MOREHEAD CITY — Very few people in the world have memories like those of retired U.S. Army General and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton.
For example, the Tarboro native and N.C. State University graduate recalled, during a talk Friday to the Crystal Coast Republican Women at the general meeting in GOP headquarters on Highway 70, that President Bill Clinton apologized to him for his behavior in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
“The last day he was in office, after the last National Security Briefing, he said he needed to see me,” he said.
The two went into an empty office.
“He got in my personal space, and looked right at me, and said something like, ‘I want to apologize to you and the men and women in uniform for my personal conduct and any embarrassment it caused,’” Gen. Shelton said. “He had tears in his eyes when he said it.”
Or, there’s this one: The day after 9-11 in 2001, at a national security meeting, Gen. Shelton recalls trying, successfully, to stop the George W. Bush Administration from immediately beginning to implement a plan to “take out” Saddam Hussein through an invasion of Iraq.
“I told the president the CIA … said they (Iraq) had nothing to do with it (9-11). He (President Bush) said ‘I don’t care,’” and that the U.S. should take the opportunity, which was being pushed hard by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others.
Gen. Shelton said he told the president that it would be a bad move, that it would inflame the Middle East.
The next day, according to Gen. Shelton, after more discussion, the president said he wouldn’t launch the pre-existing Iraq plan immediately, but would do it “at a time and place of our choosing.”
Gen. Shelton said he went home that night and told his wife, Carolyn, “We’ll go into Iraq during the president’s first term.”
Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, was on Gen. Shelton’s side, the general recalled Friday. But Gen. Shelton’s second two-year term as chairman of the joint chiefs ended in October 2001. The U.S. invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003.
The rest is history.
Gen. Shelton said he liked and respected both presidents under whom he served after being appointed to the post by Congress in 2007 on the recommendation of President Clinton.
“They were both intelligent men. You might say ‘What?’ about President Bush. I saw him on TV and he looked like a deer caught in the headlights.’ And he did. And he looked like that sometimes in person. But he was smart.”
Both presidents, Gen. Shelton said, had an “uncanny ability” to look at a plan for a military operation and recognize the key elements and ask the right questions.
And, he said, both “were very personable, the kind of people you’d like to sit down with and have a glass of sweet tea, or a beer, if that’s your taste. And you know the kind of person you can tell can’t wait to start talking when you’re talking? Neither one of them were like that. They both listened intently, with great focus.”
But, Gen. Shelton, the two men were very different in some ways. President Clinton, he said, was “late for everything,” and loved to keep folks up until the wee hours of the morning, talking, having fun. President Bush was always early for everything, and liked to go to bed early. It was quite an adjustment for those in the military and diplomatic corps who were in both administrations.
Since most of Gen. Shelton’s service as chairman of the joint chiefs came under President Clinton – who he said might well have gone down as one of the best presidents ever if not for the Lewinsky scandal – his recollections Friday dealt more with events during that administration.
For example, the December 1998 bombing of Iraq (code-named Operation Desert Fox) was a major four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets from Dec. 16-19, 1998, by the U.S. and Great Britain.
The stated justification for the strikes was Iraq’s failure to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions and its interference with United Nations Special Commission weapons inspectors.
It wasn’t long after the release of the popular movie, “Wag the Dog,” about a fictional president who, days before an election, tries to distract from a personal sex scandal by hiring a Hollywood film producer to construct a fake war with Albania.
“Wag the dog” was a big phrase in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. And, Gen. Shelton said, given the timing – impeachment proceedings were about to start in the U.S. House of Representatives over the Lewinsky scandal – many in on the secret Iraq bombing campaign feared the president would be tarred with that brush.
So, Gen. Shelton said Friday, he went to President Clinton and warned him.
“President Clinton asked me why we selected ‘tomorrow’ as the date” to start the bombing, he said. “I told him it was because of the light.”
It was going to be perfect that day for the cruise missiles and for the safety of the pilots flying the bombers.
“He (President Clinton) looked at me and said, ‘Let them accuse me of anything they want.’ ”
The campaign went on as planned, and Gen. Shelton said he and Defense Secretary William Cohen got “raked over the coals by some, but we kept our jobs.”
But there was, of course, political intrigue and foolishness in the Clinton Administration, as in any other.
Gen. Shelton recalled a breakfast meeting in which a member of the president’s cabinet – he didn’t name the person – was talking about ways to justify a campaign to take out Saddam Hussein.
The man suggested that the U.S. fly a U2 – a famed spy plane that normally soars at 70,000 feet or so – so low and slow that Saddam’s forces could shoot it down.
“He asked if we could do that,” Gen. Shelton said Friday. “I said ‘Yes,’ and he gave me a big smile. “But then I said, ‘Just as soon as I can get your ass qualified to fly it.’ ”
That kind of humor came through in other places during the talk Friday. Gen. Shelton recalled that he was in Namibia, with U.S. Special Forces, training Namibians, when he got the call that he was on the “short list” for chairmanship of the joint chiefs.
The caller, in the legal department, asked him a lot of questions, he remembered, and some of them by necessity were very personal.
“And when we were finished,” he said, “she asked me if there was anything she hadn’t asked that could cause me any problems.
“I said, ‘Well, you didn’t ask me about my second wife.”
Gen. Shelton, while serving overseas in the Vietnam War, had been “given” an honorary wife by a village chief, along with a house. He told the caller the story.
The caller then said, “So I can assume there won’t be a paternity suit? I said, ‘I can’t promise you there won’t be a suit, but I can promise you there won’t be any merit to it.’ I never saw her (the “wife”) again.”
After talking for about 40 minutes, Gen. Shelton said he’d been told he could talk as long as he wanted, but recalled a third-grader’s essay he’d seen on Julius Caesar.
It said, “ ‘Julius Caesar lived a long time ago,” he said. “It said, ‘Julius Caesar was a general. Julius Caesar gave long speeches. They killed him.’ ”
But Gen. Shelton took a few questions from the audience and signed a book or two before leaving. One question was about a rumor that military personnel had been forced to wear civilian clothes in the Clinton White House.
It wasn’t true, he said: “I didn’t really have any civilian clothes. And I always wore my dress uniform to the White House, out of respect.”
He thanked the GOP women for inviting him, and said he was glad the meeting opened with a prayer and Pledge of Allegiance.
No one, he noted, “took a knee.”
Born in Tarboro, Henry “Hugh” Shelton was raised just outside the small town of Speed.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in textile engineering at N.C. State while earning his Army commission through ROTC training. He also earned a master’s degree in political science from Auburn University.
He and his wife Carolyn, have been married since 1963 and have three sons.
He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, commanded the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, led the Joint Task Force responsible for Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti in 1994 and was promoted to General and Commander in Chief of U.S. Special Forces Operations Command in 1996.
After leaving the military, the retired general founded the General Hugh Shelton Leadership Center at N.C. State to “inspire, educate, and develop values-based leaders, both locally and globally, committed to personal integrity, professional ethics, and selfless service.”
In 2005, with his wife, he established the Hugh and Carolyn Shelton Military Neurotrauma Foundation in to fund research into traumatic brain injury among military personnel.
He’s served as chairman of the board of directors of Red Hat Corp., and published his book, “Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior” with co-authors Ron Levinson and Malcolm McConnell in 2010.
On Aug. 27, 2010, a statue of Shelton was unveiled and dedicated at the Airborne Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville.
Gen. Shelton and his wife live in Morehead City.
Contact Brad Rich at 252-864-1532; email Brad@thenewstimes.com; or follow on Twitter @brichccn
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