Inevitably, among the first words acquaintances use to describe Judge Clark is “conservative.” There is an irony in this word choice, and they know it. Political conservatives, after all, have been most consistent in their attacks on the judge and the most withering. Conservative Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork focuses the afterword of his best-seller, The Tempting of America, on the case and Clark himself. Quote.

In a recent speech, conservative Senator John Ashcroft accused Clark of “an appalling judicial activism that is contrary to all the framers held dear” and assigned him to “a let-them-eat-cake elite who hold the people in deepest disdain.”

Although Ashcroft nails Clark’s activism--Clark himself could scarcely deny the charge--he misconstrues Clark’s elitism. In Southwest Missouri, there really is no liberal elite worth taking seriously. And if there were, Judge Clark probably wouldn’t know where to find it.

Born in 1925, a twin, “Gentry” Clark grew up humble and unpretentious amidst ten children on a hardscrabble Oregon County farm. He attended high school in the homely-named town of “Couch” and was a straight E (for excellent) student from start to finish. That he took four years of Agriculture to just one of Civics is a ratio that the more cynical of his critics might not find surprising.

The time and place of Clark’s coming of age matter. Politically, South Central Missouri did not much resemble the Republican redoubt to its west where one day Clark would live and practice law. Oregon County, the Judge remembers proudly, was where the Democratic South began back then, running straight and hard right through to Mississippi.

“I’ve always been a Democrat and a Methodist,” the Judge notes, “just like my parents.” Neither allegiance would he ever come to question.

When Gentry was seven, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt ascended to the White House and held sway there until Clark was nearly twenty. These are formative years in anyone’s life; for a committed young Democrat, they were defining.

If the improvisational FDR did not exactly rescue America from the Depression, he put his inimitable spin upon it, and Clark absorbed the mythology. War followed depression--ended it, really--and in 1944, Clark was drafted out of high school and shipped to Europe, more precisely to an unholy swath of the Ardennes known as “The Bulge.” They called him “Russell” Clark now, a name more befitting the buck private he was, a rank in which Clark, despite future promotions, still takes a curious kind of small “d” democratic pride.

Although Clark missed the heat at the Bulge, he saw enough action during the drive into Germany to sate his blood lust for a lifetime. (Today, he openly opposes the death sentence). At Aachen, he remembers watching the bodies of American G.I.’s float down the Ruhr only to learn later that his brother Sherman may well have been among them. Clark’s supporters instinctively cite his love of country--”a strong, strong patriotic sense” is how Federal Judge James England describes it--but few know how deep within the man that current runs.

Throughout the war, by necessity the greatest collective effort in American history, the activist FDR served not just as Clark’s president, but his commander-in chief, his political hero, and to some degree his role model. Today, the image of FDR adorns Clark’s office walls, one of just three non-family members so honored.

The second picture on his office wall belongs to Harry Truman, a man Clark clearly admires. At first meeting, even without preconceptions, the visitor intuits the parallels between Clark and Truman: the stature, the simplicity, the style, the self-assurance, the essential, ineffable “Missouri-ness.”

When asked to assess Judge Clark, Arthur Benson--the plaintiff’s attorney on “the case”--immediately volunteers the same parallel and extends it further. Benson cites their respective births in Southern Missouri (Truman was born in Lamar), their farm backgrounds, their families’ shared belief in education, their wartime service in France, their “Yellow Dog” Democratic heritage, their rise to prominence through grunt work in the Democratic party. Significantly, Benson also notes their shared “open-mindedness” and lack of “ideological blinders.” Clark, Benson emphasizes, “is very much like Truman.”

Despite his eye for parallels, and his genuine respect for Clark, Benson dismisses him “as a small man, about 5’3”. In fact, Clark is actually about 5’7”, just an inch or so shorter than Harry Truman. That Benson could so underestimate Clark after a 20 year relation says a good deal about the ambiguous nature of their relationship and the distance that the reclusive Clark has kept between them.

Like Truman, Clark is not inclined to intellectualize. When asked what he took away from the war, he answers simply, “It put me through college. No other big impression.” College for Clark was the University of Missouri, courtesy of the G.I. Bill.. He had no real major.

Clark also attended law school at Columbia, then formally segregated, graduating in 1952, the last full year of Truman’s difficult presidency and, auspiciously, the first year Brown v. Board of Education made its way to the Supreme Court.

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