Clark Wears Campaign Medals From Two Fronts

Before the Pentagon leadership picked Gen. Wesley Clark to head the command for the Latin American region in 1996, it asked the Army for its recommendations. The brass submitted a list of candidates -- and Clark’s name was not on it.

A year later, before the Pentagon leadership elevated Clark to NATO supreme allied commander, it asked the Army again -- and again received recommendations that did not include Clark.

Clark went on to win fame as the top military commander of the successful 1999 war to expel Serbian forces from the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Now he is counting on a resume packed with military and diplomatic accomplishments to give his candidacy credibility.

But Clark’s military past is not an unalloyed asset. In fact, critics say, the Army’s reluctance to back him for promotion illustrates misgivings that a number of his peers had about Clark despite his distinguished 37-year career.

Clark, who was tagged as the Democratic front-runner in a poll released Sunday by Newsweek just days after becoming the party’s 10th candidate for president, gained strong supporters and patrons during his military career because of his brains and energy. But he also accumulated detractors, who considered him abrasive and overly ambitious, and sometimes questioned the wisdom of his decisions.

The 58-year-old Arkansan was “one of the quickest studies, hardest workers, brightest stars in the Army,” said one Army general who worked closely with Clark. “But was he the guy you wanted on your team? Were his solutions the best? There was a lot more debate about that.”

First in his West Point class in 1966, Clark also won the U.S. Military Academy’s only Rhodes scholarship that year. He earned Silver and Bronze stars in Vietnam, where he was wounded badly when the company he was leading on a patrol north of Saigon was ambushed and he was shot four times. After the war, Clark returned to West Point as an instructor in the academy’s social sciences department.

He was a White House fellow and later commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division. In a top staff post as director of strategy and policy for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, he worked with U.S. diplomatic troubleshooter Richard Holbrooke to help negotiate the Dayton peace accords that ended the three-way war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Clark’s accomplishments as a hustling problem solver again and again drew the attention of top civilian policymakers, from Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr. during the Nixon administration to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and national security advisor Samuel R. Berger during the Clinton administration.

In dealing with the Balkans crisis, Clark was “the best partner we could have had,” Albright enthused in her autobiography. Top Clinton foreign policy officials continue to praise him.

Yet in 1999, there were bitter disagreements between Clark and his Pentagon bosses about what was probably the most important military judgment of his career -- how to drive Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and his troops out of Kosovo.

NATO leaders broadly agreed that the effort should rely on a high-altitude bombing campaign, rather than a ground war that would risk major casualties -- and a public backlash. Clark pushed for weeks to use ground troops, in the face of resistance from President Clinton, Defense chief William S. Cohen and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Clark’s desire to bring in low-flying Apache attack helicopters alarmed top Army officials, who argued that the Apaches would be vulnerable because they would lack the essential cover that long-range artillery could provide. “This wasn’t according to Army doctrine,” one retired Army colonel said.

In the end, Milosevic caved and withdrew his troops from Kosovo, after a longer-than-expected 78 days of bombing -- but without the use of Apaches or NATO ground troops. Victory was achieved without any U.S. combat deaths.

“Once we were on the ground, it [would have been] a much more difficult situation,” former security advisor Berger said in an interview last week. “And, by the way, the strategy worked.”

But if Clark’s ground troops weren’t proved to be necessary, many analysts believed the threat that NATO might escalate was key in persuading Milosevic to give up.

Clark’s critics in the Pentagon have long accused him of trying to get ahead by cultivating important civilian leaders.

On one 1998 trip to Washington, Clark met with White House officials to discuss the possible air campaign in Kosovo, without first stopping at the Pentagon -- drawing a warning that he needed to share his itinerary with Joint Chiefs Chairman Henry Hugh Shelton and Cohen.

Berger acknowledged the tensions, but he insisted they were only natural when so much was at stake. “Inherent to the battlefield is a situation where the commander seeks to be somewhat more aggressive, in some respects .... Tell me a relationship between a field commander and the people back in headquarters that has not been somewhat laden with friction,” Berger said. The Pentagon, he added, “over-imagined” how much secret contact there was between Clark and the White House.

Clark’s approach to the war revealed his broader philosophy about the use of the military. He split from the post-Vietnam era view that force should be used in overwhelming measure, and only if all else had failed, a doctrine associated with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

Clark’s view was that military force could be used in different degrees of intensity, in different situations, as one of the tools of foreign policy. “This distinguishes him from most of the post-Vietnam generals,” said Ivo Daalder, who served as European specialist on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council. “He sees force as one of the tools in the toolbox.”

Daalder noted that as a key staffer on the Joint Chiefs, Clark was important in urging its chairman, John M. Shalikashvili, and others to agree in 1995 -- before the Kosovo intervention -- to the NATO bombing of Bosnia that helped drive the parties to the bargaining table.

Clark also believed in aggressively using the military on the ground, sometimes in an improvised fashion.

As NATO boss, he sometimes clashed with the U.S. Army generals who were leading the NATO “stabilization force” in Bosnia because he wanted them to be more aggressive in using military pressure to force Bosnians to change. He wanted to use the troops to accelerate resettlement of populations, to get local leaders to agree to creation of a multiethnic police force, and to pressure ethnic leaders.

On this, there was “pushback” from the field commanders, including Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who went on to serve as Army chief of staff from 1999 to August. Shinseki feared going too far in using military force for “nation-building,” said another general who worked with Clark during the Kosovo war. The relationship between Clark and Shinseki in Bosnia “was extremely strained.”

Clark, said the general, “would take more risk -- he’d rely more on instinct than staff recommendations.”

After the Kosovo war, Clark’s tactics raised questions in a confusing moment when the Russian army sent a column to the provincial capital of Pristina to occupy an airport. Clark ordered British Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson to block the runway so the Russians couldn’t bring in reinforcements. The British general refused, telling Clark: “I’m not starting World War III for you,” Clark said in his 2001 book, “Waging Modern War.”

In his book, Clark said he feared NATO’s future influence would have been undermined if the Russians had been able to become a postwar force on the ground in Kosovo. He told Jackson that he had NATO support for his action.

But Kenneth H. Bacon, who was assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, said this was a “controversial moment.” Amid confusion about Russian intentions, “the feeling in Washington was that we needed to resolve this at the capital level, Washington to Moscow,” rather than on the ground.

“We spent the entire Cold War resisting overly aggressive actions; we had a long history of talking these things out,” said Bacon, who is now president of Refugees International.

Still, Clark came out of the war with wide acclamation, including praise for his efforts at holding together a fractious coalition of 19 NATO countries.

A year later, in July 2000, Shelton, the Joint Chiefs chairman, called Clark, shocking him with the news that he would be pulled off the job three months ahead of schedule -- and without the year’s extension Clark was expecting. Officials insisted that the early departure was only to make way for a new commander, Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who they said would otherwise have been forced to retire under Pentagon rules.

But “it didn’t wash,” Clark later wrote in his book. “Was this a way of easing me out, without admitting it?”

Whatever the truth, at the close of his military career, Clark struggled with the residue of conflicts and strains he had experienced with senior officers and civilian leaders.

He had clashed with Shelton and Defense Secretary Cohen; he had a strained relationship with Shinseki, the Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003; and he was cool to Shinseki’s predecessor, Gen. Dennis Reimer, according to senior Army officers who know Clark and the others.

In his high-visibility role in the Balkans and with his close ties to civilian leaders in the Clinton administration, Clark had drawn fire, in part because of a false assumption that he had ties to another Rhodes scholar from Arkansas, Bill Clinton. And Clark was criticized for meeting and exchanging gifts with Gen. Ratko Mladic in 1994. Mladic was a Bosnian Serb leader later indicted on war crimes charges.

Some who know him said part of Clark’s problem with some in the military is that he rose swiftly, moved aggressively to get what he wanted, and drew public attention.

Col. David Hackworth, a retired Army officer turned commentator, disparaged Clark in a 1999 column as “known to those who’ve served with him as the Ultimate Perfumed Prince.” But in an e-mail exchange, Hackworth said he no longer believed that characterization of Clark to be accurate. “Withdrew it after I read [Clark’s] new book and did further research,” Hackworth wrote, adding that he recently interviewed Clark “and came away very impressed.”

Clark’s newest book, “Winning Modern Wars,” examines the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and is due out in October.

The general who served with Clark in the 1990s thinks Clark’s fast rise early in his career may have caused his superiors to start holding him back when he reached the upper rungs. Clark raced through the early promotions, but he needed more than six years to make it from colonel to brigadier general, the general said.

Officials said Clark’s outspokenness also got him in trouble.

During this year’s war in Iraq, speaking as a CNN commentator, Clark faulted the Pentagon. In late March, when the advance of U.S. forces had slowed because of bad weather and long supply lines, Clark pointed out that the Pentagon had been too optimistic about Iraqi cooperation, and would have been better off with more troops.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., an advocate of Clark, is among those who insist the general is not a credit hog, and no tougher to work for than other aggressive commanders. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower “had the same kind of relationship with people around him; he had to get a job done, so he would never suffer fools.”

Scales, a former commandant of the Army War College, believes Clark suffered fallout from some superiors’ annoyance at his fast rise. Commanders got into a habit of throwing more and more difficult tasks at Clark, to the point that “I’d almost have to say they were hoping that he would fail,” Scales said.