WASHINGTON — Before the Pentagon leadership picked Gen. Wesley Clark to head the command for the Latin American region in 1996, it asked the Army for its recommendations. The brass submitted a list of candidates -- and Clark's name was not on it.
A year later, before the Pentagon leadership elevated Clark to NATO supreme allied commander, it asked the Army again -- and again received recommendations that did not include Clark.
Clark went on to win fame as the top military commander of the successful 1999 war to expel Serbian forces from the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Now he is counting on a resume packed with military and diplomatic accomplishments to give his candidacy credibility.
But Clark's military past is not an unalloyed asset. In fact, critics say, the Army's reluctance to back him for promotion illustrates misgivings that a number of his peers had about Clark despite his distinguished 37-year career.
Clark, who was tagged as the Democratic front-runner in a poll released Sunday by Newsweek just days after becoming the party's 10th candidate for president, gained strong supporters and patrons during his military career because of his brains and energy. But he also accumulated detractors, who considered him abrasive and overly ambitious, and sometimes questioned the wisdom of his decisions.
The 58-year-old Arkansan was "one of the quickest studies, hardest workers, brightest stars in the Army," said one Army general who worked closely with Clark. "But was he the guy you wanted on your team? Were his solutions the best? There was a lot more debate about that."
First in his West Point class in 1966, Clark also won the U.S. Military Academy's only Rhodes scholarship that year. He earned Silver and Bronze stars in Vietnam, where he was wounded badly when the company he was leading on a patrol north of Saigon was ambushed and he was shot four times. After the war, Clark returned to West Point as an instructor in the academy's social sciences department.
He was a White House fellow and later commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division. In a top staff post as director of strategy and policy for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, he worked with U.S. diplomatic troubleshooter Richard Holbrooke to help negotiate the Dayton peace accords that ended the three-way war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
