To Sir With Love - A Wesley Clark Blog

Wes likes four hanky flicks and hates cold water in the pool

It's been a slow couple of days for hard campaign news, so while we eagerly await the general's foreign policy address, to be delivered this Thursday in South Carolina, how about some heartwarming Clark trivia, courtesy of Nancy Benac of the Associate Press?

The story that Wes swam two legs of a 4-man relay to win a championship race is pretty well known but did you know that if not for young Clark there wouldn't have even been a swim team:

Classmate Phillip McMath was on the Boys Club swim team with Clark when Clark decided they should have a high school team as well.

"I said, 'Wesley, we don't have a coach, we don't have a budget, we don't have a pool,'" McMath recalls. "He said, 'I'll organize it and I'll be the coach.'" He turned that team into the state champions.

Aiming high is nothing new for the ambitious career-changer.

"It only began to dawn on us as the four years developed that he was laden with terrific gifts," said [West Point] classmate Jack Wheeler. Wheeler recalls sitting with Clark in West Point's sunlit gardens on a spring day discussing Plato in their philosophy class.

"Wes sees himself as one of Plato's men of silver – a dedicated soldier," he said.

Retired Lt. Gen. Dale Vesser, who taught the class, said some students approached it as just another course on the way toward becoming a second lieutenant, but Clark genuinely wanted to educate himself and explore the idea that – as Vesser puts it – "one acquires obligations because one has talents that need to be employed for society."

And Benac reminds us that WKC's personal timeline has a sobering context.

As in high school, Clark the cadet was remembered as serious – but so were the times. In 1962, Clark's plebe year, the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. The next year brought the assassination of a president. When Clark graduated in 1966, the buildup of U.S. troops in Vietnam was approaching 300,000.

Thirty cadets from West Point's Class of '66 would die in Southeast Asia, more than in any other class.

Clark arrived in Vietnam in July 1969, after cutting short his three-year Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University in England by a year.

Does this mean he earned a graduate degree in two years, rather than the customary three?

And lest I forget, don't embarrass yourself in front of the Meet Up throng by mis-pronouncing WKC's middle name. It's "Kay'nee," Ms. Benac confirms.

Although she didn't unearth the general's favorite color, Benac does fill in these important personal details, so you won't have to waste Gert's time asking about them if you find yourselves together with a plate of fried chicken and potato salad on your laps someday.

Clark. . . says his movie tastes favor science fiction and "real heart-wrenchers. I am the perfect movie victim. I fall into every plot and character."

His pet peeves, he says, are "cold lunches, mushy snow and water in the pool that's below 79 degrees."

By all accounts, Clark's diet is awful – he lives off garbage, says his son – but he can get away with it because he still swims and runs with competitive zeal.

. . . Retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a West Point classmate and lifelong friend, describes Clark as personable, loyal and the "cheapest man in the Western world."

Scales recalls Clark puttering around in a battered Volvo station wagon at home at the same time he was whipping around in a high-powered, armored Mercedes at work.

"That's sort of a metaphor for Wes," says Scales. "He comes across as this steely, high-powered guy, but really what he is is a kid from Arkansas."