Pentagon Defeat Fired Up Clark for White House Fight

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.