In a war like this, with so much still unresolved and a policy deliberately cloaked in ambiguity for the benefit of the Congress, Clinton’s commander in the field, General Wes Clark, would be the man caught in the middle between the conflicting forces: a hesitant White House, a skeptical Congress, a reluctant Pentagon, and of course the other members of NATO, all of them having very different attitudes on how much or how little power to use. His responsibility was to take this limited mandate and maximize it as best he could. A number of allies were hardly enthusiastic at the start and would grow increasingly uneasy day by day if the early use of airpower proved inadequate. If it was not immediately successful, he might have to push for expanded target lists and perhaps eventually for the use of ground troops or at least for the ability to threaten Milosevic with their use.
But because of what Clinton had said about ground troops and the decisions made by the principals about the Kosovo campaign, Clark would be in constant collision with the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs, who in time decided he was too hawkish, and as well with his air commander, Mike Short, who soon thought that Clark, most of the civilians in Washington, and almost all of the political leadership in Brussels were going to war halfheartedly and putting his pilots at risk for too little in the way of results. The decision to go with airpower alone might have been something that Clark had signed on to as part of his command. But the ability of the Serbs to endure the early weeks of the bombing campaign, the quite limited nature of the bombing itself, and the narrow target list soon became a major problem. Increasingly frustrated, Clark began to push for a more productive target list and the ability to make ground troops part of his command, if only to increase his leverage over Milosevic.
That would eventually separate him from Cohen and the Chiefs. Their marching orders—in their minds—were quite different. They had never wanted ground troops in the Balkans, and they took the White House’s no-ground-troops statement perhaps more literally than the man who had issued it. Nor were they that enthusiastic even about the air campaign, and they were dubious of Clark as well. They did not like his early and constant advocacy of military force long before the fighting started, and they had never wanted him for that job in the first place. Thus were the lines drawn. The tensions between Clark and his colleagues in Washington were never over his talent. His credentials were more than good. They were impeccable. He was, in the army vernacular, a water walker, someone who was so good and whose career was so special that he walked on water. He was the kind of officer whose contemporaries would predict, when he was only a major, that he would surely get several stars, although in Clark’s case they were saying it when he was a mere lieutenant. In the fall of 1962 as a plebe, he had begun his career in the army as a wunderkind and had ended it, thirty-seven years later, as a four-star and the American commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, still in a way a wunderkind, as bright and brash as the first day he arrived at West Point, ready to take on the world. Clark was in some ways like the president he served, both of them tapped early on as the brightest boy around, always first in their classes, both of them talented, driven, and unwilling to accept failure in any form.
Clark had been born in Chicago, the son of a Jewish father, Benjamin Kanne, who was a lawyer and minor Democratic Party player, and Veneta Kanne, a Protestant from Arkansas. His blood father died when he was four, and his mother returned to Arkansas and remarried a man named Clark, whose name young Wes took. He was raised as a Baptist, became a convert to Catholicism while in Vietnam, and only learned later in his life that he was half-Jewish. He had excelled as a high school student and several scholarships were available for prestigious colleges, but he wanted West Point. Clark had been first in his class during his plebe year at West Point in 1963, and first in his class when he graduated from the academy in 1966, which marked him as someone to watch. In time he had also been first in his class at the army’s most critical trade school, the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth (where the elite were separated from the not so elite, and where, ironically enough, he had written his master’s thesis on Rolling Thunder, the air campaign against the North in Vietnam, deciding that it had signaled weakness rather than strength of resolve), and he had almost always been first on the list for promotion. When in October 1983 the Reagan administration had made a quick strike at Grenada, the first use of force since Vietnam, Clark, then a light colonel, was given one of the two Ranger battalions, a plum assignment, a sign of an up-and-coming officer. Even in the upper level of the army, where everyone was high-powered, ambitious, and almost supernaturally focused, Clark stood out, and it had always been that way. He got his first star when he was only forty-three and commanded the First Cavalry Division at forty-six. He was the most competitive of men. Going back to his early years at West Point, he did not merely want to win; he had to win, and he had to win at everything. He had to be first in his class, anything else was unacceptable; he had to win a casual tennis game, which for Clark was not entirely casual. He had to win a regular morning jog with pals—it was friendly, of course, just exercise among friends—but it might as well have been a run at an Olympic event. Even when Clark was an instructor at West Point preparing a few of his cadets for their Rhodes scholarship interviews, they had to do better than candidates prepped by his colleagues. It was not hard to like him, noted one of his friends, just as long as you understood that Wes believed that every minute of every day could be used profitably, and that he had to win, even if he did not understand why he always had to win. The drive that set him apart was an irresistible impulse over which he had little control. To friends it was just Wes being Wes. Winning was a function of character.
He was not by army standards a good old boy, someone who invited intimacy and offered in return comfort and easy camaraderie. Nothing about him was easygoing. As he grew older, he seemed not to age, as if that, too, might be interpreted as a sign of weakness. He refused to gain a single pound, and his manner, the crisp, starched quality of his uniform, the austere, no-nonsense nature of his briefings—was anything ever left out?—seemed to emphasize the intense, unrelenting focus of his entire personality. He was always prepared—no question by a superior would ever catch him unprepared. No one dealing with Clark could ever doubt the totality of his purpose. His vision in terms of his career was singular. He saw brilliantly what was in front of him as if he had some kind of laser scope through which to see things that other mortals might discover only later in their careers. But his peripheral vision, his ability to pick up on what was going on around him and sense the feelings of peers, was considerably more limited. Nor did he necessarily think that was important. He had little sense of the impact his ferocious personality had on those contemporaries who were also bright, but perhaps not quite as bright or as driven or as verbal as he was. He was almost genetically incapable of adjusting to the covert codes of the institution he served, where it was considered a good thing to be intelligent, but to mask your intelligence under a warm, human veneer, to know more about certain things than you let on.
Yet his career was so gilded that in 1981, some sixteen years before he got the NATO command, the Washington Post Magazine, which wanted to do a profile of the new exemplary modern army officer, had been steered to Lieutenant Colonel Wes Clark, then only thirty-six. The title was revealing and prophetic: “Battalion Commander: If There’s a World War III, Wes Clark May Be Your Man at the Front.” He was, the article noted, “among the best the Army has to offer.”1 Later it added, “He approaches the [military] ideal, the perfect modern officer.” But even in that article, some of the reservations about him, held by those who had a more traditional view of the army system and were put off by his single-minded sense of purpose, surfaced. One colleague had spoken of him for background: “This battalion [at Fort Carson] did need him, I’ll admit that. . . . We all know that before he got here it was the pits. He solved every one of the problems, got it back on its feet. The man is definitely three-star material. He overshadows the battalion. [But] I don’t know anyone who feels at ease with him. Nobody wants to give him bad news, so he has a very overrated opinion of morale and is very defensive about anything that might be wrong. Which could be dangerous . . .”2
When he left West Point, Clark had gone on to win a Rhodes scholarship, which is not unlike being handed a live hand grenade in the army. It puts you on a fast track, all kinds of powerful people now start looking out for you, but it also means that you may well go against the grain of the culture of the army, which is somewhat suspicious of people who think they are a little too smart and seem to be in too much of a hurry—the hallmark of most Rhodes Scholars. There is a terrific niche within the army for bright young Rhodes Scholars, you can rise reasonably high within a certain prescribed range as a soldier-intellectual (perhaps a brigadier, maybe even a two-star), and you can make yourself valuable over a long period at the Pentagon. Rhodes Scholars were also good advertising that this was a new, more modern, more cerebral army; in addition, it meant that the army had its own bright young men (and women) to deal with the high-powered, bright young civilians in the Defense Department who always wanted to cut its missions and budget, as well as the talented young men and women of the other services who wanted the newest toys for their branch. But the army had misgivings about many of them. “Are you a Rhodes?” one bright young officer, who had done brilliantly at the Point and had a glistening curriculum vitae, was asked by his superior on his first day at a new assignment. The officer said apologetically that though he had graduated high in his class, he had just missed the Rhodes. “Good,” the commander said. “They all suffer from terminal arrogance before they’re thirty.” So it was always incumbent on someone who was a Rhodes to show that he was a real army man, a good guy and a straight shooter, one of the boys, as good with the men under him as he was with his superiors, and as much a warrior as he was an intellectual. Within the professional army, some Rhodes Scholars from West Point were eventually accepted by their peers, but they first had to overcome an undertow of distrust—of being perceived as being too favored by the gods.
Wes Clark, however, was not that good at softening the image he presented to others. Moreover, he was a Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas, and in the nineties that became something of a problem because it was often assumed that he was close to Clinton, which was not necessarily true. Some of the other officers thought that at times when he had been around Clinton as the J-5 of the Joint Staff during the Haiti operation, Clark had signaled an additional connection. It was almost a light flirt, a hint that the two of them had something apart from everyone else in the room. In reality they were not close, they had not overlapped at Oxford, and they had never been pals during their parallel rise to the top. But they were both small-town boys from the same region who had made good in the big time a long way from home, and there was, if not a friendship, a kind of kinship. Of Clark it could be said, when it was all over, that he was both a beneficiary and a victim of being a Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas. Some in the army pushed him ahead thinking he might help bridge the gap to these alien people in the White House, but even more found their doubts about him growing because they suspected he was working a little too hard trying to bridge that gap.
There was also a kind of all-American innocence to his personality, as if he had believed when he was a boy and still believed as a grown man that the best boy with the best grades who worked hardest would always be justly rewarded. Being with Wes, some friends thought, was like being back in high school and hearing one of the younger players on the football team asking the coach to put him in the game, saying that he could do it, could turn the losing tide around in the final moments. That quality had been true of him from West Point right through to the time he almost did not get his fourth star. “The problem with your General Clark is that he’s very bright but he suffers from the gold-star syndrome,” a high British officer told one senior American in Brussels during the Kosovo war. What do you mean? the American asked. “Well, don’t you remember when you were in the first and second grade and you got a gold star for doing something right? Well, he’s been doing that ever since, getting gold stars, and there’s a real question as to whether life is about getting a gold star—about what your purpose in doing something is, and in getting ahead. He may be very driven without really knowing why he’s so driven.”
Those qualities did not necessarily endear Clark to his peers. He had always inspired some resentment, and the higher he went in rank, the more of it there appeared to be. Some of the resentment was driven by jealousy. Go up rapidly in a world like the military, where everyone knows not only your rank but how quickly you got it, and it is hard not to create some jealousy. Many of those most critical of him were men who were unsure of their own abilities and were, in contrast to Clark’s rare decisiveness, loath to make a decision. But others who watched him worried whether he was not merely too ambitious, but too self-absorbed.
The criticism of Clark manifested itself in subtle and not so subtle ways. For example, among the many divisions that run through the army, one of the most important, alongside and quite parallel to that of field commander versus staff man, was that of pure warrior versus the military intellectual. Warriors, of course, were greatly favored within the culture, while military intellectuals were generally regarded with suspicion because it was believed that their talents were abstract, that on occasion they tended to play the game of civilian politicians, and that their primary loyalty might not be, consciously or unconsciously, like that of the warriors to their troops. That, many in the army believed, was what had happened in Vietnam. Johnson and McNamara had co-opted too many senior army men, some of them would-be intellectuals, and bent them into accepting the incremental escalation of what was an unwinnable war.
Whatever else, Clark was perceived by many as an army intellectual. But to others who knew him well, he was also, in every sense, the complete warrior. Lieutenant General Dan Christman, later superintendent of West Point and one of Clark’s oldest friends in the army—they were a year apart at West Point—admired him greatly. “There is no one I’ve known in my years in the army who embodies the warrior ethos more completely than Wes—he’s excelled as a commander at every level,” Christman said. “He’s fierce and he’s absolutely fearless, and above all he is a warrior. He’s always ready not merely to go into combat, but to excel. If you were going into battle, you would want him in command—company, battalion, brigade. He would do everything right, he would think out every option, he would be selfless and he would be fearless. No one would do it better. But within the army he rarely gets credit for being a warrior.”3
From the start of his career, Clark was marked for greatness and senior command, but despite all his self-evident talent, some of his superiors always questioned whether he passed one of the army’s most critical tests, the ability to show sufficient concern for the men under him, something that distinguishes great commanders. His friends thought that criticism was unfair. No one, they believed, would do a better job preparing his men and bringing them into combat in the best kind of fighting shape, but he would do it coolly and professionally. There would be nothing warm and avuncular about him. His combat credentials were worthy. Clark had graduated from West Point in the middle of the Vietnam War, had commanded a company in the First Infantry Division, and in an early battle had been seriously wounded four times in a single engagement, in the hand, shoulder, leg, and hip. Yet he had continued to command his unit, and for that he had received the Silver Star. The battle and the wounds, some thought, had made him more aggressive than ever; as he rose in rank, he seemed to be on a hair trigger, spoiling for a good fight or a worthy war.
In time Clark had held every command position the army offered and had excelled at each level, but somehow he did not get credit for being a commander. Probably it was a function of his personality. He was never one of the boys. You could, thought one colleague, use Wes as a litmus test on some of his peers: their reaction to him would say as much about them as it did about him. If they were bright and confident, then they overlooked his occasionally irritating qualities. But if they were a little insecure about their own place as they rose to higher ranks where the challenges were more complicated, then Clark, who met those challenges so readily, created resentment. He was, as one colleague noted, the kind of guy who in college took a three-hour exam, was the first to leave the room (by about an hour), and then let you know how easy it was.
There had been only one bad moment when he had slipped and his career was in doubt. When he was at Fort Carson as a battalion commander, the commander there was General Jack Hudachek. He would eventually become well-known within army circles as the one man who had tried to slow down Colin Powell’s rapid rise. Powell had had the audacity to try to speak to Hudachek about the slippage of troop morale and had paid a high price indeed. In his memoirs Powell devoted nearly ten pages to Hudachek, none of them especially admiring. Hudachek had not been that enthusiastic about Powell and gave him a mediocre efficiency report that might easily have damaged an otherwise brilliant career. When Clark showed up as one of his battalion commanders, Hudachek did not like him either. Not that Clark had not been warned. Hudachek did not like men from West Point, Clark was told. Nor did Hudachek like young officers who are under the zone, two friends had said about Clark’s new commander, using the army term for a bright young officer who keeps getting early promotion and has a golden track record. In Clark’s case, the warnings turned out to be all too valid.
When a congressional delegation came to Fort Carson for a visit, Hudachek arranged for some of his best battalion commanders to meet with them. Clark was not selected. He was stunned. Who better exemplified what the modern army wanted to show to the Congress? He was a Rhodes Scholar, a White House Fellow, a combat veteran wounded four times in battle, a Silver Star winner, and almost always first in his class. He had taken a battalion that was in terrible shape and made it one of the best in the division. “I’m afraid the old man [Hudachek] doesn’t consider you representative of the battalion commanders,” one of the top staff officers told Clark. It was a singular slap in the face; Clark had been judged as somehow different, not one of the boys. His own battalion’s excellence—of that there was no doubt—had made no difference. This was some new kind of scoring that he could not fathom, based not on performance, but instead on undefinable qualities of personality. It was a bad omen, but what was to come was worse. When Hudachek prepared Clark’s annual efficiency report, which was life-or-death for an officer at that level, where the grading got tougher and the survivors of the system fewer, he was given a comparatively poor grade—block two at a time when it should have been block one to avoid the possible end of a promising career. Hudachek and Clark then spent several hours discussing the report, and finally, it was believed, Hudachek regraded him and put him in the first block.
That same year the brigade command list came out and Clark was not on it. Peers like Hugh Shelton (later four-star and chairman of the JCS) and Dan Christman (eventually a three-star) were on it. For the first time since he had graduated from West Point, Clark was not first in his class, not in the elite group. He was devastated. Then a year later he didn’t make the list again and he was even more seriously shaken. He thought of leaving the service, but others told him to stay the course, that even if he was having a hard time at Carson, there would be life after John Hudachek. Clark got past that bad moment, but friends thought it was an early example of the kind of resentment he generated, simply by being who he was. If he was best boy, best boys are not always beloved.
As he rose through the ranks, Clark seemed eager—too eager—to show to the world at large and to powerful civilians in particular that the stereotype of the military man who was slow and inarticulate was completely wrong. So he became almost willfully quick and verbal, and outspoken. One assignment that had showcased not merely his talents, but also some of the qualities that jarred the system, had taken place at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. At that point he was still a comer but was felt to need more experience—needed, as they say in the army, to be greened. Other officers might have upgraded the program more slowly and with greater tact for the feelings of their peers. Not Clark. He drove it from the day he first arrived. Clark did well at Fort Irwin under a difficult and demanding senior officer, significantly upgrading the entire place, but he made enemies in the process. In the army, given the complicated network of friendships that sometimes went far back, if you were hard on a senior officer, even if he was obviously under-performing, you risked turning all his pals into adversaries. Clark was very result-oriented, one colleague said. He had pushed hard in an environment that was less result-oriented and more driven by cronyism, and he had made some enemies among men who had powerful sponsors. Dennis Reimer, who would be chief of staff of the army when Clark was in Brussels, had come out to visit the NTC and was reportedly unhappy, not with the results, but with the manner in which Clark had operated—too driven, too abrasive, too hard on people.
All of this meant that as the Kosovo war was about to begin, Clark was in a unique and extremely vulnerable position, somewhat isolated from the institution that had produced him, whose top people had not recommended him for the NATO command. His critics had always believed that he might be a little too political. Certainly, he always did exceptionally well with highlevel civilians, making an unusually good first impression; those very qualities that kept him from being one of the boys with his peers seemed to help him with civilians. He had in midcareer connected himself to the Nixon people and had for a time been an aide to Al Haig, who had been considered very political by fellow army officers. Clark had written speeches for Haig, another indication that Clark, too, might be political. Those doubts arose again when he started operating as a J-5 and was selected to work with Richard Holbrooke, first when he was a special envoy in the Balkans in 1995, and then when Clark served as the military liaison with Holbrooke during Dayton. That, in the last year of dealing with Milosevic, Clark had become as hawkish as some of the civilians did not help him in the Pentagon.
Now Clark was SACEUR, which, given the power of CINCs, made him potentially the single most important military player in the drama now unfolding, more powerful, because of the changed nature of the army’s command, than even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the army chief of staff. John Shalikashvili, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had saved Clark before, and though much of the conflict surrounding Clark was about personality, some was about philosophy as well. He was Shali’s kind of guy, but by the time the Kosovo war started, Shalikashvili was gone and the men who had replaced him were not nearly as sympathetic to Clark, nor as eager to adjust the army to more flexible missions that fell outside the guidelines of the Powell Doctrine. It was well-known within the Pentagon by late 1997, first, that Clark was a committed activist, and second, that he was hard to control and tended to operate on his own value system. Clark had had a telltale argument a few months earlier with Joe Ralston, who was vice chairman, over Clark’s increasing insistence that they use NATO bombing—or at least the threat of bombing—to rein in Milosevic. In that argument Clark could feel not just Ralston’s doubts, but the resistance of the entire Pentagon toward greater activism. Ralston had asked him the old Colin Powell question: What if airpower doesn’t work? “It will work,” Clark had answered. “I know Milosevic, I know how he reacts. It will work.” “But what if it doesn’t?” Ralston asked. But it will, Clark insisted. “But suppose it doesn’t work—do you use ground troops?”4 That exchange was an early sign of even greater tensions still to come. It reflected the doubts of the other Chiefs, and their belief that Clark was pushing too hard and was too confident; to Clark it showed that the Chiefs were much too cautious, too affected by the Vietnam syndrome.
In the fall of 1998, despite the temporary cease-fire, a cease-fire without teeth, Clark came back to Washington to warn his superiors, both civilian and military, of how serious things were. At the same time he briefed a group of former high-level national security people who were activists on the Balkans and spoke pessimistically about the cease-fire that Holbrooke had negotiated. It was all window dressing, Clark said. It would break down quickly, probably in two or three months, because the verification system was inadequate and therefore Milosevic would exploit it. All we had done was buy ourselves a little time. Milosevic, as he had not honored comparable agreements, would not honor this one, Clark predicted. Two months later, in early January 1999, Clark was back in Washington again to warn the administration that Milosevic was going to violate his word in Kosovo, and we would be faced with hard choices. He met with the same group of Balkan activists and this time was even more pessimistic. There was almost certain to be war, he warned, in a very short time. Because of the course that Milosevic had chosen, it was inevitable. In the fighting, he also warned, Russia would not be pleased with what America and NATO were doing, and there would almost surely be a superpower confrontation. Jim Hooper, the former State Department officer on the Balkans who had put the meeting together, remembered that some people there thought that Clark was much too pessimistic. But a year and a half later when they met again and it turned out that he had been absolutely right in every one of his predictions—what would happen, the timing of it, even the confrontation with the Russians—Hooper told Clark that he had been prophetic.