This whole flap over who has the best military experience to be president really has been bothering me. So let’s go over 3 presidential candidates experience and see who has the best,
Wesley Kanne Clark (born December 23, 1944) is a retired General of the United States Army. Clark was valedictorian of his class at West Point, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford where he obtained a degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics & Economics), and later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master’s degree in military science. He spent 34 years in the Army and the Department of Defense, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Clark commanded Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000.
George Stanley McGovern volunteered for the United States Army Air Forces during World War II and served as a B-24 Liberator bomber pilot in the Fifteenth Air Force, flying 35 missions over enemy territory from bases in North Africa and later Italy, often against heavy anti-aircraft artillery, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving his crew by landing his damaged bomber on a British airfield on Vis, a small island off the Yugoslav coast controlled by Tito’s Partisans. McGovern’s wartime story, including his island landing, is at the center of Stephen Ambrose’s profile of the men who flew B-24s over Germany in World War II, The Wild Blue.[2]
John Sidney McCain III Â graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958 (194th in his class out of 199) and became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he nearly lost his life in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. Later that year while on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, he was shot down, badly injured, and captured as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese. He was held from 1967 to 1973, experiencing episodes of torture and refusing an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer; his war wounds would leave him with lifelong physical limitations. He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and, moving to Arizona
So when Wesley Clark says McCain’s military service doesn’t qualify him to be president, I think he hits the nail on the head. Because if you think about it, the first two candidates lost their presidential bids and McCain’s miltary service PALES in comparison to theirs.