Only a month after the Kosovo war, Clark learned that the Pentagon would be relieving him of his NATO post in early 2000, three months before his European tour was to end. According to Samuel Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, the Pentagon had told Clinton that the military career of Air Force General Joseph Ralston was winding up. Ralston was then serving as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Clinton felt he owed him. Ralston, after all, had lost his bid to become the chairman in 1997, when a controversy erupted over an extramarital affair.

Clinton approved Ralston as a replacement for Clark, Berger says, thinking it would happen only when Clark's term ended, not three months early. But the news of Clinton's choice of Ralston quickly leaked, along with an explanation that Clark would have to leave the post early to accommodate the Pentagon's arcane promotion timetable. "We approved a succession, not an execution," Berger recalls. Clark has described that day as one of the two worst of his life, the other being the day he was wounded in Vietnam.

The Soldier
After West Point, Clark volunteered for duty in Vietnam, where he was wounded in the hand, shoulder, leg and hip by an AK-47 and won a Silver Star for bravery along with his Purple Heart. He then won a White House fellowship under President Ford, and he became one of a few tradition-busting Army officers — Colin Powell was another — willing to step off the Army treadmill to serve in political assignments. "Many of us saw him as too self-serving," says a fellow Army officer. "A key measurement of an officer is how many people who serve under him get promoted to higher ranks because their commander pushed for them. You didn't see that as much with Clark as with other officers." Clark sees ambition as an engine to make things better. "Are you ambitious for the unit?" he asks. "I took a lot of units and made them better." Clark won high marks, even from foes, for his role in creating the Army's Battle Command Training Program, which made war games more realistic, and valuable, for commanders.

Clark was too in-your-face ambitious to fit into the Army's insular bureaucracy, which tends to dismiss anyone willing to challenge it. "Wes just wasn't a good ole boy," says Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army four-star who has known Clark for 30 years. "He didn't fit the 'I come from West Virginia, and my mom cooked me corn pone' that many combat leaders cultivate." Others saw a certain coldness. "He tended to have a blind spot on the human dimension," says a colonel who worked for him when Clark commanded the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, from 1992 to '94. "And it hurt morale: soldiers respected him, but they didn't love him."

But Clark's persistence rarely fails, and it may help him in politics. Back in 1961, as a 16-year-old high school senior, Clark needed a congressional nomination to get into West Point. When Arkansas Senator William Fulbright didn't answer his letter, he moved on to his state's other Senator, John McClellan. "You're not old enough, you're not big enough, and you're not smart enough to go to West Point," McClellan told Clark. "Come back and maybe talk to me next year." Refusing to take "later" for an answer, Clark turned to his Congressman, Dale Alford. The lawmaker required constituents seeking a West Point nod to take a civil service test. Clark beat out all his fellow test takers and won the appointment.

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