Westmoreland, U.S. Commander of Vietnam War, Dies at Age 91

Bloomberg.com: U.S.: Westmoreland, U.S. Commander of Vietnam War, Dies at Age 91

July 18 (Bloomberg) -- General William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam who said the war was lost because of Washington policy makers who caused U.S. soldiers to fight ``with but one hand,'' has died. He was 91.

Westmoreland died at Bishop Gadsden retirement home in Charleston, South Carolina, of natural causes, said Paul Craig, a registered nurse at the retirement community, where Westmoreland lived with his wife. Craig declined to give further details.

Westmoreland's four years in Vietnam coincided with a 20- fold increase in American forces and mounting protests at home. By his return to the Pentagon in 1968, the U.S. had almost 500,000 troops in Vietnam and the number of soldiers killed in action was rising by 1,000 a month.

Westmoreland became a lightning rod for criticism of the war and was burned in effigy on college campuses. His unwavering reports of progress, buttressed with ``body counts'' of the number of enemy killed, contrasted with press coverage of U.S. forces struggling against an elusive foe.

``Perhaps General Westmoreland's greatest service to his country, and undoubtedly the one most painful for him, was taking much of the blame and absorbing much of the burden of American civilian and military frustration over the Vietnam War,'' the late Colonel and military chronicler Harry G. Summers Jr. wrote of Westmoreland.

Westmoreland's appointment in Vietnam in 1964 capped a military career in which he won a Bronze Star in World War II and in 1956 became the youngest major general in Army history up to that time. In 1965, Time magazine named him ``Man of the Year,'' calling him ``the sinewy personification of the American fighting man.''

War of Attrition

He battled criticism during and after the war that his ``search and destroy'' strategy of airlifting soldiers into the jungle was ineffective in a guerrilla war. His attempt to wage a war of attrition -- seeking to kill or wound more fighters than the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong could replace -- failed to force the enemy to sue for peace.

The defeat, Westmoreland said, lay on the shoulders of Washington policy makers. The refusal of President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to allow attacks on enemy staging grounds in Laos and Cambodia, their support of bombing ``pauses'' that allowed the North Vietnamese to regroup, and a failure to exploit the enemy's weakness after the 1968 Tet Offensive forced U.S. soldiers to fight ``with but one hand,'' he wrote in his 1976 autobiography.

He blamed the press for giving a false image of the war, which claimed more than 58,000 American lives. After retiring, Westmoreland filed a $120 million libel suit against CBS over a documentary alleging he conspired to hide the real number of enemy forces in Vietnam. He settled for a statement in which CBS said it did not believe he was ``unpatriotic or disloyal in performing his duties as he saw them.''

Spartanburg to West Point

William Childs Westmoreland was born on March 26, 1914, in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, the only son of a textile plant manager.

As a child, he made play of dressing up in the uniform of a World War I American ``doughboy.'' By the age of 15, he earned enough merit badges to become an Eagle Scout. That feat, combined with a sail across the Atlantic for a Scout jamboree, helped to push him in the direction of a military career.

``Westy,'' as his friends and colleagues knew him, was named class president at Spartanburg High School without having to run for the office. After graduation he followed in his father's footsteps at the state military college, the Citadel.

A family friend, the former South Carolina governor and Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes, helped him transfer to the officer corps of United States Military Academy at West Point.

Westmoreland was named First Captain, the academy's highest rank awarded to the prototype of a soldier. He graduated in 1936, receiving the John J. Pershing Sword, named after the World War I commander, for military proficiency.

While at West Point, wrote Samuel Zaffiri in the 1994 biography ``Westmoreland,'' he confided in roommate Chester Clifton, later Kennedy's military adviser, his plans to become Army Chief of Staff one day. When the nickname ``Chief'' was questioned by superiors, Clifton ad-libbed that Westmoreland had Indian blood.

Road to Germany

Westmoreland joined the Army's 18th Field Artillery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, after his first choice, the Army Air Corps, rejected him because his eyesight wasn't good enough. There he first saw his future wife, Katherine ``Kitsy'' Van Deusen, the 9- year-old daughter of a post colonel. They were married 11 years later on May 3, 1947.

Westmoreland was engaged in his first combat in World War II in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in 1943. As a lieutenant colonel and commander, his service in North Africa and Sicily was recognized with the Legion of Merit.

He became executive officer of the 9th Division's artillery in France, landing on Utah Beach, and was promoted to colonel. He received a Bronze Star for his two-week defense of the Remagen bridgehead over the Rhine.

Improvising

During the Allied occupation, Westmoreland had jurisdiction over five Bavarian districts and was tasked with preparing camps for displaced persons for the winter. Faced with a shortage of glass to replace broken windows, he arranged to haul the Rhine's plentiful sodium carbonate to factories across the border in Austria and Czechoslovakia, where the essential ingredient was in short supply.

He used his contacts from World War II to finally become a paratrooper, returning to Fort Bragg, his post at the outbreak of the war, to command the 504th Parachute Infantry. He then served as chief of staff of the 82d Airborne Division for three years.

During an ill-fated jump to test the new C-82 transport aircraft, Westmoreland was knocked out cold. Found by an officer on the ground, he asked, ``Are we fighting the Russians?''

Korea

In Korea, he led the 187th Airborne Infantry Combat Team in defending a valley on the way to Seoul and again provided defense in the summer of 1953 as China began its last major offensive.

Westmoreland returned to the Pentagon late that year as a brigadier general. He took an advanced management course at Harvard Business School and, as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, created a special school for training in counter- insurgency warfare.

In 1960, he returned to West Point as superintendent. Westmoreland received his third star in July 1963 and with it command of the XVIII Airborne Corps, with operational control of the 82d and 101st. He became deputy commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, known as MACV, in January 1964.

Westmoreland became commander in June 1964 and was promoted to four-star general two months into the job. At that time, there were just 20,000 troops in the region. During his tenure the number increased to over half a million.

Pacification

Westmoreland's MACV first focused on building up the South Vietnamese Army to protect villages against raiding insurgents. The aim was to stabilize the country from the inside out under a program of ``pacification.''

The Viet Cong, however, only infiltrated further amid the South's consecutive military coups and Catholic-Buddhist hostilities. Hanoi showed no signs of yielding to air strikes.

By July 1965, the U.S. decided to send ground troops and Westmoreland planned a three-phase ground war. The first phase required halting ``the losing trend'' by the end of the year; the second taking the offensive against the Communists by the middle of 1966 and the third wiping out the enemy by approximately the end of 1967.

Westmoreland's request to expand the war beyond the South to cut off the enemy at its source was rejected by the Johnson administration.

At the behest of the president, he appeared before a joint session of Congress in April of 1967, the same month that Dr. Benjamin Spock and Martin Luther King Jr. marched to the United Nations. Westmoreland told lawmakers his soldiers ``believe in what they are doing.''

End in View

He was summoned back in November to address the annual meeting of the National Press Club. ``We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view,'' he said. In January of the following year, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, a coordinated assault on South Vietnam's biggest cities.

U.S. commanders estimated they killed 37,000 of Ho Chi Minh's 70,000-strong National Liberation Front in the offensive, compared with the loss of just 2,500 American troops. However, nightly television broadcasts of the fighting brought the war into millions of American living rooms.

When Westmoreland requested an additional 200,000 troops, lawmakers, along with Defense Secretary McNamara and President Johnson, could not see the light at the end of the tunnel he had suggested just months before. In March 1968, Johnson announced he was ready to begin peace talks and would not be seeking re- election. Westmoreland was brought home and sworn in as Army Chief of Staff that July.

War Winds Down

Westmoreland dove into a public-relations campaign that took him to all 50 states. With the election of President Richard Nixon, he made preparations for an all-volunteer army, doubling the size of the recruiting force and the Women's Army Corps. He backed Nixon's decision in May 1970 to ``clean out'' North Vietnam's sanctuaries in Cambodia by using ground troops.

Suspecting an all-out offensive like Tet, Westmoreland received Nixon's permission to build a third division of the South Vietnamese Army to be deployed south of the demilitarized zone. The North Vietnamese began the offensive in March of 1972.

Westmoreland later wrote that the ability of the South to turn back the enemy from Quang Tri province proved that the U.S. strategy of building a ``viable'' South Vietnamese Army, rather than small anti-guerrilla forces, was the right one.

Westmoreland retired as Army chief in June 1972. That October, Nixon and Kissinger made a second attempt at a cease- fire. The Paris agreement in January 1973 ended America's involvement and brought home prisoners of war, but failed to get a pledge from North Vietnam to withdraw from the south.

`A Soldier Reports'

Westmoreland's 1974 bid to become South Carolina's governor ended in the Republican primary. He based himself in Charleston, where he became a voice for Vietnam veterans, converting his home office into a support center equipped to answer letters and requests for Memorial Day appearances.

Finally having the time to write his memoirs, Westmoreland published ``A Soldier Reports'' in 1976. In the book he defended the highly criticized ``search and destroy'' strategy as ``the basic objective of military operations to seek and destroy the enemy and his military resources.''

The war was winnable, he said, if not for Washington's failure to make a full commitment to South Vietnam. Johnson ``became a prisoner'' of public opinion, and his advisers were ``almost paranoid'' about a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets and involvement by Chinese communists.

He wrote that the uncensored press ``tried to usurp the diplomat's role of formulating foreign policy'' by presenting death and destruction rather than ''the way life went on in a generally normal way for most of the people much of the time.''

He went on the lecture circuit, attempting to bridge public perceptions of the war and his experience on the battlefield. As a speaker at universities, he withstood diatribes from behind the podium, saying that the fleeing of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon proved the war was a ``just cause.''

CBS Libel Trial

In January 1982, CBS News broadcast ``The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.'' The documentary alleged Westmoreland engaged in a ``conspiracy'' to hide the real number of enemy troops from Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the public to give the impression America was winning the war.

CBS based its report on an interview with CIA analyst Samuel Adams. Adams said documents captured from the North Vietnamese showed guerrilla forces numbered around 600,000, not the 270,000 estimated by Westmoreland's MACV.

CBS correspondent Mike Wallace and producer George Crile used the information to say Westmoreland categorized guerrillas as civilians with the purpose of dropping them from the official enemy-count list.

Westmoreland sued CBS, its news division president Van Gordon Sauter, Wallace, Crile and Adams. A week before the case was to go to the jury in February 1985, the sides settled for no money and a joint statement. The judge told the jury it may have been the best possible outcome that ``the verdict will be left to history.''

Westmoreland is survived by his wife, Kitsy, his three children Rip, Stevie and Margaret, and six grandchildren.