
"I was very impressed with him," Clark said. "I saw him as a future leader of consequence."
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| ANCESTRY |
May 3, 1999
THE GENERAL
By ELIZABETH BECKER
WASHINGTON -- The American general who is leading NATO's military operation to stop Serbian troops from killing and expelling Albanians from Kosovo discovered as an adult that he is the grandson of a Russian Jew who fled his country to escape the pogroms there a century ago.
Gen. Wesley Kanne Clark was raised as a Protestant in Little Rock, Ark., where he was brought up by his mother and stepfather, Victor Clark. He was ignorant of his ancestry, which disappeared from his life with the death of his father, Benjamin Jacob
Kanne when Wesley was 5 years old. He learned of his ethnic background when he was in his 20's and embraced the discovery, according to several family members.
Since President Slobodan Milosovic of Yugoslavia began the forced exodus of Albanians from Kosovo, many have drawn parallels with the expulsion of Jews from Russia and the Nazi mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust in Europe.
General Clark has not discussed his heritage with many people, sharing his belated discovery of his biological father's family and background with only a few close friends and his immediate family. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
But in interviews, some of his relatives and friends say that General Clark was inspired by the story of his grandfather's persecution and escape from his native land, and that his determination to defeat Milosevic is fed in part by his empathy for the victims of Serbian ethnic purges.
After he was married, while studying at Oxford from 1966 to 1968, Wesley Clark was contacted by his father's relatives and gradually became aware of who his father and grandparents were. Soon after, he met some of the members of his lost family. He then slowly became part of the Kanne family, beginning with the initial phone call from a cousin in the late 1960's and culminating with an invitation to his first cousin Barry Kanne to spend a quiet New Year dinner with him in Belgium this year.
General Clark also has become fluent in the Russian language and in the past three years has delved into the family history.
"He's visited my mother several times in the past two years to find out what he could about his father and grandfather -- she is the oldest living relative and the repository of the family history," said Barry Kanne, the general's first cousin and the son of Benjamin Kanne's only brother.
In the late 1890's, Jacob Nemerovsky, the general's grandfather, fled Russia in fear for his life during one of the episodic pogroms against Jews. According to the family, Nemerovsky found safety in Switzerland where he obtained a false passport under the family name of Kanne, which he used to immigrate to the United States.
"Wes and I talked about his family once on a military plane to Bosnia," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the negotiator of the Dayton peace plan. "I told him how my wife discovered she was Jewish in her 30's and he said, 'That's funny, I have a sort of similar story.'" (Another Clinton Administration official, Madeleine K. Albright, learned only after she was nominated as Secretary of State that her grandparents had died in concentration camps during the Holocaust.)
The Kanne family say they believe that General Clark has, in the Balkans crisis, called on discipline and motivation that reminds them of his father. Gen. John Shalikashvili, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a confidant of General Clark's, says that the general has been under "unbelievable stress" as the Kosovo air campaign has expanded.
"Clark has an infinite capacity for hard work and stress," General Shalikashvili said. "That's a characteristic of his -- he devotes all of his energies to get the job done and done right."
These were also characteristics of his father B. J. Kanne, who in a grainy 1927 newspaper photograph bears a remarkable resemblance to the man commanding the biggest European conflict since World War II. His father had made the news for resigning from his position as assistant prosecuting attorney in Chicago that year in order to "devote his entire time" to run for election as alderman of the Fourth Ward.
"He was very active in politics in Chicago, and a University of Chicago graduate," said Harriet Salk, an older cousin of General Clark who lives in a suburb outside the city. "And what a tall, good-looking guy."
She remembers that handsome uncle from the family gatherings every Friday night -- the beginning of Sabbath -- and again on Sunday evening at the home of Grandmother Kanne, the widow of Jacob. The family is not sure, but they believe she, too, fled Russia, coming to America with Jacob.
The general's father, who served as a Navy ensign during World War I, practiced law in Chicago's corporation counsel for 20 years and had joined a private firm with his brother Louis when he died suddenly of a heart atttack at the age of 51. He left behind his widow, Veneta Kanne, and a lone son, Wesley.
At the funeral, Mrs. Salk said, "the constituents were lined up for blocks to pay their respects to Wesley's father."
Soon afterwards, the young Wesley Clark moved with his mother to her hometown of Little Rock, far away from the close knit Chicago family of his hard-driving, ambitious father.
His mother remarried Victor Clark, who adopted Wesley and gave him his name, and thereafter the Kanne family learned of the accomplishments of B. J.'s son from a distance. Florence Ellis, one of the five sisters of B. J. Kanne, kept up a private correspondence with Veneta Kanne Clark, and passed on the letters about Wesley to the rest of the Kanne family.
As Wesley K. Clark graduated first in his high school class, then first in his class at West Point, the family heaped praise on Veneta for raising him so well and also avoided any direct contact with Wesley out of respect for Veneta's new life, according to cousin Barry Kanne.
Then when Wesley Clark was attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar one of the cousins, Molly Friedman from Cleveland, was visiting England and called Wesley at the university. At that point General Clark didn't even know why he had the unusual middle name of Kanne, much less who his real father or grandfather were, according to the relatives.
After receiving a master's degree, General Clark left Oxford to fight in Vietnam, where he commanded a mechanized infantry company, was wounded four times and received the Silver Star and Purple Heart awards.
He also converted to Roman Catholicism in Vietnam, abandoning the Southern Baptist faith of his mother.
Over the next decade, General Clark had few contacts with the Kanne family as he climbed up the military ranks and began to build his strong political network, beginning with his appointment as a White House Fellow immediately after the Vietnam War.
In the 1990's, however, Barry Kanne's daughter April introduced herself to General Clark's son, Wesley, Jr., when they were both studying at Georgetown University.
"I looked him up and he had already heard a lot of the stories at that point," said April Kanne Donnellan. "After that I spent a couple of Christmases at General Clark's home at Fort McNair."
Through their children's contacts, General Clark finally met Barry Kanne, his first cousin and the only other direct male descendant of Jacob Nemorovsky.
It was this contact about five years ago that led General Clark to embark on a more thorough search into his father's family.
"He knew a moderate amount about the family when I met him," said Barry Kanne. "He was trying to fill in the gaps so I pointed him towards Mom and he's visited her several times."
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Boy from Little Rock chooses military path
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 11/16/2003
This is the fifth in a series of profiles of leading candidates in the 2004 presidential race. First of two parts
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Wesley K. Clark saluted from a hospital bed in Japan after suffering wounds on a patrol in Vietnam in February 1970. (Photo courtesy of Wesley K. Clark) |
Wesley K. Clark lay bleeding on the ground as the landscape around him echoed with the high-pitched ping-ping-ping of gunfire. It was Feb. 19, 1970, and the young Army captain had been on patrol near Saigon when he paused to peer down a trail that disappeared into the jungle.
In an instant, a hellish hail of fire from AK-47s exploded all around. Clark saw blood oozing from his body.
"They're in there!" Clark shouted to a couple of soldiers at his side.
"Get down, sir!" responded one of the soldiers, sniper Michael McClintic, who vividly recalls the moment. Pushing Clark to the ground -- and probably saving his life -- the Army sniper sprayed the jungle with covering fire. Clark said he called for backup and ordered nearby soldiers to set up a base of responding machine gun fire.
The 25-year-old Clark had waited years for a chance to engage the enemy, and now he was out of the fight from nearly the start.
The Viet Cong ambush that nearly took his life that day would be the only significant combat Clark would experience over the course of an Army career spanning 34 years. But the episode set a course for a military life that both detractors and supporters describe as charmed from the start. First in his class at West Point, Clark carried the hopes of many high-ranking champions into the battlefield with him.
"How bad are you shot?" Clark's commanding officer, David C. Martin, asked when he reached Clark on the radio.
"I don't think I'm shot too bad," Clark replied, according to Martin's recollection. Clark apparently did not realize the severity of four wounds to his shoulder, hand, and leg. Later Clark would recall: "I couldn't hold anything in my right hand, and I couldn't use my foot. I stumbled."
Martin raced to a helicopter and flew to Clark's location.
An Army typist recorded the moment, according to a document found in the National Archives: "Urgent . . . Gd [ground] contact . . . area unsecure -- need jungle penetrator. . . . Lighthorse 21 en route."
Within minutes, a second helicopter was overhead, dangling its "penetrator" lifeline into the jungle. Soldiers attached Clark to the dangling cord, and he was "extracted" and flown to a hospital 8 miles away.
McClintic, who was also hit by enemy fire during the ambush, received a Bronze Star with valor for heroic achievement in action. Clark was awarded the more prestigious Silver Star, reserved for "gallantry in action of marked distinction." While Martin originally wrote up Clark for a Bronze star with valor, a now deceased superior asked him to elevate the medal, and Martin said he agreed. Officers were often given higher medals than enlisted men in Vietnam, and a Silver Star added weight to Clark's military resume. The decision "suits me fine," said Martin, especially because Clark was "leading his people" and on foot patrol and retained control of the company.
For 33 years, Clark did not know the name of the person "who may very well have saved my life" until the Globe located McClintic in Michigan. Of his own action, Clark said, "I'm not going to say I was a hero. I think a hero is somebody who saves somebody else's life through risking his own life. What I did is I did my duty. My duty was to command the company. I got shot and I maintained command and gave the orders and directions." As for McClintic, Clark said the soldier "should have gotten something more . . . these awards were never fair."
During more than three decades in the Army, Clark rose to the rank of four-star general and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. He was mostly in a classroom, or a war room, or serving as a commander at posts ranging from Colorado to Texas to Germany. He was not on the battlefield during the first Gulf War, although he trained troops for that conflict.
Clark draws passion from both supporters and detractors in the military. He is either the most brilliant man they have ever known, or the most arrogant, or both.
He is "the greatest thing since sex, or you detest him," in the colorful observance of Rick Brown, an admirer and superior officer in Vietnam.
"Generically, the Army has a large number of people who don't like smart folks, or [people] perceived to be smarter than they," said Lionel Ingram, a West Point friend who was also among the brightest in his class. "They don't like people who are successful. The Army does have to some degree, among some people, an anti-intellectual bias."
As Clark pursues the presidency of the United States -- the first elective office he has sought -- he is without a voting record, and his political leanings have ranged from being a Nixon-supporting hawk to a Clinton-like internationalist and opponent of the Iraq war who earlier said he "probably" would have voted to give President Bush the authority to go to war. From the age of 14, Clark's ambition was to be a US general; his four stars attest to his success, just as his sudden retirement in 2000 reveals the way fellow officers maneuvered -- some say conspired -- to oust him.
Now, at 58, Clark has a new ambition on an uncertain battlefield, opportunistically targeting political foes he believes are weak -- the eight other Democratic candidates and Bush. "Campaigning is like the military motor pool," he remarked as he crisscrossed the country, "only better."
The early years
Wesley Kanne (pronounced KAY-nee) was born in Chicago on Dec. 23, 1944. His mother, Veneta, a Methodist, had left behind her native Little Rock to fulfill her dream of finding better opportunities in Chicago. His father, whose own parents had left Russia to find a better life, was a Jewish attorney named Benjamin Kanne.
Such mixed religious marriages were unusual at the time. The Kanne family was proud of its heritage but was not overtly religious, according to Harriet Salk, a family member who was one of young Wesley's playmates.
A graduate of Chicago-Kent School of Law, Ben Kanne served as an assistant city prosecutor, attorney for the Chicago Sanitary District, and then, for 17 years, as assistant corporation counsel, which was a senior position in the city's legal department. Notably, the Chicago Bar Record says that Kanne was "very active in local Democratic politics, and at the time of his death was secretary of the Fourth Ward Democratic Organization."
Ben Kanne was a delegate at the 1932 Democratic National Convention and -- unlike his son -- appears to have been a lifelong party stalwart. Kanne was also a member of a reform synagogue called the KAM Temple and a member of the Jewish War Veterans. (Kanne was in the Naval Reserve but did not see combat.)
"He was a big factor in my life," Clark said. "I remember he went out to buy me a present every Saturday. I remember he read to me every night. He loved three things: pinochle, horses, and politics -- plus my mother and me."
One day in December 1948, Ben Kanne went to the doctor for a checkup and was pronounced in good health. A few hours later, the 51-year-old was dead of a heart attack. He left behind a diamond ring (which Wesley Clark wears to this day), and, according to probate records, a four-door Buick worth $250, and $464.68 after funeral and court costs.
The Kanne family was devastated. Clark, who was nearly 4 at the time, recalls the trauma, and family members say he developed a speech impediment. After her husband's sudden death, Veneta told relatives it was too difficult to stay in Chicago, financially and emotionally, and she moved back to her parents' house in Arkansas.
Little Rock, however, was not Chicago, and Veneta apparently feared that the revelation of Wesley's Jewish heritage might lead to problems in Arkansas. Little Rock was infamous for its racial segregation, and for an active Ku Klux Klan that targeted Jews as well as blacks. Wesley attended a Southern Baptist church in Little Rock, and for two decades, until he was in his 20s, he remained unaware of his family's Jewish heritage.
Veneta died in 1986, but her sister vividly recalls why Veneta kept the ancestral truth from Wesley. "It was just the era, the time, that if you were Jewish you were not accepted everywhere," Shirley Donoho said. "She was afraid it would affect Wesley's future in some way. Right there in Little Rock, the Little Rock Country Club kept Jewish people out for a long time. Thank goodness that time has passed."
Veneta found a job at a local bank and saved enough money to purchase a one-story Sears Craftsman house on the lyrically named Valentine Street, set in a modest neighborhood of hills just west of downtown. From a cliff overlooking the Arkansas River, one could see downtown to the east. To the west, just a dozen miles distant, was Pinnacle Valley, where the stony cap of Pinnacle Mountain rose more than 1,000 feet and the surrounding piney hillocks spread like so many loaves of sugar.
While working at the bank, Veneta met a bank vice president named Victor Clark. He had been previously divorced, and from that marriage had one child, whom Wesley Clark says he never met. He also was a heavy drinker who eventually was forced to spend six months in a Missouri sanitarium. Victor Clark ended his drinking, but by then the drinking had ended his banking career.
Veneta married him, and found herself often supporting him. At one point he tried to make a living by buying a fish-and-tackle store in Stuttgart, where young Wesley helped out. Meanwhile, the boy's name was changed: Wesley Kanne became Wesley K. Clark.
Wesley Clark spent his weekends fishing and hunting, learning to shoot a gun by age 7. Picnics were usually punctuated by a session of target practice using beer and soda cans. Victor Clark carried in his tackle box a .22 caliber gun, which he used to kill loggerhead turtles unfortunate enough to get tangled up in his fishing lines.
A father figure
Amid the foothills 45 minutes from downtown Little Rock, off a dusty dirt road, the local Boys' Club ran one of the nation's oldest camps, with a scattering of stone-and-wood cabins and everything that a 14-year-old boy could want: swimming, fishing, fellowship. Like so much of Little Rock society, segregation was the rule: Black campers were not admitted until the the mid-1960s.
For young Wes Clark, the Boys' Club was a chance for adventure, and independence. It was run by a man who became a father figure to Clark, a World War II veteran named Jimmy Miller. From Miller, Clark honed his competitive swimming technique, which helped give him a lifelong love of the sport. It is telling that when Clark is asked about the most significant events in his life, he picks one from this period.
One day, Clark and some fellow campers who were preparing to be counselors wandered down the road along the Little Maumelle River, hoping for a skinny dip. When Miller spotted them, he said he would refuse to make them counselors unless they proved they could jump off the big red iron bridge spanning the river. Clark took the dare, and after much nervous hesitation, plunged into the water. As he later wrote, "The afterglow lasted a good two weeks, at least. Or maybe 40 years. You have to have courage and faith. And you have to expect to go through some trials to be a leader."
In 1958, after Little Rock's Central High School was forcibly integrated by the federal government, citizens had overwhelmingly voted to shut down the public high schools. In the fall of 1959, with Wesley set to enter the new Hall High School in suburban Little Rock, a nondescript facility that was viewed as a "white" school, his parents worried the high schools would once again be closed. So they enrolled him in Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tenn., 380 miles away. It was at Castle Heights that Clark's conflicted emotions about the military began to emerge.
While he had aspired to a soldier's life from an early age,
"I have never enjoyed standing inspections, polishing shoes, marching in parades," Clark said. "It just seemed like three or four hours wasted."
At the same time, some aspects of the military deeply appealed to Clark, particularly the sense of order and purpose and duty. When he returned from his year at Castle Heights, one of his first comments to his cousin, Mary Campbell, was prophetic: "I want to be a general." Tensions were still running high when Clark returned to Little Rock public schools in 1960, a year after Hall was integrated with less fanfare than was Central High. The more than 700 members of the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades had been all white. Under the federal integration order, three black girls entered Hall, one in each of the grades. They called themselves "the three E's," Effie, Elsie, and Estella.
"It was just as life-altering and traumatic for us" to enter Hall High as it was for the Little Rock Nine to enter Central High, recalled Estella Johnson. When she received an "A" on a report, she remembers, white students wrote obscenities on the paper. She found tacks on her chair, and many unkind people.
She remembers Wesley Clark this way: "There were three kinds of people there. Those who overtly bothered us, those who were friendly, and those who left us alone -- and he left us alone."
Elsie Dodson, the lone black in Clark's grade, recalls that she had no white friends at Hall High. "It is like being in a war zone, where you are around mostly enemy," said Dodson, who worked for 26 years as a Veterans Administration nurse. She has never talked to Clark, though she has followed his career from a distance and said she would support his presidential bid. "He was one of those classic smart kids," she said.
Over the years, Clark and his classmates have attempted to apologize to Dodson. Last year, his Class of 1962 sent her a letter in which they wrote, "We did not make you feel welcome and a part of our class." But Dodson said that while she has forgiven her former classmates she declined their invitation to a class reunion. "I could care less about returning to a class reunion where I didn't have friends," she said.
Clark, who today supports affirmative action and highlights his work with African-Americans in the military, looks downcast when asked about his experience at the center of the nation's racial history. While he remembers the young black pioneers, he says he had no contact with them. The experience, Clark says, marks him to this day.
"The odd thing about it was that people just didn't understand," Clark said. "They just didn't understand they were wrong about their views. I was pretty much open. I always looked at everyone pretty much as an individual. I also knew that in the society around me this was a source of enormous controversy." Born in the North, Clark didn't quite fit in Little Rock, either, although he managed to produce an Arkansas twang.
"You have those kind of experiences," he said. "They shape your entire life. You always have a certain sympathy for people who for whatever reason have to come from outside the group and have to make their way inside the group. I have always felt that."
The kings and queens of Hall High were the football players and the cheerleaders. Clark was something of a geek. He and about 10 of his friends were considered the brainiest on campus, and when Hall High School introduced the first calculus class in the history of Arkansas public schools in 1961, Clark and his buddies signed up.
In a state where football rules, Clark wanted to continue the swimming he had enjoyed at Castle Heights. When he learned that there was no Hall High swim team, he formed one and became its captain. One day, when the team was scheduled to compete at a state meet, one of the relay team's four members became ill, leaving the relay team one swimmer short. Team member Phil McMath remembers what Clark said: "I'll do it." Clark swam the first and fourth laps, and the Hall team won the meet.
On to West Point
By age 16, Clark decided he wanted to go to West Point, the Army's prestigious military academy in New York, even though its military rituals were bound to be more intensive than those he had disliked at Castle Heights. But after both US senators from Arkansas refused to nominate him, he took an admissions test overseen by an Arkansas congressman who also had the right to nominate West Point candidates. Clark came in first and won the assignment.
West Point, set upon the highlands overlooking the Hudson River, was the pinnacle of Army education. The cadets that year had a motto that bespoke their belief in destiny: "Fame will mix with the Class of `66." It was true: Of the 579 graduates, 30 would die in Vietnam, the most ever in a West Point class.
But Vietnam was barely on the horizon in 1962, when Clark strode onto the parade grounds of the Plain and marched in the shadow of the Gothic halls of stone. This was the ultimate boys' club, complete with a swimming team for a plebe like Clark. But if Clark disdained the military rituals at Castle Heights three years earlier, he was hardly prepared for the depths to which upperclassmen would dwell in their efforts to humiliate and practically torture aspiring soldiers.
West Point was designed to break boys and make men, even if it meant breaking the rules. In Clark's first year, the young plebe learned what hazing was all about. Clark was a skinny young man at 144 pounds, and upperclassmen found him an easy mark. After a week of physical torment, Clark says, he lost 15 pounds.
Then one day, in a basement area known as the "sinks," he was confronted by some upperclassmen preparing for an Army-style hazing. He was dressed in a thin cotton robe.
"You better sweat through that beach robe, mister!" an upperclassman yelled at Clark, inches from his face. "You better throw your head back, you better suck in that chin, you hear me?"
Clark responded by inadvertently smirking, a serious breach of plebe protocol. The upperclassmen punished Clark by squeezing him into a locker that was barely a foot wide, and then rocking it until the clothing hooks hit the sides of his head.
Clark couldn't convince the upperclassmen to let him out. Fortunately, a sympathetic senior named Lionel Ingram happened along. "Knock that off, and leave that man alone," Ingram bellowed, according to Clark. Ingram, who now teaches international relations at the University of New Hampshire, became a friend for life.
If, as Ingram has said, some in the Army targeted those with high intellect, then Clark had a bull's-eye on his back. Shortly after arriving, Clark told his roommate, Theodore Hill: "I'm going to be No. 1 in the class," and made good on his pledge. And everyone knew it. Grades were posted at Sally Port, the portal to the Plain, and Clark literally sat at the head of the class. Hill, who was near the top of the class, was awed by his roommate's confidence. Predictably, the two were labeled eggheads and became the subject of constant hazing.
"I remember he would be angry at some of the people who went out of their way to harass him because he was doing well academically, or [they] didn't think he was macho enough," Hill said. "Wes is not one of these back-slapping, everybody-is-my-buddy types. He is a private person. I think some people were just intimidated by his intellectual power. But I loved it. We talked for hours."
Despite their outward awkwardness -- Clark once wore his large glasses upside-down when the lenses were installed incorrectly -- Clark and Hill found a way to break the rules. When they learned that a room had been left unoccupied, they commandeered a key, put cardboard on the windows and "liberated" a pool table. The room became a private haven for dates with girls and especially for long discussions. "We were happy to be pulling one over on the authorities," Hill said.
Clark made a crucial decision midway through his West Point education. He quit the swim team to join the debate team, which offered him not only an intellectual avenue he craved but also a way to get off campus on many weekends. His debate coach, William Taylor, vividly recalls receiving a complaint one day from Captain Norman Schwarzkopf, then a West Point instructor who would go on to command the first Gulf War.
"I don't like what you are doing with cadet Wes Clark," Schwarzkopf said, according to Taylor. "He is not competing with varsity athletics. He is not socializing with the rest of his classmates. He is off doing debate tournaments. You are undermining the professionalism of this young man."
"I don't know who you are," Taylor told Schwarzkopf, and after defending the virtues of debate, hung up the phone. Schwarzkopf could not be reached for comment, but Taylor said the incident illustrates the tensions that would follow Clark throughout his career.
The debate travel also helped Clark find time for dates with his girlfriend, Gertrude Kingston of Brooklyn, a Wall Street executive assistant whom Clark had met in 1964, when he crashed a Navy party in New York City that Kingston had reluctantly attended.
On June 7, 1966, the day before graduation, Clark was preparing for what should have been the most glorious day of his life. He was going to receive five top honors at a graduation ceremony that was to be attended by Vice President Hubert Humphrey. But Clark, who had traded his thick glasses for contact lenses, apparently left the contacts in his eyes for too long. A long-forgotten photo shows Clark, huge bandages covering his eyes, in a hospital bed, shaking hands with the academy superintendent.
"Top man at West Point was in hospital," said the caption on the Associated Press photo, published in the June 8, 1966, edition of The New York Times. "Cadet Capt. Wesley K. Clark of Little Rock, Ark., No. 1 man in his graduating class and a Rhodes Scholar, is visited by his parents and Maj. Gen. Donald V. Bennett, the academy superintendent. Cadet suffered corneal abrasions of both eyes, apparently from overwearing contact lenses Monday." The accompanying story described Clark as "about the saddest of all the graduates."
With that ignoble sendoff -- Clark did recover enough to receive his diploma at graduation ceremonies the next day -- Clark departed West Point. But his destination wasn't combat in Vietnam, like many of his fellow graduates. Instead, he was about to land in Oxford, England, for a two-year Rhodes scholarship.
At Oxford's Magdalen College, Clark studied politics, philosophy, and economics. During his time abroad he defended America's role in Vietnam in debates with antiwar students, speaking on behalf of the US war effort. He also regularly heard reports about classmates fighting -- and a few dying -- in Vietnam. One of those killed was Arthur M. Parker III, who had roomed with Clark during his senior year at West Point. Parker was struck by a rotating helicopter blade while trying to rescue a comrade. He left behind a wife and child.
Another close friend was a fellow West Pointer and Rhodes Scholar named Alex Hottell. Clark's girlfriend, Gertrude, had shared housing with Hottell and his wife for a couple of months before she married Clark in the summer of 1967. One night, Clark and Hottell had discussed the possibility of dying in Vietnam. As Clark later wrote, the two agreed that "if there's nothing worth fighting and dying for, then there's nothing worth living for." Hottell even wrote his own obituary, expressing similar sentiments, in case he died. Their discussion was sadly prescient: Hottell was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash in Vietnam.
Clark apparently felt some guilt about staying behind to study at Oxford, and he assured another fellow Rhodes Scholar, Stewart Early, that he would fight when he finished his studies. Often, the two friends would stay out past the midnight curfew, forcing them to climb over Magdalen's locked gates. On at least one occasion, Early recalled, Clark lost his pants as he scrambled over the wall.
Perhaps the most bitter experience for Clark at Oxford occurred when he went to church. As a southern Baptist, he attended Protestant services, where he felt under attack.
"When I went to Protestant services in England, there was a tremendous passion against America's [involvement] in Vietnam," Clark said. "It became personal against the men in the armed services. It wasn't just the policy. It was the people. To me, that wasn't an atmosphere in which I felt comfortable."
By contrast, the Catholic church, in which Gertrude was a member, was a refuge, Clark believed. "It was reasoned, structured, ordered consistency," Clark said, qualities that he valued. After abiding by rules that Clark said required him to remain a bachelor for the first year of his Rhodes scholarship, Clark married Gertrude and embraced Catholicism, converting more than a year later in Vietnam.
In the interim, though, Clark finally learned the surprising news about his own religious background, when a relative from the Kanne side of his family called him and asked to meet him. The relative, who had discussed the matter with Clark's mother, then informed Clark of his father's Jewish heritage.
Clark called his former West Point roommate, Theodore Hill, with the news.
"He was in shock. He asked me how I would feel," Hill recalled. "I told him it was a spectacular, positive thing. I think he was quiet. I think he agreed. He was just realizing how much he had learned just from that one piece of information." Since then, Clark has visited many times with his long-lost Kanne relatives and today is close to many of them.
Ambush in the jungle
After six years of education, Clark was ready to go to Vietnam. A former West Point professor, Rick Brown, who had recommended Clark for the Rhodes Scholarship, now eyed Clark as the ideal candidate to help him in the war.
"Wes just had incandescent potential," Brown said. "When he came back from his Rhodes . . . my first reaction was, here was a chance to get Wes to the theater."
Clark arrived in Vietnam in July 1969, working for Brown for six months in a concrete-reinforced bunker as an assistant operations officer for the Army's First Infantry Division. Some associates recall that one of Clark's jobs was to compile the infamous "body count," the much-ridiculed accounting of enemies killed in action, but Clark doesn't remember performing that job. During this time, Clark was absent for the November birth in Florida of his only child, Wes Jr.
In January 1970, six months after his arrival, Clark got his chance to see combat firsthand when he became a captain of a 100-man company known as the 1st/16th. Clark had been disturbed by the morale of US troops, knowing that some were draftees who didn't want to serve. Drug abuse was prevalent, and public support back home was weak, Clark recalled. But members of Clark's company proved willing to risk their lives to protect him under fire.
The ambush in February that left him bloodied and lying on the ground "all happened in two-tenths of a second, but it seemed like an eternity," Clark said. The company medic "thought I had a sucking chest wound because [of] the blood all over the back of my shirt. He is trying to get me to stay still and talking, whereas all I can do is use command voice, so that is what I did."
Clark's Silver Star citation says Clark, although painfully wounded, "immediately directed his men on a counterassault of the enemy position. With complete disregard for his personal safety, Captain Clark remained with his unit until the reactionary force arrived and the situation was well in hand."
Clark recalled watching McClintic, the sniper at his side, get hit by fire. "The guy was actually there firing back while I was hollering at the company to come up, and he is the guy I am looking at right in front of me. I never had a chance to say goodbye to these guys or anything."
McClintic, who saved the AK-47 round that was later extracted from his body, remembers that Clark "was kind of staggering. I knocked him down and rolled him away. We were cut off and pinned down, and that is when I got wounded." Eventually, the other troops called by Clark arrived and secured the area. The enemy was driven way, with none captured or killed. Clark was extracted by a helicopter rescue team. McClintic, meanwhile, played down his role, saying, "I would have done the same for you or anybody."
Because Clark's wounds -- on his right shoulder, right hand, right hip, and right leg -- were too serious to be treated at a US facility in Vietnam, he was shipped to a base in Japan. One day, Ted Hill, Clark's former West Point roommate, visited Clark and was appalled to find that Clark was confined in a rancid room and prohibited from leaving the area. So in the middle of the night, Hill secured a blue bathrobe -- worn by those permitted to leave the hospital -- and a wheelchair and pushed Clark out of the hospital, each bump causing Clark great agony.
The pair holed up at the officer's club and proceeded to get drunk. When they returned, the young men found that the head nurse had left a note on Clark's bed, demanding that he report to her at once.
A tipsy Clark appeared before the nurse, attempted to salute, and said, as if addressing the commander of West Point, "Captain Clark, reporting to the head nurse, as ordered, sir!"
Fortunately for Clark, the nurse showed some sympathy and didn't penalize the young soldier. He had what is known as the "million dollar wound" -- bad enough to warrant an end of combat service, but not life-threatening. Captain Clark was heading home.
Tomorrow: General plans his next battle. Joanna Weiss of the Globe staff, Richard Pennington of the Globe library, and genealogist Jeanne Lazalere Bloom contributed to this report. Michael Kranish can be reached at kranish@globe.com
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