Retired Gen. Wesley Clark Ponders Bid for White House

This Fourth of July will find many presidential contenders shaking hands, marching in parades, sampling picnic fare and generally showing their patriotic stripes.

Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, by contrast, will be at home with his family in Little Rock, Ark., contemplating the presidency.

NATO’s supreme allied commander during the Kosovo conflict in the late 1990s, Clark is the darling of a small group of enthusiasts who see his resume as electoral magic and are trying to draft him to run. Democrats uneasy with the current lineup look at Clark -- first in his class at West Point, honored for valor in Vietnam -- and see a warrior who can criticize President Bush without seeming weak on defense.

Clark, a four-star general who has never held electoral office, said he has voted in Democratic primaries but is coy about officially declaring himself a Democrat. Like the last general drafted to run for president, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, he clings to the military officer’s preference for globalism in politics.

“I’ve been nonpartisan my whole life,” he said in an interview this week between a speech in Philadelphia on homeland security and a trip back to Arkansas. “I served in the Ford administration. I’ve also been a senior staff officer in the Clinton administration. I know people from both sides.”

As one of CNN’s military analysts during the Iraq war, Clark criticized the administration’s tactics but supported the strategic goal of fighting terrorism. Now, as he considers a campaign for the presidency, he said he is trying to negotiate “personal considerations of family” against his concerns as a citizen.

“I’ve been increasingly concerned about the direction of our foreign policy,” he said. “We’ve got a lot mortgaged on success in Iraq, and I’d say the odds of success are maybe 60-40. If Iraq collapses, we lose a lot. There are lots of lost opportunities in the war on terrorism.”

Clark is quick to mention his concern about domestic issues as well. A corporate consultant to emerging technology companies, he is worried about “jobs in the near term” and investor caution in the long term. “It’s a matter of equity,” he said. “People are really careful with capital after getting burned in the last tech bubble.”

He is worried, too, about a faltering education system. “We’re not going to be able to survive as the strongest economy in the world without a stronger educational system,” he said.

Clark has told Democratic Party officials that he will make up his mind about an election bid by the end of summer.

Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is one of the few party elders to have discussed a possible campaign with Clark, who first met with potential financial backers last fall. The two talked in January, and McAuliffe thinks Clark has the bug. “In his heart, he wants to run,” McAuliffe said. “His mind is trying to figure it out.”

The two talked about procedural issues -- how much time there is, for instance, to file delegate slates in the states -- and McAuliffe reminded Clark that Bill Clinton didn’t get into the 1992 presidential race until October 1991. “The more the merrier,” McAuliffe said, referring to the wide field of hopefuls. “We’ve got nine candidates out there energizing people. To have Wesley Clark talking about the failures of the White House on foreign affairs is great for the process.”

Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist who managed Al Gore’s 2000 presidential race, is a strong supporter of a Clark candidacy. She met Clark, she said, in the makeup room at CNN, where both frequently appear.

“He has a unique voice, a great intellectual gift and a wealth of experience on national security,” Brazile said. “And he keeps his eyes on you when he’s talking -- not like some politicians, whose eyes wander. I was impressed.”

The future general was born Wesley Kanne, the only child of Veneta and Benjamin Kanne. A Jewish veteran of World War I and a prosecutor in Chicago, Benjamin Kanne died when Wesley was 5. His widow moved to Little Rock, where she raised Wesley as a Southern Baptist. When she remarried, her husband, Victor Clark, adopted the boy.

Clark, who has converted to Catholicism, has said he was unaware of his Jewish heritage until he was in his early 20s and now maintains contact with his father’s relatives. He and his wife, Gertrude, have been married for 36 years; their son, also named Wesley, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles.

A 1966 graduate of West Point, Clark earned a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He was a White House Fellow in the Ford administration in 1975-76.

During the Vietnam War, he was in charge of three companies, including an infantry group.

Rising quickly through the ranks, Clark was promoted to major at the age of 31, and he was the first member of his West Point class to command a battalion. In 1997, he was named to lead all North Atlantic Treaty Organization and U.S. forces in Europe. Amid reports of ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs, he led the fighting in Kosovo, backing the muscular use of air power in a successful effort to force Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power while keeping European allies on board.

After Milosevic left office, the Pentagon removed Clark from his post a few months ahead of schedule. Clark’s supporters contended that the early departure was “payback time” from officials rubbed the wrong way by the general’s outspokenness.

“Wes is a terrific leader and did a great job in Kosovo and deserves a great deal of credit for our victory there,” said Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor. “The way in which his departure was handled involved politics at the Pentagon.”

Whether Clark, 58, can translate his military leadership into electoral success is one of the issues he may be pondering over the holiday. To Josh Margulies, a New York attorney, the answer is clear.

“It’s not enough for a lot of Republicans I know that Bush has exceeded expectations; we want more,” said Margulies, who heads Republicans for Clark. “It’s a matter of capturing the middle group -- Reagan Democrats or Clark Republicans.”

In April, Margulies’ brother-in-law, John Hliko, and Washington public relations expert David Wallace created DraftWesleyClark.com -- an Internet-based movement to encourage Clark to run. The radio ads they are running in New Hampshire -- and that are planned soon for Iowa -- compare Clark to Eisenhower.

Political players are dubious that Clark has either the time or the money to win the nomination in an already crowded field. And they wonder if his reluctance is a stealth invitation to the eventual nominee to pick him as the vice presidential candidate.

Clark would be “honored,” he said, to be considered for the No. 2 spot, but right now he is pondering the presidency. “Those young kids who organized the draft movement -- I have to give them an answer,” he said.