COMMAND: Education of a General

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The Isolated. Such situations as Panmunjom could hardly have been imagined, either by cadets or by their most experienced instructors, when Clark graduated from the Point. The nation then was fighting Wilhelm II's Germans, who were supposed to be barbarians but who at least fought a traditional kind of war.

Mark Clark is a product of the military environment since early childhood. Son of a career officer, he was born on an Army post—at Madison Barracks, N.Y. He was wounded in France; after World War I he began his slow climb up the rungs. He was a captain for 13 years. It was a period when career officers were almost wholly isolated from civilian affairs and political life. They lived with their families in little colonies at scattered garrisons or foreign posts, or were buried in the depths of the Washington bureaucracy. The public was disillusioned with World War I, indignant at the munitions makers, and it associated the professional soldiers with the "Merchants of Death." The military were expected to stay away from politics. Most of them were glad to.

This was the environment that produced George Patton, a fine, slashing tactician but who thought the struggle between Nazis and anti-Nazis was just like a lot of Democrats and Republicans. Yet a clutch of wiser men rose from this ruck and were ready when World War II demanded them. These were men who, in the between-the-wars years, improved their hours at staff and command schools; while junior officers, they were spotted and ticketed for bigger jobs. The Army school system produced a gifted and acute coalition leader, Ike Eisenhower; it produced Bradley, MacArthur, and other strategists and tacticians who helped win the war. It produced a Secretary of State, a Secretary of Defense, an Ambassador to Moscow, proconsuls in Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo.

Standard Model. In many ways Clark is a standard assembly-line model. U.S. generals are supposed to avoid such dreamy and imprecise stuff as highbrow art, music and books; Clark fishes and reads the Satevepost. Card games are okay; in the last two weeks Clark has had time for just one go at canasta with his wife (he won). U.S. generals are not supposed to get fat, lest they look bad in uniform; Clark is lean, tall (6 ft. 2 in.) and rangy. When they are afoot, U.S. generals are expected to stride, not amble; Clark strides. In the European theater, fraternization with troops was a vogue; Clark went swimming and played baseball with soldiers. He takes care always to ask his jeep driver's name, and to shake his hand. Accessibility was another vogue; Clark had the inevitable sign on his door that read: "Enter, don't knock."

Mark Clark is a proud and ambitious man; almost all good generals are. His enemies and critics say also that he is impulsive and overfond of publicity. In part these opinions are a recollection of the brash young general, enamored with cloak & dagger stuff, that Clark was ten years ago but is no longer; in part these opinions reflect the nervousness of Europeans, especially the British, when the U.S. puts any forceful man in the Far East. It so happens that the U.S. needs an aggressive, clearheaded and self-confident man in Tokyo—and Mark Clark is just that.