THE ART OF POLITICS

General Wesley Clark's next move is anybody's guess.

by Duncan Murrell
The Oxford American
June 2003

PEOPLE SAY he looks good on television. Some of his longtime friends say he looks just a little older than the kid who graduated from Hall High School in Little Rock in 1962. He is short, though this is not immediately obvious. He stands with his arms at his sides, his right trigger finger halfaninch shorter than it should be, a wound from one of four shots he took while on patrol one afternoon in Vietnam. He speaks with a cadence common to people who have spent their lives in the military, all round vowels and lazy gerunds that emerge from deep in his chest, the kind of voice that can be raised to a shout without much effort. His grey hair is neat, but a little longer than it used to be.

After three decades in the Army, Wesley Clark is now a television personality, a hired commentator on CNN, one of a group of ex-military officers who were gathered by the networks to explain the particularities and consequences of the war in Iraq. During the war, Clark appeared on television almost every single day, usually more than once. He often answered questions at great length, especially when they led him to speculate on what someone else ought to be doing, or thinking, or preparing. Many of his answers invariably wound their way back to the lessons of the Kosovo war, which he led against Serbia as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in 1999. Listening to Clark, you got the impression that almost any answer about warfare required a reference to Kosovo.

Clark opposed the rush to invade Iraq, naming alQaeda and North Korea as more pressing problems. He was troubled by the administration's apparent preference for war over diplomacy. He was suspicious of their negotiations in the U.N., and believed that Bush officials were merely interested in papering over -- and justifying -- a decision that had already been made. But when fighting seemed inevitable, Clark said he was sure the U.S. would win the war, even though he thought more troops should have been put on the ground at the start. The day the bombing began, Clark wrote in the Times of London:

It probably will not have been an allout rush to Baghdad -- and it may have taken a little more than two weeks -- but the results are likely to prove the growing potential of hightech air power, at least in open terrain.... But on the ground it probably will not look so clear. The troops and leaders in those armored and heliborne spearheads will know just how little is behind them.... And they will be waiting anxiously for the arrival of the big, heavy U.S. armored forces that will relieve the risk, ensure the backup for a fight in Baghdad and provide the presence necessary to maintain peace and security afterwards.

In late April, when the overwhelming victory had given way to looting, mass demonstrations, and uncertain security, Clark remarked that the Bush administration had "gloated too much too soon."

SINCE LATE 2002, Clark has been the subject of constant speculation as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, even though he is not even a registered member of the party. He met with prominent Democratic donors in New York, Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, and none of them could say afterwards whether he would run. He's probably a Democrat, 'is about all anyone could say.

"Talking about generals running for office is a shorthand for dealing with the perception that Democrats are not strong on defense," says Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, which represents a more conservative branch of the party sometimes called the New Democrats. New Democrats don't consider themselves weak on defense issues, From said, and consequently aren't necessarily impressed that Clark is a general. "But for a large swath of the Democratic coalition, especially liberal Democrats and others who opposed the Iraq war, a general running around identified as a Democrat, one who is articulate and attractive, can be a powerful symbol. A rebuttal." That is, so long as he isn't actually a candidate. "He's smart, articulate, appealing, but we don't know how he'll be in politics. This is the difference between politics and working your way up in an institution like the military. People who like him as a symbol might not like him when he declares himself and comes down with an opinion on their issues."

By May, Clark had declared nothing. "I'm not speculating on that," he said many times, in many different ways. But this isn't how at least one prominent Democratic operative saw it, someone who'd been encouraging him for months to run: "The Democratic field is shaping up nicely, and the General seems more interested in speculating than getting his hands dirty."

The frustration of some Democrats towards Clark's flirtation with a presidential run is understandable. Clark is familiar to millions of Americans, yet very few people know what kind of candidate he would be, or what issues he would make his own. He is the kind of person upon whom others will hang their hopes because he gives them no reason why they shouldn't. And to those frustrated with his slow approach toward the presidency -- the people who've been talking him up to columnists and reporters and big-money donors -- Clark will say that not once during all the speculation has he said he would run. He never said he would, and he never said he wouldn't.

I MET CLARK in January at his office in Little Rock, on the twentyfifth floor of a modern blue-glass building owned by the Stephens Group, a fabulously wealthy investment bank started in 1933 by a municipal bond trader named Witt Stephens. The company hired Clark in 2000 as a corporate consultant "to help develop emerging technology companies," which in practice meant scouting companies in the defense sector. There was old money in the dark wood floors, in the gilded rococo mirror behind the receptionist's desk (the receptionists all referred to Clark as the General), in the chandeliers and the recessed lights, in the art: abstractions, engravings, faux Zen brush paintings, a Remington bronze of a horse throwing its rider called "The Ambush." Along the hallway that led to the conference room was a taxidermist's masterwork: a male African lion with its teeth in the neck of a wild boar. Tall windows overlooked the city and the river. People moved about quietly in smart, dark suits, speaking to each other sotto voce as they stepped around the lion, which partially blocked the way. Where to put the lion? It was a masteroftheuniverse sort of question.

It had taken Clark more than forty years to end up here in the sanctum of the city's most powerful company, just a few miles from his childhood home. He would leave the company in February, but before then he was, by all accounts, an active consultant, flying across the country on appointments. He no longer traveled with an entourage, and had come to enjoy driving himself around without an appointed chauffeur. The changes suited him just fine, he said, and gave him much more time to spend with his wife, Geri, whom he met during his second year at West Point.

He was raised in wealthy west Little Rock, and was about to enter Hall High School as a freshman when Governor Orval Faubus ordered the city's schools closed in 1958 to oppose integration. (Clark went to military school in Tennessee that year because of Faubus's decision.) The next year he returned to Hall and watched as three black girls enrolled without incident, with nothing like the protests, the violent arrests, and the federal intervention that marked the attempted integration across town at Central High School just two years before. By the time he graduated in 1962, Hall had been integrated for three years.

This history is not dead to Clark. On the rare occasions when he has revealed in public a personal, not professional, opinion -- his welldocumented loathing of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, or his public support of the University of Michigan Law School's affirmativeaction policies, for example -- he has invoked his childhood experience of "growing up here in Little Rock, and the struggles for justice and equality in the United States." His proximity to such important lessons of the 20th century -- the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, Rwanda, Kosovo are by his own reckoning what make him suited for the presidency.

"It's an interesting question," Clark said when I asked him why a political novice would run for such an office. He looked up at the ceiling and rocked back in his chair at the conference table. There might have been a camera hidden in the ceiling, or behind the potted plants. It was that kind of place.

"I think a time like this is an interesting turning point in American history. Many of the things that we've taken for granted, that have shaped our international strategy, our domestic environment, they're up for grabs right now. We got walloped on 9/11, and now Americans are asking themselves what's out there. They're saying, 'Hey! Man, these people are sup posed to like us! And what happened with Russia and the Soviet Union? Where is China?' Ordinary Americans are now much more interested in the world beyond. And in combination with the war on terror, you've got a rollback to a sort of imperial presidency, a presidency that's much more private, and an investigatory service with greater authority to come after ordinary Americans. We thought we put that to rest after the excesses of the Nixon administration and Vietnam. I believed that when I fought in Vietnam I represented the right of all Americans to express their views. So I'm concerned."

There is an idealism that underlies such outspoken skepticism toward the Republican administration, one that creeps in when Clark recounts his life and the choices he's made. When asked about his decision to leave Little Rock for West Point, he put it this way: "I wanted to serve my country. I wanted to be a leader. I wanted to be in the armed forces. I was worried about the threat to the country from Russia, and so I went to West Point."

Clark recognizes such feelings as somewhat anachronistic. The irony, as he sees it, is that while the relationship between the military and the general public has improved since Vietnam, the experience of actually serving in the military has become less common. The result is a perception of soldiers as the embodiments of ideals -- duty, honor, country -- reinforced by a sentimentality unsullied by firsthand knowledge of soldiering. Such admiration for the military is powerful, but not quite powerful enough to drive the sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes into recruiting offices. "We've been the beneficiaries of that lack of familiarity," Clark says, which has allowed the leadership of the United States to use the military as a symbol, sending soldiers off to wars that don't affect most American families directly by putting their children in harm's way.

When Clark wants to demonstrate the weakness of certain arguments, he often mimics the people making them. To demonstrate what recent college graduates might say if he suggested they join the military, Clark leaned forward in his chair, eyes wide, hands folded in his lap: "Well, General Clark, that's a very interesting thing. If it's what some people want to do, great. I mean, we really need people like that. And thanks a lot for going out there and risking your life for our country. For myself, I've got lots of other things to do, and but, you know, I'm really glad someone wants to serve. As for me, I really want to be a lawyer. I'm really looking forward to being a journalist, or getting into my family's business. "Or," he added with a smile and a pause, "just enjoying my freedom."

Clark didn't mean this to be funny. His earnestness was palpable. It often is, and is often so beyond his selfawareness that critics have interpreted it as sanctimony, or arrogance. Friends from his youth say he really is that earnest, and one West Point classmate allowed that Clark was "more likely to come down on the serious side than the lighthearted." Even some junior members of his NATO staff would reportedly refer to him as "the Supreme Being," which was not meant kindly.

This ambivalence toward leaders, Clark says, is common in any organization, including the military. But such healthy, educated skepticism is missing when Americans make soldiers into symbols, or when political parties make generals into saviors. This naiveté is symptomatic of something very dangerous, in Clark's view. "The paradox is, or the danger is, that when everybody doesn't have an obligation to serve, the costs of service can become disconnected from the rhetoric of governments."

During his many hours in television studios in Little Rock and Washington, he's parsed that rhetoric, repeated it, judged it, and searched for the meaning in what it does not say. It's an ironic turn of fate for Clark, who in his book, Waging Modern War, describes his own cordial yet adversarial relationship with journalists during the Balkan conflict. Clark writes about how he learned the basics of working the press from a master, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke, and how he put those lessons to practice: saying as little as possible while maintaining the appearance of accessibility; using the press to send messages to foes and allies alike; closely monitoring press coverage, and getting out ahead of possibly damaging stories; knowing what information to omit from press briefings. He became such a constant presence on television during the war that, according to Clark, thenSecretary of Defense William Cohen asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to give him this message verbatim: "Get your fing face off the television."

Clark's theories about modern war include a belief that the media is a legitimate part of an extended battlefield, since information and images from battles are so accessible and pervasive. For him, the media in Kosovo was another battlefront. He treated Serbia's government-controlled television as an enemy operation, and eventually ordered the bombing of a Serbian television station, killing more than a dozen Serb journalists (a decision that prompted critics to accuse NATO's leadership of war crimes).

As a commentator on the military during this latest Iraq war, as an outsider looking in, Clark has been acutely aware of how few people have been interested in talking about Kosovo. Nonetheless, in his analysis of the diplomatic wrangling that led up to the invasion of Iraq, Clark invariably invoked the lessons of the war he led to victory in 1999: the power of international cooperation; the need for a robust body of international law; the limitations of air campaigns, and therefore the necessity of inserting a credible ground force early on; the ways in which diplomacy and force can work in tandem. Clark wrote dozens of newspaper columns elaborating on these themes, adding that if the military lost something in the cumbersome process of getting each of the NATO nations to approve targets during the Kosovo campaign, it gained much more politically by having every nation on board.

These aren't necessarily the lessons others have taken from the war in Kosovo. Clark has described on more than one occasion how, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, a senior official in the Bush administration approached him in a Pentagon hallway and told him, "We read your book -- no one is going to tell us where we can or can't bomb," referring to the widely held belief that Clark and his staff were hindered by NATO's elaborate targetapproval process. This was an eerie reprisal of another encounter in a Pentagon hallway two years before, just after being told he would have to retire early to make way for his successor at NATO headquarters. "I was walking down the hallway and one of the senior military guys turned to me and said, 'You know, Wes, the [Clinton] White House is really concerned that they didn't get any bounce out of the war, they didn't get anything favorable."'

It angers Clark that these are the lasting impressions of a war he helped win, and to make his point that day in the conference room he mimicked his detractors: "I guess the most important lesson is, we never want to do anything like that again." Then he shouted in his own voice: "Why? You were successful! Why, why, why? Why don't you want to do it again? Why don't you want to do it better next time?

When NATO was the last organization that could help, it pulled itself up by the bootstraps and helped. I think they should take enormous pride and credit in that. Instead, it was like, 'You know, I guess we really screwed this thing up."'

The final insult to his victory as a general came halfway through the attack on Baghdad this past March, when Clark -- along with the rest of the exgenerals on television, all wellschooled in classic warfighting doctrine -- questioned whether the battle plan had been too optimistic, employing too few troops and leaving an extended supply line exposed to counterattack. Clark's commentary drew directly on his own experience in Kosovo, of course. But whatever credibility that gave him in 1999 had long since run out with the current administration. Bush insiders dismissed the criticism as coming from people who didn't know any better, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay singled out Clark for playing politics in preparation for a presidential run. "Frankly, what irritates me the most are these blowdried Napoleons that come on television, and in some cases have their own agendas," DeLay told Clark's own employer, CNN. "They are not involved in daily briefings. They are not involved in the Command Center. They are not on the ground."

In the conference room at the Stephens Building, Clark pounded the table once, and grimaced. He does not need to be reminded that he is no longer on the ground, or in command. "I'd love if someone asked me to come back in uniform," he said. "I don't care how many stars they give me. I'd sign back up as a lieutenant colonel if somebody would let me."

AT West Point, the daily grades of each cadet were posted for all to see in the brick sallyports, and the name "Wesley Clark," member of the class of 1966, could usually be found at the top of the lists. Back then, each cadet took a seat in the classroom according to his ranking in that particular class -- top in the front, bottom in the back. According to classmates, the back of Clark's head was a familiar sight.

People invariably call Clark "bright," but in most cases they mean something more than smart; it's the speed of Clark's mind that impresses people. "Wes was one of those who was a quick study," says David Arthur, a West Point classmate. Arthur, who served in the Army before attending West Point, remembers a skinny seventeen-yearold kid from Arkansas familiar with the rigors of calculus and political philosophy, but for whom some of the basics of Army life -- marching, shooting, patrolling, shining shoes -- were foreign. "He was very young, and very inexperienced that first year, but he was very quick to pick up on how things worked," Arthur says. "It was easier for a guy like me, with prior service. It was not easy for guys like Wes. But he overcame a lot of that because he was so bright."

Clark's academic prowess was well known among the cadets, as was his success on the varsity swim team, and later on the academy's debate team. By the end of his senior year, he was ranked first academically, and his military skills had improved so much that he had been named one of the brigade's twentyfour company commanders.

Lieutenant General Dale Vesser, now retired, taught Clark political philosophy at West Point before going on to work for Robert McNamara and to write a volume of what later became known as the Pentagon papers. He remembers Clark being one of the first cadets in class to ask the question, "Why are we in Vietnam?"

"He wasn't impressed by the conventional answers -- domino theory, other things the government would have us believe at the time," says Vesser. "These sorts of things were discussed at West Point quite openly." After serving in Vietnam, Clark went on to write a paper criticizing the way the war was being fought through "politically designed" bombing that was intended to signal U.S. resolve and "avoid decisive military impact." Clark judged it a failure, as did so many other young officers later on, including Colin Powell, whose "Powell doctrine" endorses the use of overwhelming force.

If Clark had been wary of the Vietnam war as a cadet, something changed shortly after graduation. He was the last Rhodes Scholar (the only West Pointer in his class who received the scholarship) to participate in a U.S.arranged speaker program that dispatched young Americans around Britain to explain U.S. policy in Vietnam. Clark remembers being roundly booed, and looks back on the experience as his first foray into the world of foreign policy and diplomacy. He remained in Europe, studied at Oxford, then returned briefly to the States before heading for Vietnam.

Clark served a few months on the 1st Infantry Division staff in Lai Kae before shipping out to the field, and in that time converted to Catholicism. Raised a Southern Baptist by his mother, Veneta, and his stepfather, Victor, Clark says he was "looking for a firmer anchor point for my beliefs than the weektoweek sermons of a Protestant minister." The discipline of Catholic practice drew him in. It was at around this same time that Clark discovered that his father, Benjamin Jacob Kanne, a Chicago lawyer and political figure who'd died when Clark was four, had been the son of a Jewish man who had fled to the United States in the 1890s to escape the Russian pogroms. Although Clark did not waver in his conversion, he took an interest in his family's hidden history, and has since become quite close to his extended Kanne family.

Newly baptized, Clark shipped out to the field to take command of the Army's A Company, Ist of the 16th Infantry, a mechanized unit. Not long afterward, on February 19, 1970, Clark had "one of the two bad days of my time in the Army." It was just before the Tet holiday, and some intelligence indicated that a major enemy operation was being planned. Clark's battalion was ordered to block an infiltration route into Saigon that ran through a jungle and a mangrove swamp. The platoons of Clark's company took turns pulling twoday patrols of their sector, and Clark often joined them to observe. On February 18, while trying to set up an ambush, the patrol took fire from local Viet Cong. No one was hurt. The next day, continuing the plan, the patrol moved through the forest up a wide, wellworn path that had once been the main route of Vietnamese woodcutters and charcoal makers.

As Clark tells it, "the scouts who were leading the patrol said, 'Sir, we've lost the trail.' It was the dry season, and it wasn't muddy, and we'd just crossed this little footbridge, and he says, 'We've lost the trail.' I said, 'That's impossible.' I had a compass, and I had my rifle, and I knew what direction we were supposed to be going in, and I knew within a hundred meters where we were. And when 1 got up to the front of the column I said, 'You're right, there's no trail there.' And as I was thinking about what that meant, I dropped my rifle. It was on the ground in front of me. I looked down. I'd never dropped a rifle before. I'd been through Ranger school and, you know, a year or two in the Army, and in all that time at West Point I'd done practice patrols numerous times, and I'd never dropped a rifle. When I looked down I noticed there was a little chip of bone sticking out of my hand. I could hear hornets buzzing. I also saw a dark spot on my leg. And each of these were distinct thoughts and images. And so I finally connected the dots. It probably took me sixtenths of a second, but its the six-tenths of a second you'll never forget in your whole life, and I turned to the guy behind me and said, 'I've been shot.' And he said, 'Get down!' I turned around and jumped backwards. It was a hard decision not to pick up the rifle."

Clark was shot three more times during that ambush, but still managed to direct a counterattack and successfully lead the platoon to safety, for which he was awarded the Silver Star. He then left Vietnam for the States, where he underwent almost a year of physical therapy before securing a reaching position in the Social Sciences department at West Point.

After being promoted to major, he served on the staff of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, Alexander Haig, then returned to the States and, as a thirtyfiveyearold lieutenant colonel, took command of a tank battalion at Ft. Carson, Colorado. He had risen fast and had begun to attract attention from inside and outside the military. In 1981, when an Army public relations officer asked him to cooperate with a Washington Post reporter who wanted to write a story about him for the paper's magazine, he agreed.

"That was one of my mistakes," Clark says, adding that he was asked to do it because the Army needed good publicity. The service had been struggling to reform itself after Vietnam, and the switch to an allvolunteer force had been difficult. After the disastrous mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran in 1980, the Army was desperate to improve its image. Clark says he agreed to be interviewed simply because he'd been asked to cooperate. But he also knew that the reporter had set out to write a story about the Army's rising stars, and that other top young officers -- including thenBrigadier General Colin Powell -- had turned the Post down.

Clark now admits he should have known better than to cooperate with a project that was designed to lionize him. The officer corps is filled with ambitious men and women who carefully manage their egos in public, for whom the pecking order of the military's hierarchy is important and about which they are extremely sensitive (officers at every level will go so far as to track seniority down to the month). An article that painted the young lieutenant colonel as the Army's golden boy, published in the Pentagon's hometown paper, was bound to provoke resentment.

In the end, the Post article did just that, asserting, among other things, that Clark "approaches the ideal, the perfect modern Officer," with a former West Point instructor characterizing him as "probably the most brilliant junior officer now on active duty in the Army."

Jim McCallum, a former classmate and current faculty member of the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute, remembers listening to people talk about Clark after the article. "I'd say, 'Do you know him? Do you know what he's done?' This isn't a guy who went and had a cushy little command job and left it after a year. After that article, I think you had some officers at a senior level saying, 'Oh, he thinks he's pretty good. We'll see.' And as you get a reputation, you have more people out there with the knives."

Clark believes the Post article intensified his reputation as an overeducated and overly ambitious young officer, and that this reputation ran afoul of a trend in the Army's concept of itself. It's odd to hear a fourstar general like Clark say he was handicapped by the very intellect and ambition that had distinguished him since his arrival at West Point. But after Vietnam, the Army began to look unfavorably on intellectuals, bureaucrats, and "whiz kids," who many officers blamed for botching the war. In Waging Modern War, Clark explains the implications this way:

It was a time of the "country boy" and "jes plain soldierin." Lots of people with fancy masters degrees and Ph.D.s kept it quiet if they could. I couldn't help what I had already done or how I had worked my way up.... I had gotten an Armywide reputation, and I was stuck with it, for better or worse.

Clark did put on some of the countryboy act for the Post article. ("[It's] a very sort of impersonal thing. A Southern thing, to be drawn to the concept of service to country ... something they don't understand much in the Northeast.") Nonetheless, such posing didn't become him. In his view, if the Army's shift toward public humility was intended to undermine ticketpunching and careerism, the only thing it accomplished was to complicate the transaction between the public and private selves of its officers. That is, it promoted hypocrisy. As a result, says Clark, ambition never disappeared; it simply went undercover. Officers would perform the countryboy routine in front of the troops and down at the officers' club, but then "run and get on the phone with their career detailers [personnel officers who make duty assignments] saying, 'How long do I have to stay out here, because my wife wants to get back to Washington, and, you know, I've got kids I've got to get in school. And when am I going to get promoted, anyway?' And then they'd call up their boss and say, 'Hey, how's everything going up there, sir? You're setting a blazing trail, we're following your guidance out here, sir, you're terrific!'

"Ambition is human nature," Clark says. To suggest a soldier should have no ambition, that he should just offer up his body without question or desire for anything else, is to misunderstand him. It is a dangerous way of thinking that leads to soldiers being treated as interchangeable parts, statistics in a body count. "The question is, what is your ambition for? And what are the limits on it? What are you constrained by? What's your character? If you're ambitious to do a good job with the responsibilities you've been given, and if you have healthy boundaries -- you're not going to abuse your authority, you're not going to abuse the people who work for you, you're not going to do unethical or illegal things to advance yourself or your organization -- then I think you should be fired up and full of energy and go out and do it. Don't apologize for it."

TRAUMA, conflict, family history, greed, envy, empathy -- these are some of the roots from which ambition grows. Given a person with power, it's difficult to assess which of these applies. Simple ambition never completely explains the things people do, nor the way they do them. Clark is no exception. Some observers have pointed to his Jewish background to explain his ardent support of the Albanians in Kosovo, and his fierce (some say zealous) fight against the Serbian invasion that sent Kosovar Albanians fleeing the country by the hundreds of thousands in 1998 and 1999. Clark has said his family background may have been an influence on him, and also his childhood experience in Little Rock. But the most powerful influence might have been the Rwandan massacres of 1994, during which both the United States and the United Nations -- despite advanced warnings -- allowed one centralAfrican tribe to commit genocide against another.

At the time, Clark was the general in charge of plans for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was one of the officers asked to look at the events in Rwanda, and how the United States could respond. "We had some U.N. troops in a soccer stadium in Kigali, and a Canadian twostar general on the ground with about a hundred Canadian communicators, and they wanted to do something. You had rampaging militia, you had rampant murder going on. We looked at drawing up a plan we could give to the U.N. We said, Okay, here's our plan: we need, like, 10,000 or 20,000 troops to occupy the country. And we said to ourselves, Who's going to give those troops? Well, nobody in Africa. So you think the Brits and the French are going to put 20,000 troops in there? Not without American leadership. And I remember having a conversation with one of our key leaders, and he turned to me and said, 'Wes, do you think this government, nine months after Mogadishu, is going to put 5,000 or 10,000 Americans on the ground in the center of Africa? When we have no overriding national interest there?"'

Clark credits press coverage of the massacre, in particular Philip Gourevitch's writing in The New Yorker, with clarifying the enormity of a failure he'd had a hand in. "All these bodies hacked up, and priests killing parishioners, teachers killing students, people begging to be shot rather than macheted to death, and so forth -- I thought, God this is sick. I don't want to be part of something like this again. " Clark says when he looked at the situation in Bosnia, and later in Kosovo, he remembered that feeling of failure.

The next year Clark found himself serving as the military advisor to Richard Holbrooke, who was frantically shuttling around the Balkans trying to negotiate a peace settlement. Holbrooke has described Clark as being, at the time, "at the crossroads of his career," aiding a diplomatic mission that "would lead him either to a fourth star -- every general officer's dream -- or to retirement." Clark risked getting into conflict with senior military officers, Holbrooke thought, because diplomatic missions often require military compromises. Early on in the Bosnian mission, Clark had earned Holbrooke's loyalty and respect after a French armored personnel carrier rolled down a mountainside on the way across Mt. Igman to Sarajevo, killing three American diplomats on the negotiating team. Clark and Holbrooke had been leading in another vehicle, and when they finally figured out where the carrier was, Clark tied a rope to a tree stump and rappelled down the mountainside to help with the rescue and to recover the dead. According to both men, the tragedy formed a bond between them.

Clark went on to be the chief architect of the military sections of the Dayton Peace Accords, which put an official end to the fighting in Bosnia, and was one of the main people who strong-armed the Serbs into agreeing to those sections, a sticking point during the negotiations. It's clear from everything Clark has said in subsequent years that the experience left him with a real distrust and loathing of Slobodan Milosevic, and the conviction that the man -- and therefore, the Serbs themselves -- would respond to world opinion only when the world threatened violence.

The success of the Bosnia mission led Clark to his fourth star. Afterward, General John Shalikashvili, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, engineered Clark's appointment in 1996 as Commander in Chief, U.S. Southern Command, even though Clark was not the Army's first pick for the job. When asked why he would

overrule the Army in favor of Clark, Shalikashvili said, "I had watched him as a colonel on high-level staffs, and I certainly had an opportunity to watch him very carefully when he was on the Joint Staff. I wanted him in that command because I wanted to know how he would operate in that very sensitive political environment, how he would interface with the political leaders."

Satisfied that Clark could handle himself with a major command, and aware of his special knowledge of the continuing problems in the Balkans, Shalikashvili overruled the Army again in 1997 when he nominated Clark as the new Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command, and as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR). Despite the Army's nomination of a different officer, Secretary of Defense William Cohen took Shalikashvili's advice and appointed Clark, who then flew off to Belgium, where the government provided him with a 19thcentury Flemish chateau which he describes in his book as being set on "twentythree acres with a wide lawn, circular drive, several twohundredyearold trees, three greenhouses, five gardeners, a tennis court, and newly renovated interior fixtures." Clark was also given the same desk used by Dwight Eisenhower, the first Supreme Allied Commander.

It's an unusual military job, requiring the general to report to two separate hierarchies, both the Department of Defense and NATO. It takes an extraordinary amount of political and diplomatic savvy to serve both masters. Nevertheless, Clark took obvious pleasure in dining with heads of state around Europe, and taking charge of one of the United States' most important commands. By all accounts, he was at the pinnacle of his career.

The Balkans fractured again in 1998 as Serbian troops moved into Kosovo to put down the Kosovo Liberation Army, which the U.S. had recently dubbed a terrorist organization. If Clark's response to the Civil Rights movement and the massacre in Rwanda had been to vow "never again," then opposing the Serbs against the KLA might have struck some observers as hypocritical. The KLA, which had arisen after the failure of more peaceful Albanian Kosovars to build a multiethnic state, were a group unabashed in their desire to see Kosovo cleansed of all Serbs, whose numbers had dwindled to about ten percent of the population. This had been enough reason for the United States to keep the KLA at arm's length, but then the Serbs invaded. The fighting was brutal and reminiscent of the war in Bosnia, and too clear a challenge to international authority to let pass. Reports of mass killing, summary executions, rapes, torched villages, and the creation of a quarter million Kosovar Albanian refugees all posed grave problems for the international community. And if solving that problem meant unintentionally achieving the goal of the maximalist and racist KLA -- after the Kosovo war, 125,000 Serb civilians fled, leaving only 75,000 behind -- no one mentioned it.

Western governments were largely in agreement that something drastic needed to be done about Slobodan Milosevic. In late December 1998, when the Serbs backed out of negotiations for a permanent peace, few government leaders protested when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the European allies that the time for simple talk had ended, and that further diplomacy had to be backed by a credible threat of force against Belgrade. It fell to Clark to put together that force. When talks broke down altogether in late March, 1999, it was a NATOled coalition of aircraft, guided by Clark and his staff, that began bombing the area.

Less than a month later, when the air raids failed to stop Serbian attacks, and critics were labeling the campaign as "Madeleine Albright's War," Albright pulled Clark aside. "Well, Wes, it's up to you," Clark reports her saying. "I've done my best, and they've called it my war, and they've turned on me. Now they'll turn on you."

The alliance had initially embarked on a relatively riskfree plan of bombing Serbian air defense assets from high altitude in order to clear the way for additional strategic bombing. To maintain the cohesion of the alliance, each member nation eventually sought approval of each new target list, a process that was slow and complicated. (In Washington, where this procedure has continued to be ridiculed and criticized, few acknowledge that the country that exerted the most control over the target list and often took the most amount of time was the United States itself.)

If the purpose of the NATO bombing had been to prevent a massive humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, it began as a spectacular failure. The Serbs' response to it was to step up ethnic cleansing operations. Some 1.5 million Kosovar Albanians would be expelled from their homes, and an estimated 10,000 would be killed.

As a result of the Serbs' defiance, the Europeans and Americans began to see things differently. While other NATO countries wanted to bomb Seth troops in Kosovo, the Americans wanted to go straight at Milosevic's strategic strengths and hit fuel, electricity, supply, command, and even "leadership" targets. The pressure on Clark was intense, and he tried to split the difference and satisfy both sides. While this endeared him to the Europeans, back in Washington his handlers at the Pentagon were grumbling about where his loyalties lay, and they weren't made any happier when he began to press for the use of ground troops.

Clark and Cohen began to butt heads. The stories are legion: Clark talked to congressmen about the status of the conflict, and was berated by Cohen; Cohen told Clark not to attend a particular NATO meeting and Clark showed up anyway; Clark briefed National Security Advisor Sandy Berger on the war's progress and Cohen chewed him out again, this time for going over his head. Finally, Clark enraged his superiors in Washington when he began to publicly state the need for ground forces in Kosovo, an option Cohen and the White House vehemently opposed. President Clinton had even gone so far as to say he had no intention of using U.S. troops against the Serbian army. And yet Clark would not let the issue rest, convinced that only the fear of an invasion would prompt Milosevic to give in.

By design or simple miscommunication, Clark was shut out of many of the planning meetings in Washington, and was therefore unable to directly make his case for how to fight the war. Because the bombers had mostly failed to hit Seth troops, and ground forces were a forbidden topic, Clark asked the Army to send him a task force of Apache helicopters with which he could attack Seth units in the field. The Army eventually agreed, though it took weeks to get the helicopters positioned. Even then, they were saddled by restrictions on how they could operate and where they could strike. As a result, the task force was largely useless. The war dragged on. (The lack of a ground force option eventually forced Clark and NATO into a more open relationship with the KLA, a relationship that up to that point had yielded only intelligence. Running out of options on the ground, NATO began to support KLA operations, eventually dropping bombs in support of a failing KLA offensive on Mount Pastrik. Clark has been quoted as saying at the time, "We'll pay for that hill with American blood if we don't help [the KLA] hold it.")

After ten weeks of bombing, much of it ineffectual, the United States agreed in theory not to rule out the use of ground forces. The Serbs sued for peace within two weeks. The threat of ground combat -- coupled with the fact that Russia, Serbia's only possible protector, had chosen to side with NATO -- finally caused Milosevic to roll over.

The war ended. The Clinton administration had been typically ambivalent about it, allowing the strategic and diplomatic discussion to disintegrate into something of a grudge match between the State Department and the Pentagon. Clark fought the war the way no general would want to: hamstrung by an elaborate targetapproval process, with an incremental (rather than overwhelming) use of force, and no ground troops. Yet somehow Clark had succeeded. He also saw how the diplomatic effort to isolate Russia from Serbia had worked, and had made the possibility of a NATO ground invasion more threatening, ultimately making an actual invasion unnecessary

After Kosovo, Clark was praised throughout Europe, and was the guest of honor at a number of state dinners. Queen Elizabeth made him an Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Clark and his staff had made NATO seem robust and vital. In Washington, however, in addition to being called a war criminal by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and others, the White House was unsure of what to do with him. After he was told that the White House was concerned that they hadn't gotten any political benefit from the war, Clark fumed. "I'm thinking, Right! You won a war, but you wouldn't call it a war so you couldn't call it a victory. You didn't bring anybody back in and praise them for it. All you did was moan and groan about how difficult it was."

ON the second bad day of Wesley Clark's Army career, he left for Lithuania with the lyrics of a Buddy Holly song in his head: "Rave on, it's a crazy feeling/And I know it's got me reeling ... rave on." It was the end of July, 1999, and the Kosovo war was over. He sensed that his relations with Washington had improved, and that everyone now understood that his actions during the Kosovo war had been necessary, if not always understood. He went to dinner with Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, and at 10:10 p.m. he was called out to receive a phone call from General Hugh Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Clark took the call on a cell phone, and was told that he would be relieved of his command. He retired the following May

To explain the unusual step of forcing a victorious general into early retirement, Cohen and Shelton have cited the vagaries of Department of Defense personnel law. Specifically, Air Force General Joe Ralston, the popular Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, needed a command by May; otherwise, by law he would be demoted to a twostar rank. Certain things were left unsaid, though: Generals can always find temporary duty at the Pentagon in order to avoid being demoted. More galling for Clark was that Ralston had been tarnished a few years before in an adultery scandal. (In the 1980s, Ralston had an affair while separated from his wife.) Ralston's prospects for being confirmed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff disappeared after the revelation, but in time the scandal wore Off, and eventually Cohen was able to appoint Ralston without much of a fight. ("He was Cohen's man," says Dale Vesser. After serving fewer than three years as SACEUR, Ralston retired in 2003 and joined Cohen at The Cohen Group, an "international strategic business consulting firm.")

"When I got back to my room," Clark told me, "I was pretty upset that it had happened, and also that I had been pulled out of dinner to be told that, and that I got jerked around about it. I think my wife and I laid down to go to sleep about four o'clock in the morning and we didn't sleep. And the next day, you know, life continued. I went out to look at training exercises and so forth. And I got a call that morning from [Ralston], and he said, 'I had nothing to do with it! I had nothing to do with it!"' Clark paused. "These guys made some mistakes."

That is all Clark will say about his dismissal from the military, with all its implications of failure and disgrace. Nine months after his phone call from Shelton, in May 2000, Clark retired. The Army had no place else for him to go.

"If he had a weakness as a commander," says General Shalikashvili, "it was that he probably didn't appreciate enough that not all those around him had the same drive and energy that he had, and sometimes he expected more from people around him than they could give. He saw things through his eyes, and expected people to follow him at that fast pace. And, you have a different perspective when you're out in the field rather than back in the capital."

AND so the prodigal son returned to Little Rock. He started playing more golf, but discovered he wasn't very good at it. He wrote his book, and began to appear on television, and soon enough a few people -- major donors, columnists, Democratic Party professionals, political activists thought he'd make a good politician. First he was asked to run for governor of Arkansas by the state Democratic Party, an offer he turned down. A few months later he was being considered as a possible presidential candidate, and his life and personality were reduced to a political sales pitch.

"He's a really good guy," says one prominent Democratic activist, one of the inner circle of big-money donors who helped get Bill Clinton started on his first presidential campaign. "Obviously his leadership in the military is a very strong point. He's able to connect with people when he addresses them, and I think that's a strong point in someone running. He has an articulate vision, and he connects with people. His experience on television is a strength, too. He's a good symbol, yes."

And that's what Wesley Clark will remain until he chooses to step into the race -- a charming and articulate symbol.

For his part, Clark is uncomfortable with the idea that he's a symbol of anything, that he's anything other than a fleshandblood man with his own strengths and weaknesses.

"Some Army guys told me once, 'We've got to be better than the rest of society.' Well, better in what sense? Better in the sense that you're really dedicated to the job? Okay. Better in the sense that you've really learned your skills? Okay." Clark looked around the conference room, at the Remington statue, at the table, at the television set, at his questioner, at the ceiling, and then back to his questioner. He put his right hand flat on the table, where his index finger looked especially small. "But better in the sense of more pure? Better human nature? I don't think so. Human nature is human nature, and the people in the Armed Forces aren't any better or worse."

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