Brass Ambition

By Mark Thompson/Washington

While the politicians call him General, the generals call him a politician. He once boasted of knowing the cholesterol level of all the officers vying with him for a promotion. The view of Wesley Clark as a hyperambitious, political general is widespread within the military, and though some officers decry those qualities, such traits might be just the thing for a presidential candidate. Right now, Clark's resume is his platform, and he wins high marks from former colleagues for his intelligence and innovation, though not for his warmth or generosity to fellow officers. They praise him for improving the way the Army trains its commanders and for settling age-old hatreds in the Balkans by diplomacy when possible, by force when necessary.

Clark's new book, Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism and the American Empire, casts his trained eye on the Bush Administration's policy of nearly unilateral pre-emption and makes a cogent case for multilateralism. The book and Clark's military record offer insights into how good a general he was--and what kind of President he might be.

THE STRATEGIST

Generals, even those with four stars, get to influence policy only at the margins. They take an oath to follow the orders of their civilian leaders. Their power comes from influencing those leaders before final decisions are made. By that standard, Clark didn't get what he wanted in the 1999 Kosovo war. He fought to have ground troops to force Slobodan Milosevic to halt the killing of thousands of Albanian Kosovars in the province of Kosovo, which might have made military sense but would have shattered NATO unity. But the Clinton Administration took ground troops off the table early, as a way to preserve the alliance (some NATO members didn't want to attack at all) and paint the war as all of Europe, and the U.S., against Yugoslavia. Clark made the best of it, eventually persuading his bosses to at least begin planning to deploy ground units. and after 78 days of increasingly heavy bombing, the strategy worked--though it took the Russians to persuade Milosevic to surrender.

In the mid-1990s, Clark was serving as the director of policy and planning for the Joint Chiefs, a position in which his deft political touch and a capacity for poor judgment were on display. He played a key role in stopping an early round of bloodshed in the Balkans, helping to draft the Dayton accords that halted the killing in Bosnia. But he stumbled when he met and swapped military hats with Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb general the U.S. had branded a war criminal for the indiscriminate killing of Bosnian Muslims. The meeting infuriated the State Department. Clark later apologized, saying his gesture had given Mladic "a recognition and an acceptance into the brotherhood of arms which I don't feel his record substantiates."

THE CAREERIST

Clark had a charmed career in the military, but, associates say, it began stalling out after he won his second star with his promotion to major general in September 1992. Bill Clinton gave him a third star in 1994. Two years later, then Lieut. General Marc Cisneros recalls hearing that Clark was seeking to win the four-star billet as head of the U.S. Southern Command--after the service had nominated Cisneros for the post. Cisneros would have seemed the ideal candidate: a Spanish speaker who had taken Manuel Noriega into custody in 1990 when the Panamanian leader surrendered to U.S. troops. Clark, in contrast, speaks Russian and had never held a Latin American post.

"When I was told by the Army that he was maneuvering to politically usurp my nomination, I visited with Clark," Cisneros says. "I said, 'I hear you're competing for the Southcom position also'--but he denied it. He told me, 'You're the nominee, and you're the one who's going to be selected, and I'm not trying to get that job.'" But within weeks, Clinton had nominated Clark. "I could have taken a 'Yes, I'm applying for the job,'" Cisneros says. "But when I confronted him, he was dishonest to me."

While Clark declined to respond directly to Cisneros, he told TIME, "People are entitled to their own opinions. The Army and the armed forces are very competitive institutions." An erstwhile colleague comments, "It doesn't mean a lot to be a Rhodes scholar in the Army, but it helps your career when the President is one." In fact, after Clark had run the Southern Command for only 12 months, Clinton nominated him to be NATO commander. That too raised Pentagon eyebrows, given that Clark had no significant command experience in that theater either.

Clark got crosswise with Defense Secretary William Cohen during the Kosovo campaign. Among other things, Cohen didn't like Clark's conducting press conferences from NATO headquarters in Brussels that might step on the Pentagon's preferred message. So Cohen had Army General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, telephone Clark with a tart midwar message: "The Secretary of Defense asked me to give you some verbatim guidance, so here it is: 'Get your f______ face off the TV,'" Clark wrote in his 2001 memoir. (Cohen declined to discuss Clark.)

Only a month after the Kosovo war, Clark learned that the Pentagon would be relieving him of his NATO post in early 2000, three months before his European tour was to end. According to Samuel Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, the Pentagon had told Clinton that the military career of Air Force General Joseph Ralston was winding up. Ralston was then serving as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Clinton felt he owed him. Ralston, after all, had lost his bid to become the chairman in 1997, when a controversy erupted over an extramarital affair.

Clinton approved Ralston as a replacement for Clark, Berger says, thinking it would happen only when Clark's term ended, not three months early. But the news of Clinton's choice of Ralston quickly leaked, along with an explanation that Clark would have to leave the post early to accommodate the Pentagon's arcane promotion timetable. "We approved a succession, not an execution," Berger recalls. Clark has described that day as one of the two worst of his life, the other being the day he was wounded in Vietnam.

THE SOLDIER

After West Point, Clark volunteered for duty in Vietnam, where he was wounded in the hand, shoulder, leg and hip by an AK-47 and won a Silver Star for bravery along with his Purple Heart. He then won a White House fellowship under President Ford, and he became one of a few tradition-busting Army officers--Colin Powell was another--willing to step off the Army treadmill to serve in political assignments. "Many of us saw him as too self-serving," says a fellow Army officer. "A key measurement of an officer is how many people who serve under him get promoted to higher ranks because their commander pushed for them. You didn't see that as much with Clark as with other officers." Clark sees ambition as an engine to make things better. "Are you ambitious for the unit?" he asks. "I took a lot of units and made them better." Clark won high marks, even from foes, for his role in creating the Army's Battle Command Training Program, which made war games more realistic, and valuable, for commanders.

Clark was too in-your-face ambitious to fit into the Army's insular bureaucracy, which tends to dismiss anyone willing to challenge it. "Wes just wasn't a good ole boy," says Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army four-star who has known Clark for 30 years. "He didn't fit the 'I come from West Virginia, and my mom cooked me corn pone' that many combat leaders cultivate." Others saw a certain coldness. "He tended to have a blind spot on the human dimension," says a colonel who worked for him when Clark commanded the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, from 1992 to '94. "And it hurt morale: soldiers respected him, but they didn't love him."

But Clark's persistence rarely fails, and it may help him in politics. Back in 1961, as a 16-year-old high school senior, Clark needed a congressional nomination to get into West Point. When Arkansas Senator William Fulbright didn't answer his letter, he moved on to his state's other Senator, John McClellan. "You're not old enough, you're not big enough, and you're not smart enough to go to West Point," McClellan told Clark. "Come back and maybe talk to me next year." Refusing to take "later" for an answer, Clark turned to his Congressman, Dale Alford. The lawmaker required constituents seeking a West Point nod to take a civil service test. Clark beat out all his fellow test takers and won the appointment. --With reporting by Karen Tumulty/Little Rock

With reporting by Karen Tumulty/Little Rock