Clark Clifford was born
in Fort Scott, Kansas, on 25th December, 1906. After graduating from
Washington University worked as a lawyer in St.
Louis, Missouri (1928-1943).
During the Second
World War Clifford joined the US Navy
and served as assistant naval aide and naval aide to President Harry
S. Truman. In 1947 Truman appointed him general counsel and in
this post he helped draft the National Security Act.
After leaving the government
in 1950 Clifford practiced law in Washington.
Over the next few years Clifford represented several large corporations.
His main role was to help them to navigate their way through laws
and regulations. One of his major clients was Howard
Hughes.
A member of the Democratic
Party, he worked as an adviser to leading politicians such as
Stuart
Symington and
John F. Kennedy. May 1961 Kennedy appointed
Clifford to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Two
years later he became its chairman.
Clifford remained in this
post after Lyndon B. Johnson became
president. In 1967 Clifford and General Maxwell
Taylor went on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam.
During this period Clifford was seen as a foreign policy hawk and
advised Johnson that he could win the war if he increased the number
of American troops to Vietnam.
Clifford replaced Robert
McNamara as Secretary Defense in March 1968. McNamara had been
urging the president to gradually disengage from the conflict in Vietnam.
In contrast, Clifford advocated an escalation of the war. He told
the Senate Armed Services Committee that his main objective was to
guarantee to the South Vietnamese people the right of self-determination.
McNamara had been against
increasing American involvement in Vietnam. Clifford changed this
policy and one of his first actions was to send 24,500 more troops
to Vietnam. This increased the number to a new high of 549,500. However,
he soon saw the futility of this policy and like McNamara before him,
began to talk of disengagement. This brought him into conflict with
Dean Rusk who argued that the war "would
be won if America had the will to win it."
In order to get peace talks
under way, Clifford supported Johnson's decision to end bombing north
of the 20th parallel, an area comprising almost 80 percent of North
Vietnam's land area. In May, 1968, North Vietnam and the United States
began peace talks in Paris. On 31st October, Clifford announced the
end to all bombing in North Vietnam.
Clifford returned to private
practice after President Richard Nixon
was elected to office and was senior partner in Clifford & Warnke.
One of Clifford's clients was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International
(BCCI). The bank was chartered in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands
and had offices in 70 countries. In 1981 Clifford became chairman
of BCCI. Later it was called First American Bankshares and became
the largest bank in Washington.
In July, 1991 BCCI was
accused of fraud, laundering drug money and bribing bank regulators
and central bankers in 10 developing countries. It was reported to
have $20 billion in assets shortly before the shutdown, but liquidators
were unable to find many of its assets. However, it was discovered
that Clifford had made about $6 million in profits from bank stock
that he bought with an unsecured loan from BCCI. As the New
York Times reported: "A New York grand jury handed up
indictments, as did the Justice Department. Clifford's assets in New
York, where he kept most of his investments, were frozen."
Clifford and his law partner,
Robert A. Altman, eventually reached a $5 million settlement with
the Federal Reserve Board. Charges of bank fraud against Clifford
had been set aside because of his failing health. Clifford told a
journalist that he considered his role in extricating the United States
from what he called that "wretched conflict in Vietnam"
to be his finest moment; the day he was indicted and fingerprinted
like a common criminal, he said, was "the worst."
Clark Clifford died at
his home in Bethesda, Maryland on 10th October, 1998.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Chalmers Johnson, The
Disquieted American (6th February, 2003)
In mid-1965,
the legendary Major-General Edward Lansdale - 'legendary' for having
thoroughly militarised the Philippine Government in the name of 'counterinsurgency'
- was asked to return to Vietnam as special assistant to Ambassador
Henry Cabot Lodge. After hearing Lansdale talk in Washington, Ellsberg
asked to join his team. He transferred from the Department of Defense
to the Department of State at the same civil service grade, and set
off for Saigon, still very much with the outlook of a Cold Warrior
and a Marine infantry officer. Lansdale assigned him the job of visiting
every province of South Vietnam and reporting on the 'pacification'
efforts.
To do this, Ellsberg associated
himself with another legendary figure, John Paul Vann, then working
as an adviser to the US Agency for International Development. With
Vann at the wheel of a jeep, they drove all over South Vietnam. Vann
taught the neophyte Ellsberg many tricks of the trade: always drive
fast because that makes it much harder for guerrillas to detonate
a mine under your car, and always travel in the morning, after the
previous night's mines have been blown but before they have all been
replaced.
During these inspection
tours, Ellsberg went on patrol with American units and often found
himself in combat. Even though he was technically a civilian, he could
not go along as a simple observer. He got a Swedish K submachine-gun
from the CIA and revived his skills as an infantryman. He was surprised
to discover that, with a little experience, you can usually tell from
the sound when a bullet is coming directly at you. From walking around
up to his neck in flooded marshes he caught hepatitis. In mid-summer
1967, after he had recovered somewhat, he left Vietnam and returned
to Rand.
This tour of duty was very
important to Ellsberg's political development. There was no pacification,
since our South Vietnamese allies simply had no stomach for fighting
their fellow Vietnamese. He discovered that the conflict was not a
civil war, as so many academics around the world believed. One side,
the South, was entirely equipped and paid for by a foreign power.
As he writes, 'we were not fighting on the wrong side; we were the
wrong side.'
Back in the US, Ellsberg
was particularly incensed by the daily drumbeat of official statements
from the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State
and the high command in Vietnam, all of them insisting that the US
was making great 'progress' in winning the hearts and minds of the
South Vietnamese people.
Then came the Tet Offensive
of 29 January 1968 - simultaneous Vietcong attacks in almost every
province of South Vietnam as well as in Saigon itself. The scale of
the offensive strongly suggested that American leaders were either
incompetent or lying. On 10 March, the New York Times published a
leak from inside the Pentagon to the effect that General William Westmoreland,
the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops.
Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate
and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people.
It did not come from Ellsberg,
but 'as I observed the effect of this leak,' he recalls, 'it was as
if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised something crucial: that
the President's ability to escalate, his entire strategy throughout
the war, had depended on secrecy and lying and thus on his ability
to deter unauthorised disclosures - truth-telling - by officials.'
It dawned on Ellsberg that, in the wake of Tet and the leak, President
Johnson could not get away with his deceptions any longer.
Ellsberg was recalled from
Rand to Washington to join a high-level working group evaluating the
full range of options on Vietnam for the incoming Secretary of Defense,
Clark Clifford. In the capital he learned that McNamara had ordered
John McNaughton to organise the writing of an internal historical
study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to the present based
on top secret documents. McNaughton assigned the project to his deputy,
Morton Halperin, who in turn delegated leadership of the work to his
deputy, Leslie Gelb. At the time neither Halperin nor Gelb had ever
been to Vietnam.
They, in turn, hired Ellsberg
to write one of the projected 47 volumes, and he chose to work on
JFK and the year 1961. One of the first things he did was to obtain
from the CIA all the National Intelligence Estimates for Indochina
from 1950 to 1960. 'What was evident in each one of the years of major
decision was that the President's choice was not founded upon optimistic
reporting or on assurances of the success of his chosen course.' Ellsberg
thus began to ask himself a forbidden question: why did every one
of the Presidents from Truman to Johnson 'mislead the public and Congress
about what he was doing in Indochina?' He had discovered part of the
answer: it was not because the President's subordinates deceived him.
(2)
Marilyn Berger, Clark
Clifford, New York Times (11th
October, 1998)
A secretary
of defense for one president, friend and confidant of three others,
Clifford frequently played the role of capital wise man in inner-sanctum
crises, helping President Harry S. Truman find peace with labor and
warning President Lyndon B. Johnson about the folly of the Vietnam
war.
With a gentle drawl and
an insider's run of the halls of power, Clifford was consulted as
well by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, bridging the
nation's postwar political era until he ran into legal troubles in
high-finance brokering.
For all the roles he played
in presidential history, Clifford faced a rigorous ordeal in his final
years, insisting on his innocence to the end as he faced charges of
fraud, conspiracy and taking bribes in the biggest banking scandal
in history, the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
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