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In two conversations that night and again the next
day, sources say, he argued that his replacement would
be a blow to U.S. efforts to reshape NATO. Shelton wasn't
moved. Clark, the 54-year-old warrior, was going to
have to step aside for Ralston, the 55-year-old Washington
insider.
To salt the wound, news that Clark was leaving early
was leaked to The Washington Post within an hour of
Shelton's first call. The next day, the White House
tried to make nice, heaping praise on Clark's record.
Defense Secretary William Cohen suggested, vaguely,
that there might be an ambassadorship in the offing.
But the equivalent of a gold watch and a pat on the
back did little to disguise the insult. "A slap
in the face," said one senior European official
at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Albanians and Kosovars
felt they'd lost a national hero. The French daily Le
Monde said Clark was treated "like a bum."
Yet, for all that, official Washington had few regrets.
"It was botched in the handling, but it's the right
decision," a senior administration official told
NEWSWEEK.
The irony is not only that Clark won the war and lost
his job; he won the war without fighting it the way
he wanted to. Overruled by the White House, he was not
able to bomb as early, or as massively, as he thought
necessary. He always believed ground troops had to be
ready to move into action, but they never were. Clark
had wanted the U.S. Army, of which he is a general,
to be involved. But when Yugoslav dictator Slobodan
Milosevic finally folded after 78 days of bombing—and
bombing alone—that seemed to prove the wisdom of
those who had opposed Clark's "hip-shooter"
recommendations.
Ralston will be only the second Air Force officer to
hold NATO's top command. That fact was noted in the
alliance's Brussels headquarters, where it fueled a
sense that the United States has lost its will to fight
on the ground. "What does this say about the U.S.
military's commitment?" asked one senior NATO staffer.
"Commitment to what? To keeping the Army healthy
and out of combat?"
Yet the core problem was at least as much one of personality
as of doctrine. Since his days at West Point, Clark
has been something of a loner. (His favorite sport was
long-distance swimming. He still tries to work out in
the pool every day: lap after arduous lap, oblivious
to the outside world.) Clark gloried in being the lone
warrior, the take-no-prisoners intellectual. "It's
very difficult to stop this ambitious man," said
one of his European peers during the war. His colleagues
might admire and envy Clark, but few actually liked
him.
Ralston has been a more conventional officer and gentleman,
so well regarded that back in 1997 he was expected to
become chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But an adulterous
affair Ralston had a decade before, while separated
from his wife, came to light. That was just as the Air
Force was agonizing over the way Lt. Kelly Flynn, the
first woman B-52 pilot, had played around, got caught,
lied about it and got fired. Ralston decided it was
prudent to step aside. But he soldiered on as vice chairman,
and was such an effective insider that during the Kosovo
crisis Ralston had, in many ways, more day-to-day influence
on the administration's handling of the war than Shelton.
"A choice between losing Ralston to retirement
or asking Clark to give up his post two months early?''
said a White House source. "That's a no-brainer."
Should Clark have been surprised to be shown the door?
He rubbed even his admirers the wrong way. Subordinates
wearied of his high-pressure attention to minute detail.
A European NATO officer who worked closely with Clark
remembered him during the air war "with his little
laptop being able to see all the aircraft maneuvering
in the air war." As another NATO veteran put it,
"He does get in people's knickers to some extent."
When Clark was assigned to work with an old West Point
classmate, he suggested that since they might compete
for promotions they should put their friendship on hold.
Clark's fights with other NATO commanders were legendary.
Early in the conflict, he ordered up a task force of
Apache tank-busting helicopter gunships, after going
to the White House over the protests of the U.S. Army
chief of staff, Gen. Dennis Reimer. The Army dragged
its feet and took nearly a month just to reach the theater—and
never did fire a missile in anger. At the end of the
war, Clark was so anxious to stop the Russians from
stealing a march to Pristina airport that he ordered
an airborne assault to take the field before them. But
Gen. Mike Jackson, the British commander on the ground
in Kosovo, wouldn't carry out Clark's orders. Subsequently,
a frustrated Clark asked Adm. James Ellis Jr., the American
officer in charge of NATO's Southern Command, to order
helicopters to land on the runways so big Russian Ilyushin
transports couldn't use them. Ellis balked, saying Jackson
wouldn't like it. "I'm not going to start World
War III for you," Jackson later told Clark. Both
Jackson and Clark appealed to their political leadership
back home for support. Jackson got all the help he needed;
Clark didn't. Effectively, his orders as Supreme Commander
were overruled.
Clark still has his fans at NATO headquarters. It was
Clark who balanced the demands and misgivings of 19
nations and armies through 78 long days. That showed
a great political touch; indeed, Wesley Clark may be
too much of a politician for some soldiers—even
if he is too much of a soldier for the politicians.
During the Kosovo war, that made him "the perfect
man for the job," said a top NATO official. When
the war was over, it also made him the perfect man to
dump.
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