Posted on 10/02/2003 8:47:26 AM PDT by HAL9000
After the Army, Clark signs up as businessman
Doors open for retired general
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark’s business resume reads as if it belongs to an upwardly mobile executive who’s had his nose to the grindstone for three decades.
In the three years since he left the Army, Clark has signed on as an adviser or director with more than half a dozen companies, written two books, worked as a CNN pundit and launched a campaign to become president of the United States.
The common denominator: He was working with a government he knows inside out.
The information that is public shows that he was well-compensated. But not all of the companies that hired him got everything they hoped for.
Acxiom Corp., for instance, courted Clark from the beginning and still has him on the payroll as a $150,000 lobbyist. It likes the fact that Clark is a risktaker.
Stephens Inc., on the other hand, favors a measured approach. It hired Clark to open a new front on its investment empire. That didn’t happen, and Clark and Stephens have parted ways.
The way Charles Morgan remembers it, Clark had lots of choices after leaving the military in May 2000, and returning to Arkansas didn’t seem to be on the radar screen.
Morgan, chief executive at Acxiom — a customer datamining powerhouse based in Little Rock and Conway — traveled to Brussels, Belgium, to be part of a roundtable discussion with top international executives in early 2000. He was surprised to discover that everyone was talking about Clark, the four-star general who was about to turn over his command of NATO.
"When I arrived in Brussels, everyone was saying, ‘We’re so sad Wes Clark is leaving.’" Morgan said in an interview Tuesday. "At that time, I’d forgotten he was from Arkansas. I was fascinated that Wes was so popular in Europe."
Morgan remembers thinking, "Does this guy walk on some sort of water or what?"
Clark, then 55, was completing a 34-year career in the military. He had won silver and bronze stars as a company commander in Vietnam, held a top staff post for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commanded American forces in Latin America, helped negotiate the Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and successfully prosecuted the 1999 war that expelled Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s forces from Kosovo.
"I remember telling my wife on the trip home how strange it was that you couldn’t run into someone without them praising Wes Clark," Morgan said. "Susie said to me, ‘If he comes back to Arkansas, you ought to get him on Acxiom’s board.’ I told her I doubted he’d come back."
Nevertheless, when Clark’s retirement became official in May 2000, Morgan asked Clark to join the company’s board.
"He’s a bit of a technologist, and we saw he created all of these war games, and that’s what got all of the generals together, working together and cooperating. We’re about technology, so it seemed like a logical idea," Morgan said.
Clark "politely declined," Morgan said.
He told Morgan he was weighing his options.
STEPHENS INC. JOB
The general barely had time to unpack his belongings once he and his wife, Gert, moved back to Arlington, Va. Already, he’d begun writing his first book, Waging Modern War, for a small independent New York publisher, PublicAffairs.
Already he’d begun networking.
One contact led him to Arkansan Vernon Weaver, longtime Democrat and President Clinton’s choice for U.S. ambassador to the European Union. When the two men first met in Brussels, both knew they’d soon be returning to the United States.
Weaver was returning to take a job as assistant to Chairman Jackson T. Stephens of the Stephens Group, the Little Rock-based conglomerate. Clark was looking for a job in investment banking. And Warren Stephens, chief executive officer of Stephens Inc., the investment arm of the Stephens Group, wanted to become a player in aerospace and technology.
Stephens Inc. and Clark seemed a good fit. "Vernon said, come on down and talk to us," Warren Stephens said in an interview Wednesday.
At the time, Stephens Inc. was deeply involved in Northrop Grumman Corp.’s $13.4 billion acquisition of TRW, which would create the second-largest defense contractor in the country. Warren Stephens saw that as a foot in the door of an industry in which it had little history. Clark might swing the door open, he thought.
The company brought Clark in as a managing director of its merchant-banking division in July 2000. But Clark spent most of the next year working on his book, according to Stephens spokesman Frank Thomas.
Not until last December did Clark pass the National Association of Securities Dealers test, which certifies him to work in an investment house. Clark, who graduated at the top of his West Point class in 1966, scored 86. Passing is 70. He hasn’t taken the state test for a license to sell securities in Arkansas.
"Wes didn’t know anything about investment-banking business. He came to it with virtually zero experience in it," Warren Stephens said. "It was a pretty steep learning curve."
So why hire him?
"Wes was a draw to get people to some events. We had a lot of lunches and conferences, and he spoke at many of those events," Stephens said.
Clark left Stephens Inc. early this year to start his own consulting company. His position has not been filled, and his legacy is unclear.
"It would be incorrect to say Wes made a big contribution while he was here, but it would be wrong to say we expected that, either," Warren Stephens said.
"Wes certainly was helpful in opening doors, but that was about the extent of it."
There "would not be any significant dollars we could place by his name," Stephens added.
And his campaign for president carries an unwelcome dividend. It draws attention to Stephens Inc. and the Stephens family, both of which have long and complicated political histories, most notably with Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The only political contribution Clark has made in the past two decades was $1,000 to Erskine Bowles, a former Clinton chief of staff who was running for the Senate, according to Federal Election Commission records. That was in November 2002, while he was a Stephens employee.
It’s awkward, Warren Stephens acknowledged. He likes Clark and thinks highly of him, but they are on "different pages" politically. Stephens is the Arkansas financial co-chairman of President Bush’s re-election effort.
"Our company isn’t looking to get into the spotlight here," he said, "and I’m not happy that it has been put upon us with Clark’s candidacy."
MORE OFFERS, RECOGNITION
The month Clark signed on with Stephens, July 2000, was full of meetings and alliances. Clark was appointed a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washingtonbased public-policy research firm, retained representation from the Greater Talent Network as a paid speaker and joined the board of Cambrian Communications, a Fairfax, Va. fiber-optics company.
He also signed on as an adviser to the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit that offers onthe-scene analyses of wars and other conflicts. There was no money involved, but the job would keep Clark in the international loop.
Just weeks later, on Aug. 9, 2000, then-President Clinton presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to Clark and 14 others. Clark’s citation said he had "distinguished himself as a soldier, scholar, and statesman" and "set a standard of excellence that has been his lifelong benchmark."
Clark was in and out of Little Rock regularly during the fall of 2000, but he didn’t settle down in the city until he and Gert bought a 4,023-square-foot house in the tony Robinwood subdivision from Don Scott and his wife, U.S. bankruptcy attorney Mary Davies Scott, in March 2001. The price: $459,000.
In May 2001, Clark joined the board of the $2.2 billion SIRVA Corp., the Westmont, Ill., relocation company that owns North American Van Lines and Allied World Wide. SIRVA, which filed plans with the Securities and Exchange Commission in August to take its company public, is in a mandated quiet period and can’t talk about Clark’s contribution to the business, spokesman Jim Trainor said.
But Trainor did say Clark’s affiliation with the company came by way of a contact at the New York investment firm of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, which owns 81 percent of SIRVA. A core component of the company’s business is moving executives and government personnel.
CNN MILITARY ANALYST
While Clark was juggling consulting offers and his full-time job at Stephens, CNN gave him a chance to get back into the public eye. The network wanted him to become its senior military analyst. Clark readily agreed, not knowing that the war with Iraq would eventually put him center stage.
CNN would not say how much it paid Clark, but a source familiar with his sort of contract said it was at least $1,000 a day. Clark’s contract ended in May.
Clark wasn’t poor when he entered civilian life. While his presidential campaign has not released an accounting of his holdings, he made a good living in the Army, ending his career with a salary of $12,306.86 a month. Clark now gets a retirement check of $8,701 a month, according to the Department of Defense.
Greater Talent Network, whose list of exclusive speakers includes author Tom Wolfe, former FBI Director Louis Freeh and ice-cream entrepreneurs Ben & Jerry, won’t say how often Clark has been dispatched, but its speaking fees start at $5,000. Clark’s second book, Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire, went on sale this week. He received advances for both it and Waging Modern War, but they weren’t outrageous sums, said Gene Taft, spokesman for PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus books.
"Our authors don’t get rich on the front-end of our books," Taft said.
Taft won’t release exact sales figures on the first book but said it went back to press three times. "It wasn’t hundreds of thousands of copies," but it did well for a book of its type, he said.
The second book is already in a second printing, 5,000 to 10,000 copies above the initial print run, Ta f t s a i d.
POST-9/11 WORK
Clark worked for Acxiom for free for several months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"After 9/11, he really missed the [military] service," Morgan said. "And I asked him if he’d go back in if he could. He said he’d go back in a second."
Absent that possibility, Clark wanted to get involved with companies that could shore up the government’s security, Morgan said.
"He believes in technology more than guns, or at least in balance with it. After 9/11, he helped us for two or three months, calling and offering ideas, telling us what sort of services might be needed for the nation.
"I told him, ‘You can’t just keep doing this for free.’"
But Clark was still a Stephens employee. So Acxiom and Stephens did a deal.
Stephens formed a new subsidiary, SCL LLC, specifically for aerospace and defense consulting. Clark was the only employee, Acxiom the only customer. Acxiom agreed to pay Stephens $300,000 a year. Clark’s cut of that is unknown.
Again, Acxiom offered Clark a board position. This time, he said yes.
In March, Clark left Stephens to form his own consulting company, Wesley K. Clark & Associates. He kept the Acxiom contract, which was renegotiated for $150,000 a year plus expenses, until announcing his candidacy for president Sept. 17.
Lobbying reports filed with the secretary of the U.S. Senate show that Clark and SCL earned more than $330,000 in 2002 and that Clark’s firm earned $50,000 lobbying for Acxiom in the first six months of this year.
As a member of the Acxiom board, Clark has received $23,000 for attendance at meetings, the company’s proxy statements show. He also has received 4,000 shares of stock and 2,900 stock options, which will not fully vest until 2006. Acxiom stock closed at $16.14 Wednesday.
Has Clark been good for Acxiom’s business?
To a man, the companies that have courted him say Clark’s biggest asset is his insight on how to get the government to listen to them and, ultimately, buy their products.
For Acxiom, that included arranging a July 2002 meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney for Morgan and Jerry Jones, the company’s general counsel.
Acxiom’s product is its ability to extrapolate information on certain segments of the population on the basis of income, age and stability. The government and the airline industry are using Acxiom’s models to flag potential troublemakers.
The company does not break out its emerging government contracts publicly, but spokesman Dale Ingram said they represent about 1 percent of the company’s $1 billion in annual sales and are growing.
Morgan said, "The best thing I like about Wes is that he’s a doer."
OTHER COMPANY POSTS
Clark is on the stockholders’ committee of a German manufacturer of industrial gases, Messer Griesheim, which is controlled by the New York investment firm Goldman Sachs. A Messer Griesheim spokesman would neither talk about Clark’s contribution to the company nor answer questions about how long he’s been affiliated with the company.
Clark is a director with Entrust Inc., a Dallas company that specializes in Internet security systems and had contracts with 1,250 government and private agencies as of January 2002. Entrust CEO Bill Conner served with Clark on a Pentagon advisory panel a few years ago.
Clark receives about $15,000 a year for attendance at meetings, company spokesman Kenneth Kracmer said. In addition, he has received 2,250 shares of Entrust stock and 44,000 options. Entrust closed Wednesday at $4.98 a share.
Clark serves on the board of advisers of Time Domain Inc., an aerospace- and-defense-minded wideband communications company in Huntsville, Ala. The company develops radar that can see through walls and a next-generation global-positioning chip that can create invisible security bubbles around cell phones and other handheld devices.
CEO Ralph Petroff said the company learned of Clark through its NATO connections. "Everyone was saying, ‘you guys need to have General Clark.’ We surely did."
"Few people in the military today have the perspective of General Clark, in terms of what the needs are on the modern battlefield," Petroff said.
Time Domain is a privately held company that doesn’t have to disclose revenues, but Petroff said Clark had been important in gaining access to Washington decision makers.
Stephens Inc. has an investment in Time Domain Corp., but it was made long before Clark came on the scene, Warren Stephens said. It has not performed well, he added.
Since April, Clark has been chairman of the board of Wave-Crest Laboratories of Dulles, Va. The private company is developing small, computer-enhanced motors. He has been a consultant to WaveCrest since 2001.
We met him through Stephens, having heard about his wonderful reputation, and he’s advising us on technology applications in many sectors," company spokesman Tom McMahon said.
Warren Stephens recalls that WaveCrest approached his company seeking money and that Clark was asked to investigate its technology. Stephens Inc. did not invest in WaveCrest.
It appears that only one of Clark’s business ventures has gone south. Cambrian Communications, the fiber-optics company that gave him his first board position, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2002.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Where there's smoke, there's fire. Or a lack of fire at unbombed Serbian Messer assets.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.