From US statesman to Saddam’s friend

Clark, 75, has been dismissed by US officials and minimised by most American media, reviled by conservatives as a traitor and shunned even by antiwar activists. Clark’s long, strange trip to the margins of American political discourse is a cautionary tale for the committed. He has long followed his inner compass, but he might have forfeited a last chance to make a difference. He portrays himself as a Texas straight shooter spurned for illuminating hard truths about the United States and its role in the world. ‘‘Once you say somebody’s on the fringe,’’ he said, ‘‘it’s as if something’s wrong.’’

Son of a US Supreme Court Justice, Clark ranged the deep South in the early 1960s as one of Robert Kennedy’s civil rights enforcers. As Johnson’s Attorney General, he had an orchestra seat on the decade’s upheaval. Clark headed a task force investigating the 1965 Watts riots and oversaw the drafting of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts. Then, with the nation roiling at the end of Johnson’s term, he banked left to become a radical lawyer. ‘‘I’m still fighting the good war,’’ he said. Baffling choices in causes and allies have eroded Clark’s credibility in recent years, both old friends and critics say.

Some wonder if his outward odyssey is private penance for failing to publicly oppose the Vietnam War from inside Johnson’s Cabinet. Others suggest he is just gullible, or deep in the throes of a young man’s unfinished rebellion.

The simplest explanation might lie in the contours of Clark’s career. He is, intimates say, a self-made victim of his own willful conscience. ‘‘He’s a person who doesn’t compromise, a moralist,’’ said Richard Falk, a peace activist and academic who has known Clark since the 1970s. ‘‘He sees things as right and wrong and pursues that sense no matter what public opinion dictates. You could view him either as extraordinarily principled or perversely stubborn.’’

For the past 12 years, Clark repeatedly has defied international sanctions against Saddam’s regime by transporting aid into Iraq. He openly acknowledges the violations, which risk fines and legal action, US officials say. Some activist leaders have distanced themselves. Liberal organs including The Nation and Slate scolded Clark for denouncing US ‘‘genocide’’ while glossing over Saddam’s brutal record of torture and mass killings. ‘‘It’s disturbing when someone admirable starts sounding like an apparatchik,’’ said Todd Gitlin, an antiwar Columbia University professor and once a University of California, Berkeley radical. ‘‘You wonder what synapse is missing.’’

Clark dismisses them all with a reflexive, dry laugh that spackles his panhandle drawl. ‘‘It’s demonisation,’’ he said, ‘‘putting somebody in the path of the devil.’’ There is a Texas plains stubbornness beneath Clark’s modest manner. Scion of an old Dallas political family, he has aged into a Marlboro Man of the medina. His weathered cowboy’s face and gaunt frame are now a familiar countenance in war-torn Middle East capitals. His clothes seem plucked from a laundry bag lost since the 1970s-cheap khakis, denim work shirts and a scuffed corduroy sports jacket.

Clark’s dated resume still has cachet. It won him meetings with Iranian ayatollahs and North Korean commissars. He is careful not to offend his hosts. In Saddam’s Iraq, Clark had ‘‘unique stature and access,’’ said pacifist organiser Peter Lems. Even in his US Attorney General days, Clark was a tactful team player who could break ranks with Lyndon Johnson. But ‘‘once the president made his decision, he pretty much went with it,’’ said Barefoot Sanders, a senior federal Judge for the Northern District of Texas. Clark’s former staffers have heard little from their onetime boss in recent years. ‘‘Ramsey’s a hard man to stay in touch with,’’ Sanders said. In government work, Clark tempered his idealism.

Out of office, his liberal sympathies ran riot. In the 1970s, he defended radicals including the Berrigan brothers and mounted two failed US Senate campaigns in New York. A stint at running an activist New York law firm foundered. Partner Melvin Wulf found Clark ‘‘an enigma,’’ secretive and too proud ‘‘to shill for business.’’

Clark went unannounced to Iran, enlisted by the Carter administration to help free 53 Americans held hostage in the US embassy. He flew home empty-handed, but he had new contacts. Along for the Tehran trips, Richard Falk was impressed by his willingness to listen to Iranian clerics. But Falk, who teaches international relations at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also noticed Clark’s ‘‘vulnerability, part-political naivete, part-vanity.’’ Clark’s lofty lectures on the benefits of American democracy fell flat. ‘‘The ayatollahs would vacantly stare out the window,’’ Falk recalled. ‘‘When I heard he was going to Iraq, I wondered if he was trying the same missionary routine with Hussein.’’

Clark first slipped into Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, denouncing the US bombing campaign for its toll of civilian deaths. ‘‘It’s kind of his civil disobedience,’’ said Tom Clark. But disobedience risks consequences. Over the past 12 years, Clark has ignored international sanctions on Iraq by carrying in shipments of food and medical aid. A Jan 4, 2001 news release from Clark’s ‘‘Fourth Iraq Challenge’’ announced his entourage would ‘‘defy US/UN imposed sanctions by taking supplies to Iraq without license.’’

While conservatives suspect his ideology, some peace activists say Clark and his organisers run roughshod over dissenters. Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, said he was banned after criticising the group’s pro-Palestinian rhetoric. He appealed to Clark, but got only silence. Clark was deep in plans by then for another aid mission to Baghdad. His small delegation flew in mid-February to Jordan with medicine from Scandanavia and food shipments from Australia. Then they drove 14 hours across the Iraqi desert.

At Baghdad’s al-Rashid hotel, Clark received a familiar summons. Saddam Hussein wanted to see him. The next day, he was driven to ‘‘one of the big government buildings where he kept his offices.’’ The two men had spent hours together. Clark had even cautioned Saddam that Iraq faced ‘‘intense criticism’’ for its state executions. But he never pressed. ‘‘I can’t try to change the culture,’’ Clark said.

Saddam often rambled on in chats that lasted up to four hours. He boasted about Iraq’s electric power program. He prodded Clark to tell of Lyndon Johnson’s growing despair over Vietnam. And he described how his grandfather, a Tikriti chief, ordered clansmen to prop him up in front of a hated rival to feign strength as he lay dying. ‘‘That’s not the type of man who would just surrender,’’ Clark said. Saddam was all business when they met for the last time on Feb. 23, Clark said. It quickly became clear Saddam was fixated on gauging the strength of America’s antiwar movement.

Clark said he bluntly warned Saddam there was little he could do when war came. Iraq could not ‘‘withstand American military might. It would be a slaughter.’’ Saddam took his words in silence. When they parted two hours later, neither man said ‘‘anything about hoping to see each other again, or anything like that,’’ Clark recalled. ‘‘He wasn’t betraying anything. I wasn’t thinking that it was the last time. ‘‘I’m still not all that certain that it is.’’

(LA Times-Washington Post)