To Sir With Love - A Wesley Clark Blog

New Video - 60 Minutes II, 11/19/03

Video link: Wesley Clark speaks with Dan Rather for CBS 60 Minutes II, 11/19/2003

Dan Rather's respectful attitude and 60 Minutes' high production values mark WKC's debut on a mainstream TV magazine as something of a milestone. By now Gen. Clark's deep emotion in describing the justification for the Kosovo intervention has been widely noted, but the show was also significant for showing how comfortable he is in his body. His physical charisma was powerfully on display as well as his ironic sense of humour and his sometimes blunt candor.

CBSnews.com is offering both the transcript of the segment as broadcast and the complete interview with Rather (first of three parts starts here.)

The segment broadcast has Clark condemning the wrongheadedness of the Bush administration in terms as stark but more eloquent than Gephardt's epithet, "miserable failure." To my mind, Clark has managed the difficult feat of advocating better treatment of the military ranks without politicizing them in an obviously self-serving manner. Speaking of how he and his reluctant wife Gert came to their decision to run, he told Rather, ". . . Finally, it came down to the anger inside at the way men and women in the armed forces were being abused and used by the administration."

Addressing yet again Gen. Shelton's mean-spirited smear, Clark framed their dispute in terms of his duty to his mission rather than as a pissing contest between macho guys: "It just turned out that we had differing views about the importance of preventing another round of genocide, and how to do it," says Clark. "And I thought, you know, when you're a senior officer, you have an obligation not just to answer the mail, but to speak up and to speak out until you're told not to any longer, until you're told, 'We're just not going to do it.'"

Ánd this seems consistent with the only evidence to emerge that supports Shelton's suggestion that his rift with Clark was a matter of honor, not policy. A lengthy and well-researched profile of WKC in the Boston Globe reports:

. . . Clark became convinced that he needed a backup plan for ground forces despite opposition from the Pentagon and the statement by Clinton. Ivo Daalder, a former aide in Clinton's National Security Council who also was briefed by the White House during the war, said Clark developed a "secret cell" of a half-dozen officers from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to develop a ground-war plan.

"On his own nickel, without anybody's approval, he got a ground war plan," said Daalder, co-author of a book about Kosovo, "Winning Ugly." Clark "didn't ask Shelton for it because he knew the answer. He got the secret cell, a planning cell, that was going to do planning on a ground invasion that was not authorized by anybody, but he argued, rightly in my mind, that he needed to figure out what the options were going to be."

Clark, asked about the plan in an interview, said, "I went through Shelton and the Army to get the ground war planning started. Shelton OK'd it." Shelton declined requests for an interview, but the matter raises questions about whether this is one of the reasons that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has questioned Clark's "integrity and character."

Clearly, under the circumstances, Shelton felt betrayed and undermined and firing a junior seen to be insubordinate would not be unjustifiable. But to drag Clark's integrity in as an excuse is to equate behavior consistent with WKC's training and deeply held principles with an ethical or moral lapse on a par with lying, cheating, or stealing. Frankly, a Wesley Clark capable of such selfish deception could hardly have survived West Point's zero-tolerance honor code, let alone graduate first in his class.

But Gen. Clark's most sincere and possibly controversial statements were made in support of military intervention on behalf of human rights. Showing Mr. Rather graphic photographs of the violence in Kosovo, Clark spoke softly with a powerful intensity:

"This is the casualness, the pornography of violence against civilians.

"This is not real war. This is war against unarmed people, and I just couldn't bear the thought that the United States would stand by and allow this to happen.. . . You know, there are people in this case who said, 'We don't have any interest here. If there was oil here, we'd stop this.' So we'd rather fight for oil than to save lives? I don't think so. . . I don't think that's what this country really believes or what we stand for. So I, I do get emotional about this. Because when you can do good, you should."

Stormin' Norman would have pulled young Wes off the debate team for his own good

Dislike and distrust of Wesley Clark run deep and long among the army's elite upper echelon. Their ambiguous dis-endorsements of Clark hint at ambitiousness that borders on opportunism and a character informed by narcissistic amorality (or am I confusing WKC with Gov. Schwarzenegger?) When a figure as well known as Norman Schwarzkopf, the hero of Desert Storm, weighs in with a remark like:

Hugh Shelton said he was fired because of matters of character and integrity. That is a very, very damning statement which says, if that’s the case, he’s not the right man for president, as far as I’m concerned.

the natural tendency would be to think that where there's smoke, there's fire. A "real muddy-boots grunt," in the words of Col. David Hackworth (Ret.), Gen. Schwarzkopf and Gen. Clark go back almost forty years to when Clark was an underclassman and Schwarzkopf an instructor at West Point. To my knowledge, the two never served together after Clark was commissioned so what do we make of Schwarzkopf's resentment of the younger man's failure to take his sage advice at the beginning of his career?

In a piece that pulls together most of what is known about Gen. Clark's personal background, the Boston Globe tells us:

"Clark made a crucial decision midway through his West Point education. He quit the swim team to join the debate team, which offered him not only an intellectual avenue he craved but also a way to get off campus on many weekends. His debate coach, William Taylor, vividly recalls receiving a complaint one day from Captain Norman Schwarzkopf, then a West Point instructor who would go on to command the first Gulf War.

"I don't like what you are doing with cadet Wes Clark," Schwarzkopf said, according to Taylor. "He is not competing with varsity athletics. He is not socializing with the rest of his classmates. He is off doing debate tournaments. You are undermining the professionalism of this young man."

"I don't know who you are," Taylor told Schwarzkopf, and after defending the virtues of debate, hung up the phone. Schwarzkopf could not be reached for comment, but Taylor said the incident illustrates the tensions that would follow Clark throughout his career." (ed: As an aside, it's interesting to note that Schwarzkopf himself was not the happiest of campers at the time, since "I had graduated from West Point to be an infantryman, not an instructor, and I felt that's where I belonged.")

Can we just spit out this mouthful of sour grapes now and move on? The whole media-nourished meme that "the generals hate Wes Clark" comes down to Shelton, Schwarzkopf, Franks, et al. wondering who the hell Clark thinks he is to run for president when they were bigger, bolder, and better generals than he ever was. Unless you're a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, what kind of person of "character and integrity" impugns the character and integrity of a former subordinate, against whom he never made any charge whatsoever of the kind at the time when such charges would have truly involved national security, and then refuses to either apologize or justify the slur? And what kind of man's man repeats the canard without knowing what Shelton meant any more than we do?

Gentlemen, your time is past. Thank you for your years of loyal and brave service, but the kind of gossip you're retailing in your golden years is better left to Paris Hilton and Shannen Doherty. Write another book, play some golf, but get the hell out of Wesley Clark's way. He's got work to do.