Former chairman of Joint Chiefs hospitalized

FORT LEWIS, Wash. — Retired Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Clinton administration, has been hospitalized in guarded condition at an Army hospital here, a spokesman said Monday.

Shalikashvili, 68, entered Madigan Army Medical Center at 11 a.m. Saturday. The family is requesting that no more information be released, spokesman Mike Meines said.

The former NATO supreme allied commander spoke at the Democratic National Convention in July, endorsing John Kerry for president.

“I do not stand here as a political figure,” he told the convention. “Rather, I am here as an old soldier and a new Democrat.”

In a statement Monday, Kerry called him “a good friend, a trusted adviser and a great American whose life and example embody the values at the heart of America — opportunity, service and family.”

The Democratic presidential candidate added that he had called the general’s family to say that his wife “Teresa and I are praying for a speedy recovery and stand ready to do anything we can to help.”

Shalikashvili served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993, the year Bill Clinton took office, until September 1997, when the general retired from the Army.

At a retirement gathering honoring Shalikashvili, then-President Clinton said it was the general who had made recommendations that led to U.S. troops being sent to a number of post-Cold War hot spots, including Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf.

“In every conversation we ever had,” Clinton said at the time, “he never minced words, he never postured or pulled punches, he never shied away from tough issues or tough calls and, most important, he never shied away from doing what he believed was the right thing.”

Shalikashvili’s willingness to commit U.S. forces to remote countries rarely if ever seen on the list of “vital national interests” set him apart from his better-known predecessor, Gen. Colin Powell.

Earlier, under President George H.W. Bush, Shalikashvili served as NATO’s supreme allied commander and also as commander in chief of all U.S. armed forces in Europe. At the end of the first Persian Gulf War, he was in charge of the Kurdish relief operation that returned hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees to northern Iraq.

Shalikashvili came to the United States in 1952 from his native Poland. He was 16 and had witnessed the Nazi occupation of Poland.

He joined the Army six years later.

Shalikashvili and his wife, Joan, moved to Steilacoom, Wash., near the Fort Lewis Army base south of Tacoma, in 1998. In the late 1980s, he had served at Fort Lewis as commander of the 9th Infantry Division (Motorized).