Clarke and McClellen

Richard Brookhiser:

"...The glittering façade masking dither, the appearance of complexity that gives way to pandering: So far Gen. Wesley Clark resembles another Democratic general-politician, George McClellan—second in his class at West Point, nicknamed the "Young Napoleon" until he bungled the peninsular campaign in the Civil War and ran on a Peace Now platform against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. McClellan, in the words of military historian John Keegan, was 'vain, vainglorious, opinionated, worldly, self-satisfied, ostentatiously busy—but also dilatory and self-doubting. He was a splendid organizer, on the principle of doing everything himself and delegating to nobody, but his gifts were for solving problems presented to him by unsatisfactory subordinates, not by active and contentious enemies. He was a great fault-finder [yet he] found no fault with himself. If he were to be compared with other famous American generals, it could be said that he resembled MacArthur in his arrogance and George C. Marshall in his hauteur, but that he lacked … the former’s dynamism and the latter’s strength of character.'"

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