Now that Wesley Clark has uprooted her once more, Gert, as she’s called, is clinging tightly to what’s left of her privacy. After appearing with her husband and their son and daughter-in-law at Clark’s announcement last week, she disappeared from view. She spent the next couple of days hunkered down, not granting interviews. “She didn’t want to be a public person,” the general says of his wife. Her reluctance delayed his decision to get in. In the end, she told him, “you’ll have to make the decision.”
Yet Gert Clark, 59, is hardly a meek, long-suffering military wife. An Irish Catholic who grew up in Brooklyn, she was working as an executive assistant on Wall Street in 1963 when she met the ambitious West Point cadet at a Navy dance (Clark and his friends crashed the party). “She’s got street smarts,” he says about her. Friends say she is opinionated and outspoken, and has as sharp a tongue as her husband. When the couple was stationed in Brandenburg, Germany, she publicly criticized the quality of the military school. Before one PTA meeting, someone asked her to kindly keep her opinions to herself. “It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull,” the general says with a smile. At the meeting, Gert spoke out long and loud.
For all the hassles of moving around, military life still agreed with her. Precise and disciplined like her husband, she can, acquaintances say, play the role of MP when it comes to her husband, policing who gets close to him. And though she never liked having to maintain a public presence, she is skilled at working a room. “Gert has a tremendous amount of experience in politics in that there is no more political place than the top echelon of the military,” says former Arkansas senator David Pryor. “She has a Ph.D. in that world.”
General Clark relies on those instincts. He tells her everything, aides say, and she’s not shy about critiquing him. She’s also one of the few people who can make the general snap to attention. Wesley Clark’s good friend Jerry Jones recalls a Sunday-afternoon outing with the general on a Little Rock golf course. Clark was playing one of the best games of his life. “He was on a roll,” says Jones. Suddenly, Clark looked at his watch. “I have to go,” he said, and began walking away. “I promised Gert that I’d take her to the movies.” When it comes to your wife, even the former Supreme Allied Commander knows that sometimes you’re better off just following orders.
