Clark McAdams Clifford (December 25, 1906 – October 10, 1998) was an American lawyer who served as an important political adviser to Democratic presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.

His official government positions were White House Counsel (1946–1950), Chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (1963–1968), and Secretary of Defense (1968–1969);[1] Clifford was also influential in his role as an unofficial, informal presidential adviser in various issues.

[2] All four Democratic presidents of the Cold War era employed Clifford's services and relied on his counsel, marking him as one of the ultimate Washington insiders.

Clifford encouraged Truman to embrace a left-wing populist image in hope of undermining the impact on the race of third-party Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, who had served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice-President from 1941 to 1945.

Clifford also believed that a strong pro-civil rights stance, while sure to alienate traditional Southern Democrats, would not result in a serious challenge to the party's supremacy in that region.

[18] After Johnson became president in November 1963 following Kennedy's assassination, Clifford served frequently as an unofficial White House Counsel and sometimes undertook short-term official duties, including a trip with General Maxwell Taylor in 1967 to South Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

It became clear that from the sketchy information available we could not figure out what happened.”[19] He delved deeper into the inconsistencies in the Israeli explanation: “That the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir is unbelievable.

I never felt the Israelis made adequate restitution or explanation for their actions.”[22][23] On January 19, 1968, Johnson announced his selection of Clifford to succeed Robert McNamara as the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Clifford continued McNamara's highly publicized Cost Reduction Program, announcing that over $1.2 billion had been saved in fiscal year (FY) 1968 as a result of the effort.

Faced with a congressionally mandated reduction of expenditures in FY 1969, Clifford suspended the planned activation of an infantry division and deactivated 50 small ships, 9 naval air squadrons, and 23 Nike-Hercules missile launch sites.

The final FY 1970 budget, which Clifford and his staff worked on before they left office after the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency, amounted to $75.5 billion TOA (Total Obligational Authority).

At his confirmation hearing, he told the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. Senate that the limited objective of the U.S. was to guarantee to the people of South Vietnam the right of self-determination.

Soon after moving into his Pentagon office, Clifford persuaded Johnson to deny General William Westmoreland's request for an additional 206,000 American troops in Vietnam.

Even as he oversaw a continued buildup, Clifford preferred to emphasize the points Johnson had made in his March 31, 1968, address: that the South Vietnamese army could take over a greater share of the fighting, that the administration would place an absolute limit on the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam, and that it would take steps, including the bombing restrictions, to reduce the combat level.

"[29] After he left office, Clifford, in the July 1969 issue of Foreign Affairs, made his views very clear: "Nothing we might do could be so beneficial ... as to begin to withdraw our combat troops.

[30] Although the Johnson Administration ended under the cloud of the Vietnam War, Clifford concluded his short term as Secretary of Defense with his reputation actually enhanced.

As he left office to return to his law practice in Washington, Clifford expressed the hope and expectation that international tensions would abate, citing the shift in the Vietnam confrontation from the battlefield to the conference table, and the evident willingness of the Soviet Union to discuss limitations on strategic nuclear weapons.

On Friday, December 5, 1975, Clifford recommended to the Church Committee that the National Security Council and a Director General of Intelligence—not the Central Intelligence Agency—be the ones with the authority to decide whether or not to engage in covert action.

[31] Clifford's legal practice and lobbying work made him wealthy, and he was considered one of Washington's "superlawyers" due to the reach of his influence and seemingly limitless connections.

[citation needed] Clifford made waves by threatening the newly established regime of Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran with war for its intransigence in negotiating the release of the hostages seized from the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

The bank was nominally owned by a group of Arab investors, but in order to assuage fears from the Federal Reserve, Clifford had assembled a board of distinguished American citizens to exercise day-to-day control.

In 1991, Robert M. Morgenthau, the District Attorney for New York County (coterminous with the borough of Manhattan), disclosed that his office had found evidence that BCCI secretly owned First American.

Morgenthau convened a grand jury to determine whether Clifford and his partner, Robert A. Altman, had deliberately misled federal regulators when the two men assured them that BCCI would have no outside control.

Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown, noted that a key strategy of "BCCI's successful secret acquisitions of U.S. banks in the face of regulatory suspicion was its aggressive use of a series of prominent Americans", Clifford among them.

[36] Clifford, who prided himself on decades of meticulously ethical conduct, summed his predicament up when he sadly told a reporter from The New York Times, "I have a choice of either seeming stupid or venal.

[32] Clark Clifford emerged as a national figure almost overnight, moving from a low-level naval aide in the White House to President Truman's top adviser and strategist.

His reputation – and his law practice – continued to soar until finally Lyndon Johnson appointed him Defense Secretary to lead the nation out of the Vietnam trap.

[41] Historian Walter Isaacson argues that in many ways Clifford resembled the four wise men who shaped American foreign policy in the 1940s and early 1950s – Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Robert A. Lovett, and John J. McCloy.