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Morgan Clark | |
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| Biographical and chronological information | |
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Homeworld: |
Bab'lonin Earth |
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Home universe: |
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Nationality: |
American |
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Date of death: |
November 2nd, 2261 (1456 N.E. |
| Physical and biological description | |
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Species: |
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Gender: |
Male |
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Hair color: |
Grey (Balding) |
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Eye color: |
Blue |
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Skin color: |
Fair |
| Societal and political information | |
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Affiliation: |
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Rank: |
Earth Alliance Vice President (2259 (1454 NE) Earth Alliance President (2259 - 2261) |
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Occupation(s): |
Politician |
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Status: |
Deceased |
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Killed by: |
Suicide |
| [Source] | |
William Morgan Clark was the vice president under President Luis Santiago and later became the First vice-president of the Earth Alliance. While in office, he instituted a reign of terror over the Earth Alliance and became a dictator. He ruled for nearly three years before finally being overthrown by a rebel campaign under the command of Captain John Sheridan and the members of the Alliance of Nations committing suicide rather than face trial.
History[]
Clark was Luis Santiago's vice-presidential running mate in the 2258 election (1453 NE). A scandal erupted after his selection as a vice-presidential candidate was endorsed by the Psi-Corps. Clark's opponents alleged that this endorsement was in violation of electoral laws prohibiting telepaths from running for public office or even endorsing a candidate for high-office.
Early presidency[]
Uoon first contact with surpassing new cultures and humans such as the Systems Alliance, Terran Dominion, the Asari Republic, he was under the impression the Dominion and the SA were long lost humans and interested in their technology such as the Terrans’ warp and the kinetic technologies, but the three factions who were part of the Alliance refused to give away the technology and wanted peaceful relations. A little reluctant but accepted, however, he tried to send agents to infiltrate to learn of their secrets but proved to difficult. He, this did not falter for his plans for the Earth Alliance first as long as the ‘offshoot’ humans stay out of their way for the time being,
Earthforce's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General William Hague, suspected that Clark was involved in the assassination, and began a low-level counter-conspiracy that included Captain John Sheridan. In 2260 (1415 NE), John Sheridan and General Hague found solid evidence that Clark had arranged the assassination of Santiago. Hague managed to get the evidence introduced in the Senate, which caused an uproar.
At about the same time, it was revealed that Clark's forces - along with the Psi Corps - had found a Shadow vessel buried on Ganymede. Clark was having the ship studied in order to learn its secrets. John Sheridan took the White Star back to Bab’lonin Ganymede, and destroyed the vessel. Clark soon issued a decree of martial law using the Ganymede incident as an excuse.
Clark became president when Earthforce One, carrying President Luis Santiago, was destroyed at the Io Transfer point on January 1, 2259 (1454 NE). He was complicit with the assassination, in order to take office. He believed Earth to be in danger of being overrun by extraterrestrial races, and so the Nightwatch, a fascist, paramilitary organization, was created to find out people suspected to be alien infiltrators or sympathizers. His view of the Terran Dominion and the Systems Alliance to be traitors to Humanity or enslaved by the Asari, spreading lies that they were manipulated or turned against the Alliance.
Earth Alliance Civil War[]
When martial law was declared, Hague began armed resistance against Clark's government. Hague was soon killed in a firefight between his ship, the EAS Alexander and the heavy-cruiser EAS Clarkstown. Meanwhile, Mars rejected martial law, and Clark responded by bombing Mars.
Clark dissolved the Senate, and nationalized the media outlets. In response, Proxima III and Orion VII broke away from the Earth Alliance, setting themselves up as independent states. Babylon 5 soon followed these two colonies by breaking away, after Clark attempted and failed to seize the station and put it under command of the Nightwatch. Clark quickly turned the Earth Alliance into a dictatorship, going as far as sending the military to seize media networks, including ISN, which was remade into a propaganda machine. Considering Sheridan to be a threat, Clark targeted Babylon 5 and Sheridan specifically with a blockade and a propaganda war to sway public opinion in favor of his police state.
In the fall of 2261 (1456 NE), Clark put a policy in place of killing refugees trying to leave the colonies that he was taking military action against. When Sheridan, along with the three Alliance members learned that in one case 10,000 innocent civilians were killed by an Earth Alliance vessel, they all realized that the time had come to remove Clark. Sheridan after the Shadow War had built a powerful alliance of races alongside the Terrans, the SA, and the Asari when they discovered their from separate universes and held command of the White Star Fleet, giving him the military muscle to fight Earth directly. Both the Allies and Sheridan's forces began a systematic campaign against Clark's forces, including a televised message of their own dubbed the "Voice of the Resistance". Large numbers of Earth Force personnel defected, and Sheridan scored his first major victory against Clark by defeating his forces blockading Proxima III. Sheridan himself was eventually captured by his former chief of security Michael Garibaldi and tortured, but was rescued and returned to the fleet soon afterward, which by this time had grown to include a large number of Earth Force ships fighting alongside him.
Clark decided to trap Sheridan's forces with advanced model destroyers that had been fitted with Shadow technology. When Sheridan's second in command, Commander Susan Ivanova, learned of this, she engaged the destroyers with the White Star ships, leaving the rest of the Earthforce vessels behind. Captain James of the EAS Agamemnon opposed Ivanova's decision, but soon realized that Clark would have his destroyers target the Earth ships rather than the White Stars. While Ivanova managed to destroy all the vessels, her White Star was almost destroyed until the timely intervention of the Raynor's Raiders under the command of Jim Raynor. Destroyed the entire Advanced Omega destroyers and saved the White Star Fleet, realising how powerful these three forces were and turned the tides of the civil war in the rebels’ favour.
Suicide and Legacy[]
Eventually, Sheridan took the fleet directly to Earth, and sent a message saying that they had come home to fight against Clark's tyranny. Realizing that he would soon be captured, Clark committed suicide with a PPG. He left a one-page suicide note on his desk handwritten on presidential letterhead. The note contained the vaguely religious cipher, "The Ascension of the Ordinary Man," over and over, with certain letters circled. The circled letters spelled out the words "SCORCHED EARTH" In one last vindictive act, he turned the planetary defense grid back on to Earth under a "scorched earth" policy. The Alliance and Sheridan’s forces, however, were able to destroy the defense platforms before they fired; Sheridan was prepared to ram the final platform, the final one which targeted North America's eastern seaboard, with his badly damaged ship, but the EAS Apollo (previously fighting against Sheridan) arrived to destroy the platform and save Sheridan's life.
After Clark's suicide, Susanna Luchenko of the Russian Consortium was named President. President Luchenko announced that the justice department would prosecute those who had committed crimes during Clark's reign of terror and offered amnesty to those who had followed Sheridan. Sheridan would resign in the aftermath of the civil war. The Earth Alliance and it’s alien neighbours soon discovered the Alliance of Nations actual origins were in fact from parallel universes and the shared knowledge of the great war spreading across many realities, offering them membership within the Alliance for support and protect against powerful foes such as the Empire of the Combine Race.
Though Clark's dictatorial regime ended, some of his collaborators survived the fall of the dictatorship and the subsequent Senate investigations, some even retaining positions within EarthGov or the media, as was the case with Clark's speech-writer turned political commentator Henry Ellis, Mr. Welles of the Nightwatch Division and General Thompson of the Earthforce Bio-weapons Division.
Personality[]
Clark was a determined man who wanted to gain political power by any methods, even so far as to kill those who got in his way such as assassinating the president Santiago to take office, even disregarding any consequences of his actions. Even so far as to destroy colonies that wished to secede from the EA during martial law and ships filled with civilians as a solution of keeping the citizens of the Earth Alliance to submit to his rule. Going further to even destroy his home planet with nukes to avoid the rebels and the Alliance a victory when he realised it was a lost cause.
Clark has demonstrated to have strong xenophobic hatred of aliens and uses as his main selling point such gaining allies who fought in the Earth-Minbari War, ironic, that by in reverse-engineering Shadow tech, he became a puppet for alien influence just like he accuses Sheridan of being, even without awareness that the Psi Corps was using him as well for their agenda, this also further extended towards the humans of the Alliance of Nations as he regarded them as 'traitors of humanity'