US Candidate Profile: Wesley Clark

By JOHN WHITESIDES, Reuters Political Correspondent

Retired four-star General Wesley Clark made a splashy but late entrance into the 2004 White House race, riding a gold-plated resume to the top tier of the Democratic pack before a series of early missteps sent him tumbling.

But Clark, a quick study as a Rhodes scholar and the top cadet in his class at West Point, has since found his voice on the campaign trail and says he is tailor-made for a race against President George W. Bush in which national security and foreign policy will play prominent roles.

"This is an election that's going to be about national security," Clark, a former NATO commander who directed the 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo, said in a December debate with his eight Democratic rivals in the first primary state of New Hampshire.

"It's going to be about facing down George Bush and his failure to perform his duties satisfactorily as commander in chief," he said. "I'm the only candidate ... who can take that fight to George W. Bush." Clark, spurred on by a well-organised internet campaign that tried to draft him into the Democratic race, declared his candidacy with a burst of publicity on Sept. 17.

An early critic of the war in Iraq, he stumbled on his first campaign trip over whether he would have supported a congressional resolution authorising military action. He initially told reporters he probably would have, then switched his stance 24 hours later.

His Democratic rivals also questioned his party credentials, noting he had voted for Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and praised Bush at a Republican fund-raiser in 2001.

Even though Clark quickly shot near the top of many national polls, he drifted down over the next few weeks. His campaign staff went through several shake-ups, and he decided in October to skip Iowa's party caucuses on Jan. 19, calculating he did not have the organisation to compete there.

With a more seasoned staff in place, many taken from the failed campaign of Florida Sen. Bob Graham, Clark has focused on doing well enough in the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 27 to position himself for a breakthrough in the seven more moderate Southern and Western states that hold contests on Feb. 3.

He gave a series of policy speeches to flesh out his sometimes sketchy stands on foreign and domestic issues, proposing guaranteed health care coverage for all children, calling for an army of civilian domestic volunteers and laying out steps to expand international involvement in Iraq and mend relations with Europe.

GRABBING THE FLAG

By December, Clark's stump speech blended tough criticism of Bush as a commander in chief with reminders of his own service, including a decorated stint in Vietnam in which he was wounded.

At a convention of Florida Democrats in early December, he dramatically grabbed a flag from the back of the stage and planted it at the podium, holding it with one hand as he declared it "our flag."

"We'll never let George W. Bush, Tom DeLay or John Ashcroft tell us we don't have this flag," he said, referring to the House Republican leader and the attorney general. "America must do better than this president."

Clark, a native of Arkansas like former Democratic President Bill Clinton, has been aided by several members of Clinton's administration and won praise from Clinton, who appointed him NATO commander.

Described as a brilliant, hard-working but thin-skinned perfectionist while at NATO, he has been criticised by some of his former military colleagues -- most notably Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who raised questions about his character and integrity.

Clark called the comments, never explained by Shelton, modern-day "McCarthyism" prompted by disagreements over policy while Clark was heading the military campaign in Bosnia.

"He's the man for the job," a senior Pentagon official said of Clark when he was named NATO commander. "Clark is bright, scholarly and affable. And he can negotiate with presidents and governments as well as dealing with military counterparts."

By the time he left in 1999, Clark had antagonised Pentagon superiors with what they viewed as a self-promoting style and with his arguments in Kosovo that preparing ground attacks and an invasion was the only way to convince the Serbs that NATO was determined to do what was necessary to win.

A senior member of the US team that helped broker the 1995 Dayton peace accords on Bosnia, Clark testified in The Hague in December at the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, calling it "a very, very satisfying experience."

He acknowledged during the campaign he made a mistake in a 1994 meeting with Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, posing for pictures with him, exchanging hats and accepting a bottle of brandy and a pistol. Mladic, an indicted war criminal, is accused of slaughtering thousands of civilians.

The 59-year-old Clark, who speaks Russian, has one son with his wife, Gert.