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December 26, 2003/Tevet 1 5764, Vol. 56, No. 14
Wesley Clark relishes outsider status
RON KAMPEAS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BOCA RATON, Fla. - Wesley Clark pats the yarmulke on his head, telling the congregants of Temple Emeth, "It feels really good to be here and to wear this."
Then, with unbridled enthusiasm, he stuns the room by explaining why he became a Roman Catholic.
Gen. Clark, the Reagan voter running as a Democrat, the soldier who waged diplomacy, the peacemaker who loves a good scrap, enjoys nothing better than confounding expectations.
He is doing just that by creeping up through the ranks of nine Democratic presi-dential candidates to reach second in the polls in some states, and raising enough money to keep him comfortable through March.
The latecomer, whose candidacy some dismissed as a vanity bid, now is jockeying with Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri as the likeliest candidate to challenge front-runner Howard Dean in the February stretch.
Jewish supporters say Clark is best positioned to stanch what some fear might be a massive Jewish defection to President Bush's camp in November 2004. Clark's solid pro-Israel pronouncements and history in uniform, they say, are the best Democratic bet against Bush's tough-on-terror image and his rapport with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Clark reportedly is President Clinton's anointed favorite: Two of Clark's top campaign advisers, Eli Segal and Ron Klain, are Jewish veterans of the Clinton administration.
Yet Clark carefully has cultivated his image as an outsider, priding himself on never having held political office.
Clark links his outsider status at least tangentially to his Jewish background. His Jewish father, Benjamin Kanne, died in 1948, when Clark was 4. Within months, his non-Jewish mother, Veneta, moved back to her hometown of Little Rock, Ark., from Chicago.
Clark was a stranger in Little Rock and says that at first he was miserable, dis-tinguished by his Chicago accent and his unusual last name, Kanne (pronounced KAY-nee, and apparently a variation of Cohen).
His mother feared that Clark's Jewish background would compound his alienation - so she never told him about it.
When Clark was 24 and he found out about his Jewish connection - through his father's relatives, who contacted him while he was studying in England - he confronted his mother. She broke down crying, he said.
Clark said the prejudice against his father, which his mother had witnessed, had affected her.
"She said, 'When your father and I were married, or when we dated before we were married, there were res-taurants we didn't go to, there were clubs we couldn't belong to, there were vacation resorts we weren't welcome at,' " Clark said.
Despite his ignorance of his own background, Clark's sense of himself as an outsider sparked an affinity for Little Rock's Jews.
An accomplished swimmer, the teenaged Clark preferred a summer job as a lifeguard at the Jewish country club to the same job at the country club that barred Jews.
He also was driven. Jay Heyman, a classmate at Hall High School in Little Rock, remembers that by age 14 Clark already was talking of going to West Point.
Clark rose rapidly in the military following a tour in Vietnam, where he won a Purple Heart for leading his men to safety after he had been shot.
In his early 30s, Clark served a stint as a White House adviser in the Ford administration. He was promoted to NATO chief in 1997.
Clark clearly relishes his reputation as a warrior-in-tellectual even though, he says, he was marked for hostile treatment by others in the military the moment he won his Rhodes scholarship out of West Point, in 1968.
But even four-star generals have to take orders, and Clark's tendency to leapfrog the command structure some-times got him into serious trouble.
Most notably, as NATO commander during the Kosovo crisis in the late 1990s, he allied himself with two civilians - U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the top U.S. envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke - in advocating for military intervention.
That relationship sidelined Clark's direct superiors, including Defense Secretary William Cohen, who, despite a successful mission in Kosovo, engineered Clark's firing in 1999.
Clark acknowledges that he broke rank but says he had a higher duty as a soldier, since the Pentagon's reluctance to act against Yugoslav strong-man Slobodan Milosevic was immoral.
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