Warrior's Rewards

Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme Allied Commander in Europe, waged and won NATO's campaign for Kosovo without losing a single soldier in action. For the U.S. military, the victory was uniquely--historically--bloodless. Last week Clark learned it was also thankless.

In a midnight call from Washington, Clark was told he'd be relieved of his command at NATO next April, a few months earlier than he'd anticipated. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton, presented the decision as a simple matter of giving the post to another deserving officer. Clark, who got the call in the middle of a quick trip to the Baltic republics, was caught off balance. He'd seen Shelton in the United States just the week before. Not a word had been breathed of his replacement. According to one source privy to the conversation, Clark told Shelton the move would be read as a vote of no-confidence in his leadership.

Shelton, brisk and businesslike, said there was no way around it. His replacement--Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--would be forced by law to retire if he weren't given a new slot by April. Clark wasn't buying it. In two conversations that night and again the next day, sources say, he argued that his replacement would be a blow to U.S. efforts to reshape NATO. Shelton wasn't moved. Clark, the 54-year-old warrior, was going to have to step aside for Ralston, the 55-year-old Washington insider.

To salt the wound, news that Clark was leaving early was leaked to The Washington Post within an hour of Shelton's first call. The next day, the White House tried to make nice, heaping praise on Clark's record. Defense Secretary William Cohen suggested, vaguely, that there might be an ambassadorship in the offing. But the equivalent of a gold watch and a pat on the back did little to disguise the insult. "A slap in the face," said one senior European official at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Albanians and Kosovars felt they'd lost a national hero. The French daily Le Monde said Clark was treated "like a bum." Yet, for all that, official Washington had few regrets. "It was botched in the handling, but it's the right decision," a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK.

The irony is not only that Clark won the war and lost his job; he won the war without fighting it the way he wanted to. Overruled by the White House, he was not able to bomb as early, or as massively, as he thought necessary. He always believed ground troops had to be ready to move into action, but they never were. Clark had wanted the U.S. Army, of which he is a general, to be involved. But when Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic finally folded after 78 days of bombing--and bombing alone--that seemed to prove the wisdom of those who had opposed Clark's "hip-shooter" recommendations.