WASHINGTON, OCT. 2 — You can tell a lot about a politician by the way he handles a crisis. Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the newest Democratic presidential hopeful, confronted his most important challenge in 1999, when he was the senior commander of NATO and the alliance went to war to stop Slobodan Milosevic from repressing the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo.

It is no secret that General Clark's relationship with the Pentagon was strained during that conflict. So it is also not surprising that reporters have begun to mine that period for the sort of score-settling anecdotes that often serve as fodder for political profiles.

But it is worth taking a step back and taking a fuller look at General Clark's record. The larger story is this: General Clark believed the stakes were so high for NATO that the alliance needed to be prepared to confront Mr. Milosevic militarily.

When the fighting erupted, General Clark managed to keep the alliance intact. Along with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, he believed that NATO could not ensure victory by relying on airstrikes alone and needed to have the option of using ground troops — a view that that put General Clark at odds with a risk-averse Pentagon, but one that was supported by many strategic experts.

I covered the Kosovo conflict at NATO headquarters in Brussels, at allied air bases in Italy and on an Air Force command plane one memorable evening that flew near Kovoso as ethnic Albanian fighters tangled with Mr. Miloseovic army's at Mount Pastrik.

It was clear that the stakes for NATO were enormous and that its commander was not in an enviable position. The United States Air Force general, Michael C. Short, who oversaw NATO's air campaign was pressing for a freer hand in conducting strikes in Belgrade while some anxious allies were insisting that the air attacks focus on Serbian troops. General Clark had an ally in NATO's secretary general, Javier Solana, but still had to maintain the support of 19 NATO nations, not to mention the Clinton administration, which had divisions in its own ranks.
Since General Clark announced his intention to run for the presidency last month, a number of partial and even misleading accounts of the war have emerged. Some have suggested that his strained relationship with the Pentagon reflects badly on his skills as a leader. What is often overlooked in these accounts is that important issues were at stake in deciding whether and how to go to war.

There was a general sense in many allied capitals that the West had dithered too long in the early 1990's before intervening to quell the ethnic fighting in Bosnia, and that this had occurred at the cost of thousands of lives and the credibility of the NATO alliance. General Clark was among those who urged that the West act in a more resolute way when the Kosovo crisis developed years later. But not everyone at the Pentagon shared those priorities or was eager to commit the forces to back them up.

"There was giant resistance from the Pentagon to deepening the commitment to the Balkans," General Clark told me in a 2001 interview. He said the Balkans had not figured in "the Pentagon view of its national military strategy, which is to prepare to fight in the Persian Gulf and in Korea, and that short of that, the maximum amount should be spent on the procurement account."

That Pentagon resistance spilled over into planning for a possible ground war. In a misguided effort to build Congressional support, the Clinton administration indicated that it was not planning a land offensive, an assertion that removed a means of applying leverage on Mr. Milosevic. With the air war dragging on and concern that hundred of thousands of ethnic Albanians might not be returned to their Kosovo homes before the winter of 1999, the British began pressing to start preparations for a possible land campaign.

General Clark mounted a parallel lobbying effort. Even before his push to prepare a land campaign, General Clark was advocating the use of Apache helicopters, artillery and rockets, which were deployed in Albania and known as Task Force Hawk.

It was important for NATO to take a stand in the Balkans and foolish for the alliance to go to war with one hand tied behind its back. Conventional air power had never previously won a war single-handedly and there was no guarantee that it would succeed in Kosovo in a reasonable time frame. General Clark's insistence on preparing a ground option was sound military doctrine.

While General Clark was never allowed to send Task Force Hawk into battle, the White House was giving serious attention to a possible ground campaign when the war ended and Mr. Milosevic agreed to withdraw his troops from Kosovo. Indeed, the perception that NATO was moving toward a ground option might well have been a factor in Mr. Milosevic's calculations.

Another notion about General Clark's record is that he was reckless when he proposed occupying the Pristina airfield in Kosovo after the war to preclude the Russians from rushing in troops.

After Mr. Milosevic agreed to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, NATO and the Russians were still at odds over the sort of peacekeeping force that should be deployed. Anxious to avoid the partition of Kosovo, NATO insisted that the Russian forces come under its command. While that debate was still going on, the Russian military abruptly withdrew several hundred of its troops from Bosnia and dispatched them to the airfield at Pristina.

I was in Moscow at the time and it was clear that this had occurred without the blessing of the Russian Foreign Ministry and initially, it seems, the Kremlin. After reports of the troop movements first surfaced, I asked the Kremlin spokesman to check with his superiors. He later assured me no orders had been issued to send troops to Kosovo, something that did not say a lot for civilian command and control in Russia.

General Clark was anxious to prevent the Russian military from sending in more reinforcements and creating a Russian-protected Serb enclave. Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine were persuaded to close their airspace to Russian transport planes. But what if they relented under Russian pressure or the Russians defied the ban? Would NATO intercept Russian planes carrying troops?

General Clark's plan was to put NATO troops on the airfield to make it impossible for reinforcements to land. But a British general, Mike Jackson, who was in charge of the peacekeeping force that was to stabilize Kosovo after the Serb troops withdrew and who now serves as the head of the British Army, complained that it was too risky, famously asserting, with some hyperbole, that it would be risking World War III.
Britain was the United States' staunchest ally, and so the Clinton administration decided to defer to the British position. Still, General Clark's recommendation was not rash; it was a judgment call that had been discussed in detail in Washington and that was initially supported at senior levels of the American government.

One lingering question about General Clark's résumé is why his NATO tour came to an abrupt end in 2000. He was not fired by the White House, as some accounts have suggested. Rather, former officials of the Clinton administration say, his tour was cut short by Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and Gen. H. Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were still smarting over their differences with the NATO commander.
The White House was told that General Clark's tour was being shortened a bit to smooth the transition to a capable successor. When President Clinton saw it for the slight it was intended to be, he was furious, according to senior Clinton administration officials. But the president was not anxious for an open confrontation with the Pentagon and decided to leave bad enough alone.

"Our belief at the White House was that General Clark had effectively led NATO forces to victory in Kosovo," Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, told me this week. "What we understood we were approving, after the war, was a succession, not a termination."
The Kosovo campaign had its flaws. There was too much wishful thinking among allied officials at the outset that a few days of bombing would do the job.

The strategy of gradual escalation, which was used to build consensus within NATO, has been widely criticized by military experts for depriving the alliance of the striking power it needed to more quickly settle a war that lasted 11 weeks. General Clark takes note of all of these problems and more in his tome on the conflict, "Waging Modern War" (PublicAffairs, 2001).

But the record also indicates that the general had very difficult questions to contend with and that his judgment on some of the crucial issues was sound.