When the call came on that summer night in 1999, Gen. Wesley K. Clark was dining with Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus at the leader's elegant estate in Vilnius. A fine cut of roast beef was on his plate, French wine filled his glass and Clark was in excellent spirits.
A military aide whispered in Clark's ear: The Pentagon was on the line. "Excuse me, Mr. President," Clark said. "I'll have to take this call."
On the phone was Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with news that would change the life of Clark, then supreme allied commander in Europe and one of the brightest stars in the U.S. military.
Should he find a secure phone, Clark asked Shelton. Don't bother, was Shelton's reply. Then, curtly, Shelton informed Clark that Defense Secretary William S. Cohen was relieving him of command early, cutting short Clark's meteoric military career.
When Clark returned to the dinner table, he quietly informed Adamkus. "I couldn't believe this was happening," Adamkus recalled recently. "I asked Gen. Clark if he had expected this, and he said he had to admit it was a surprise."
The full effect took awhile to sink in. When Margaret Sullivan, one of Clark's aides, saw him later, she remembered, "Wes looked like he had been hit by a car. He felt he had been publicly humiliated."
While Clark knew his relations with Cohen and Shelton were strained, he had not anticipated the move, which came in the glow of his crowning achievement: the successful intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to stop ethnic bloodshed in Kosovo, the small, mountainous province of Serbia.
But it was a turning point in the career of this ambitious American general. And it would lead, four years and two months later, to Clark's decision last fall to enter a crowded field of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
"Here he had spent his entire career serving his country, led a near perfect operation in Kosovo and was now being summarily dismissed," said Sullivan, his Pentagon aide. "I have often wondered
Clark's 33-month tenure as NATO chief is cited by his supporters as evidence of his brilliant, skillful leadership in an international crisis. But his detractors, including former colleagues in the military, say it's an example of Clark's overriding ambition and thirst for the limelight.
No one disputes, though, that Clark was at the nexus of a bruising fight within the Clinton administration over the Western role in the Balkans. At issue was whether the United States should try to stop Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic from carrying out murderous attacks against Kosovo's 1 million ethnic Albanians, who are mostly Muslim.
Pentagon leaders then were opposed to intervention, arguing that it would serve no important national security or economic purpose. But the State Department and White House countered that the United States could not afford to ignore another large-scale humanitarian disaster.
Clark aligned himself with the White House, giving it the key military support it needed to win the argument. In the Pentagon, though, Clark's position was seen as an act of betrayal that bordered on insubordination.
In the end, NATO succeeded in stopping Milosevic with a 78-day bombing campaign. Milosevic now is on trial in The Hague for war crimes. But Clark's efforts, particularly his use of the news media to advance his views, earned him enemies among the military's senior officer corps. As one foe put it, Clark had become "a political courtier who had lost the ethos of a warrior."
The path taken by this 59-year-old Arkansas native to the Democratic campaign trail this month began with a career launched in glory at West Point, where he was quickly identified as a future leader. First in his class at West Point in 1966, he spent a year studying social sciences and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, earning a reputation as one of the Army's "intellectual" leaders.
He went to Vietnam and was shot Feb. 19, 1970, in the shoulder, hand and hip when the company of infantry soldiers he was leading was ambushed. For continuing to command his troops while wounded, he was awarded the Silver Star.
After Vietnam, though, West Point graduates like Clark fell out of favor. The unsuccessful war in Southeast Asia was blamed by some on a cadre of Pentagon intellectuals, led by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and his "whiz kids" analysts. Clark returned to West Point in 1971 to teach in the social sciences department with "The Lincoln Brigade," a corps of Army intellectuals named for a World War II general who championed the soldier-scholar-statesman model for officers.
