Wes Clark at the "Vietnam & the Presidency" Conference
by Marian Ferro
March 11, 2006

It was a 2-day conference held at the JFK Library and sponsored by the National Archives and all of the Presidential libraries.

Wes was on today's final panel, "Lessons Learned," along with fellow veterans, Senator Chuck Hagel, columnist Bob Herbert from the New York Times, and Pete Peterson, who was a POW for 5 1/2 years and later was appointed the first ambassador to Vietnam. Brian Williams was the moderator, and he was pretty good. The whole conference was interesting, but as you might guess, I was particularly looking forward to this panel, and it didn't disappoint. Wes was terrific, as always. I took a few notes, though not as much as I'd have liked to.

Here is some of what he said, as best as I could scribble it down.

"Presidents should avoid going to war. It's a last, last, last resort...Wars are extremely ugly and...and painful..Don't go to war unless you absolutely must...Vietnam was an elective war. So was Iraq.

"The administration from 9/11 was leaning toward getting into war with Iraq...I was told by my friends in the Pentagon 10 days after 9/11 that we were going to go into Iraq...The decision was made that we'd go to war.

"We do have to have checks and balances, And this country's freedom isn't being well-preserved."

This is just a sampling; I wish I could have gotten more down. It's all stuff we have heard from him before, but I'm sure many of the people at the conference had not. My friend, who had been for Dean, was very impressed with Wes; she gets more impressed every time she hears him.

(Brian) Williams asked Hagel if he's going to run for president, and he tried to deflect the question toward Clark. When Clark was asked, he talked about how the important thing now is the 2006 elections and that he's working to get a lot of the Dems, the veterans, elected.

Those of us in the audience could submit questions. Of course I submitted one, but they didn't use it.

My question was "When we went into Iraq, we obviously hadn't heeded the lessons of Vietnam. What can we do now to extricate ourselves from the situation?"