E-mail a friendGen. Wesley Clark
airdate October 29, 2007
Retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark is a respected voice in public affairs and diplomacy. During his military career of more than three decades, he rose to the rank of four-star general as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander. A West Point grad and Rhodes Scholar, the highly-decorated war hero's commands included the campaign to end the Kosovo War and the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. Clark was a Democratic presidential candidate in ‘04 and is now a senior fellow at UCLA's Burkle Center. He's also a best-selling author.
Gen. Wesley Clark
Tavis: General Wesley Clark served as supreme allied commander of NATO during President Clinton's second term in the late nineties before mounting his own campaign for the White House back in 2004. He is currently an analyst for MS-NBC and the author of a new book about his life and career called "A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor, and Country." General Clark, nice to have you back on the program, sir.
Gen. Wesley Clark: Thanks a lot, Tavis, good to be with you.
Tavis: Good to see you again. Last time I saw you, you were rushing out of the studio because you had a grandbaby literally about to be born at that moment. (Laughter) How is the grandbaby doing?
Clark: They're doing great. They're doing great.
Tavis: Good, good, good, good. Let me - I don't want to offend you by saying this, because I don't mean to offend you. Looking through the book and talking to a couple of my producers, we all read the book and said, “You know what? When a guy writes a book like this, he's running for something.” (Laughter) And yet you're not running for anything, unless there's something you want to tell me tonight.
Clark: No, I'm not running for anything. I wanted to talk about leadership, and I wanted to talk about America. And I wanted to do it at a time when I think that the country's kind of torn apart. There's two visions of what America is, and I wanted to give my vision. There's this America afraid concept out there that's a country under fear, a country that's surrounded by enemies, beset by people trying to crash our borders, Osama bin Laden, 10 feet tall. Nobody likes us, and all that.
And then there's an America that's courageous and confident. A country that's a nation of immigrants, a country that builds bridges, not borders. Proud of our values, sharing, engaging with other people. Not afraid of the world, but a leader. And I believe in the second school of the American vision, and I wanted to talk about the instance in my life and what I'd seen about America both here and abroad that let me feel that way.
Tavis: What gives you reason to believe that we are leaning in toward one vision as opposed to the other? And which direction are we, in fact, leaning?
Clark: Well, 9/11 was a real shock to this country, and people were afraid. And I think that fear was used by a political party to manipulate public opinion and to maintain itself in office. A couple days after 9/11, I was with a different network then. I was driving down to Atlanta, and a Republican Party operative from Arkansas called me.
The Republicans had been trying to recruit me from Arkansas, and he said, "General, I just want to ask you a question. Now that 9/11 happened - “now this is 48 hours after 9/11 - "Now that 9/11's happened, which way do you think the country's going to be shifting?" I said, "Well, I don't think it's going to shift. I think Democrats are Democrats, Republicans are Republicans, and most people will be in the middle."
He said, "General, that's a weak answer. The truth is, this country's moving to the right, big time, and if you ever want to get elected to anything, you'd better be part of us." Well, I found that really offensive, that a party would use fear and national security as partisan ammunition in this, because when I served in the United States Armed Forces, we served the commander in chief.
We didn't care what party they were; we were trying to do our duty, and both parties more or less had the same strategy of deterrence and containment. And suddenly, up sprouts this vision of fear and by golly, we're going to have to give up our liberties to maintain our security. And it's a dangerous road we're moving down.
Tavis: One of the things, to your point now, General, that I've always found interesting, and quite frankly, not believable, and that is this notion that when someone from the military decides they're about to retire or does in fact retire and a political party, one of the parties wants to recruit him or her to do their bidding or to join their ranks, I never believed that you guys are that nonpartisan in your service.
Now to your point, I totally get it. When you're in the uniform, you serve the country; you follow the commander-in-chief no matter what party he or she may be of. But this notion that when you're done there this all-out battle to try to grab a hold of you for this side or for that side suggests to me that you guys don't have brains to begin with, that you don't have your own ideas, your own way of seeing the world. You clearly know what your leanings are while you're in uniform, yes?
Clark: Yes, but they're mostly focused on national security, Tavis. And so you know about national security, but you don't really know about living in American communities. You pay taxes but you don't really understand public schools. Your kids go to schools, but probably they're DOD schools and a lot of the time your kids are abroad because you're serving abroad.
You have healthcare, but the healthcare is provided by the government so you don't see the medical problem. You don't know about labor unions and the relationship with management because you're part of the United States Armed Forces.
Tavis: So is it really possible, then, that Republicans and Democrats have an equal shot at getting a Wesley Clark or some other general, now retired, to join their ranks? Is it really that close, the competition?
Clark: It depends on the person and what their educational background was. I had had a pretty unusual background for an army officer because I'd been to Oxford and I'd been there during the Vietnam War so there was a lot of discussion of U.S. foreign policy. It was a period of intense searching. So I couldn't just be, like, an economics student.
And then I had worked in the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, so I'd seen these domestic programs during the Ford administration. I had taught economics and political philosophy at West Point, so I'd had to go back and really learn the Federalist Papers and ask these big questions about government.
So I was primed to think about the big issues of the country. But when I was in uniform, yes, there was an effort on the part of the Republican party while I was in uniform to try to sway me to be sort of anti-Clinton. I don't know if it was an organized effort, but there were occasionally senators who would come up to me and say, "Oh, don't be part of Clinton's war in the Balkans."
Or "It must be really tough, working under that commander-in-chief you've got." And I strenuously resisted those kinds of suggestions, and frankly, I was offended by them. Because it doesn't matter who the commander-in-chief is. Your obligation is to give your whole heart and soul to the country.
Tavis: How do you do that, though, as a member of the armed forces, saying nothing of being a general, a person in charge of leading these troops, when you know in your head and in your heart you are absolutely diametrically opposed to where the commander-in-chief is taking the country on a particular issue, perhaps like the Iraq war?
Clark: Well, if it's a military issue, then if you're high enough in the chain of command you've had a chance to have your voice heard. Now if he doesn't agree with your position then you have the choice of just opting out of the chain of command and retiring. If you're lower down, your voice probably won't get heard. And if you're an officer or a senior non-commissioned officer, you could always write a letter up the chain of command and presumably, you could ask to be excused from that service and say that you object to it.
Now, you can't - maybe you won't get out of it, but if you (unintelligible) say, a battalion commander, commanding 500 troops, and you had told your chain of command and said, “I am personally opposed to the war in Iraq, I refuse to serve there, it's wrong,” they'll pull you out of command. Now it'll be the end of your military career, (laughter) but they're not going to - they don't want you if you can't do your duty.
A lot of these officers have concerns and questions and problems with what they see, but they're not - they're pragmatic issues, they're not political issues. They don't become political until they get out of the service, and then they start asking the big questions - well, why did we go over there? And what are we getting out of this?
Not how do we make it work better; those are pragmatic questions, but what's the strategy and why is it we won't talk to the Iranians and the Syrians? Why do we want to dump all the problem on the men and women in uniform and we don't want to use diplomacy? What are we afraid of?
Tavis: I want to shift gears somewhat dramatically. You've said a thousand things I could follow up on, and I've only got so much time and I want to get to a few other things in the book, so forgive me for shifting gears in not such a smooth way. But you mentioned Bill Clinton early, and obviously your friendship with he and Senator Hillary Clinton. You grew up in Little Rock.
Clark: I did.
Tavis: I was just there weeks ago doing my radio show live from Central High School on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the integration of Central High School. You were, as I recall from the book, in eighth grade.
Clark: Eighth grade. Eighth grade.
Tavis: Exactly, eighth grade when Central High School was integrated 50 years ago. What do you take from that in your home town now, looking back 50 years?
Clark: Well, we never - we haven't solved the problem in our home town yet. The schools have been under the United States district court there for years, and the result has been enormous White flight, the creation of a dozen or more private schools that people pay a lot of money to send their kids to because they don't trust the public schools anymore.
It's been a real problem for Little Rock, Arkansas, because we couldn't bring people together. Maybe other communities have done better with it, but we didn't, and what I learned from that episode, I learned two or three things. First, I really learned about White rage. This was the beginning of Nixon's southern strategy.
Really, when it hit Little Rock, the people didn't understand it and they felt like they were being picked on by the liberal media in New York. And my parents were one of them, but I knew my parents were wrong, too. And it was one of those things that you learn at an early age that you can love your parents, and you respect most everything they say except in this area, that they're wrong. You have to sort of live with that dissonance. And throughout my career, I was aware of the fact that people can be good, they can be sincere, they can be wonderful people -
Tavis: And wrong.
Clark: - and wrong. But it's a very important thing for young people to have those understandings at an early age. When I was in the Balkans and we were there with Richard Holbrook in the mid-nineties, when we were trying to end that war, I would listen to the Serbs as they'd talk about the Croats, and the Croats as they'd talk about the Muslims, and back and forth.
And it would just echo in my mind back to Little Rock in 1957, and how people were so divided and could say ugly things about each other, but they were wrong, and they were unreasonable, but they couldn't see it. They could be sincere and rational in every respect but one.
Tavis: Is George Bush sincere, rational, but wrong?
Clark: Well, George Bush came to office with no experience in the world in foreign policy, and I think he has a set of Republican principles that are mostly based on what he's heard from Vice President Cheney and the people around him that are essentially neoconservative. I think he embarked on a foreign policy that took us into a flight of fantasy in the Middle East that we're still struggling to get out from under.
He may be sincere, he may pray every day, and he says he does and I hope the good lord gives him strength, but I wish he'd give him some wisdom, too, because he's really taking us down a path of unreality.
Tavis: You're on record now as supporting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
Clark: I am.
Tavis: Should she be the nominee and eventually the president, you'd be interested, if asked, in serving in the Cabinet or some other capacity? Or are you at this point done with public service?
Clark: Well, I don't know if I'm done or not, but it's just an issue I haven't thought about. I still have my political action committee, SecuringAmerica.com. I'm going to campaign for a lot of Democrats in this coming cycle. I'm in business; I'm chairman of an investment bank. I'm an analyst for MSNBC. I'm just having a lot of fun being out of uniform and just doing as much as I can possibly do to try to make a difference.
Tavis: That's a long definition for the word retirement, (laughter) but I ain't mad at the general. His name, of course, Wesley K. Clark, his new book, "A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor, and Country." General Clark, as always, good to see you; glad to have you on the program.
Clark: Thank you very much, Tavis. Great to be with you.
Tavis: Nice for the opportunity to talk to you.
Back to October 29, 2007