COMMAND: Education of a General

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The important way in which Clark differs from the run-of-mine general is in an unusual flexibility, adaptability, capacity for growth and for new ideas. An officer in Tokyo who knew Clark in Italy says that he was then "brash and hotheaded," but now is a "slick, well-balanced article who seldom zigs when he ought to zag." Soon after World War II, Clark realized that U.S. military men were not going to enjoy (or suffer) the same isolation from civilian life and political affairs that they had after World War I.

His political education began in 1942, when he was assigned to deal with the slippery French in Africa. In dealing with Darlan and Giraud, two men of differing temperament and loyalty, he sometimes solved his problems by clamping one or the other under house arrest. At that time he was addicted to table-pounding. It was probably well that Bob Murphy was there to keep Clark under control.

But it was a beginning. After World War II, he studied the Russians in action at two of the four-nation Councils of Foreign Ministers. As U.S. occupation commander for Austria (1945-47), he was a little unsure of himself at first, but covered it up well and soon learned to fence with, and often to outwit, his Soviet opposite number, Marshal I. S. Konev. Clark recalls that Konev once presented ten demands, all of which the American found unsuitable. "Marshal Konev," said Clark, "what would you do if I accepted all these demands?" In that case, the Russian answered candidly, he would be back with ten more demands the next day.

Clark soon perceived that the Russians were not in the least interested in rebuilding Austria but only in capturing or ruining it. From that vantage point, he saw that the Communists had the same intentions toward the whole non-Communist world. The Russian methods were new— propaganda, intimidation, infiltration, blockade, camouflage, political feints, political power plays, small proxy wars, and all the rest—but such methods all had their analogues in traditional war, and the goal was the same old goal: destruction of the enemy. So the new methods did not dislodge the base of the military man's thinking. They added to his curriculum.

In Tokyo, after Mark Clark had had a chance to appraise the Panmunjom deadlock, he said: "The more you deal with these fellows [the Communists], whether at Vienna, London, Moscow or Panmunjom, the more you realize that their goal is the same simple, unchanging one of world domination. My experience has been that when you meet them with a show of force and with determination, they stop, look and listen."

Vulnerable Spots. After two years of war, one year of truce talks, the Korean question is still: Win, lose or draw? Mark Clark cannot be wholly, or even largely, responsible for the outcome. Washington makes policy; Clark is the executive. Yet there is much that he can do and is doing.