XPost: alt.war.vietnam

Michael Neese
I have lived a lot of it.Updated Tue

How did the infamous Vietnam War General William C. Westmoreland live
after his retirement in 1972? I do not mean his deeds, but everyday life.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Westmoreland's tenure as Chief of Staff ended on June 30, 1972. He was
offered the position of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, but opted to
retire on June 30, 1972. He was awarded the Army Distinguished Service
Medal by President Richard Nixon.

Later years[edit]

Westmoreland ran unsuccessfully for Governor of South Carolina as a
Republican in the 1974 election. He published his autobiography the
following year. Westmoreland later served on a task force to improve educational standards in the state of South Carolina.

In 1986, Westmoreland served as grand marshal of the Chicago Vietnam
Veterans parade. The parade, attended by 200,000 Vietnam veterans and
more than half a million spectators, did much to repair the rift between Vietnam veterans and the American public.

Westmoreland versus CBS: The Uncounted Enemy[edit]

Mike Wallace interviewed Westmoreland for the CBS special The Uncounted
Enemy: A Vietnam Deception. The documentary, shown on January 23, 1982,
and prepared largely by CBS producer George Crile III, alleged that Westmoreland and others had deliberately understated Viet Cong troop
strength during 1967 in order to maintain U.S. troop morale and domestic support for the war. Westmoreland filed a lawsuit against CBS.

In Westmoreland v. CBS, Westmoreland sued Wallace and CBS for libel, and
a lengthy legal process began. Just days before the lawsuit was to go to
the jury, Westmoreland suddenly settled with CBS, and they issued a
joint statement of understanding. Some contend that Judge Leval's
instructions to the jury over what constituted "actual malice" to prove
libel convinced Westmoreland's lawyers that he was certain to lose.

Others point out that the settlement occurred after two of
Westmoreland's former intelligence officers, Major General Joseph
McChristian and Colonel Gains Hawkins, testified to the accuracy of the substantive allegations of the broadcast, which were that Westmoreland
ordered changes in intelligence reports on Viet Cong troop strengths for political reasons. Disagreements persist about the appropriateness of
some of the methods of CBS's editors.

A deposition by McChristian indicates that his organization developed
improved intelligence on the number of irregular Viet Cong combatants
shortly before he left Vietnam on a regularly scheduled rotation. The
numbers troubled Westmoreland, who feared that the press would not
understand them. He did not order them changed, but instead did not
include the information in reporting to Washington, which in his view
was not appropriate to report.

Based on later analysis of the information from all sides, it appears
clear that Westmoreland could not sustain a libel suit because CBS's
principal allegation was that he had caused intelligence officers to
suppress facts. Westmoreland's anger was caused by the implication of
the broadcast that his intent was fraudulent and that he ordered others
to lie.

During the acrimonious trial, Mike Wallace was hospitalized for
depression, and despite the legal conflict separating the two,
Westmoreland and his wife sent him flowers. Wallace's memoir is
generally sympathetic to Westmoreland, although he makes it clear he
disagreed with him on issues surrounding the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration's policies in Southeast Asia.

Views on Vietnam War[edit]


Herbert Elmer Abrams' portrait of General Westmoreland

In a 1998 interview for George magazine, Westmoreland criticized the battlefield prowess of his direct opponent, North Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp. "Of course, he [Giap] was a formidable adversary",
Westmoreland told correspondent W. Thomas Smith Jr. "Let me also say
that Giap was trained in small-unit, guerrilla tactics, but he persisted
in waging a big-unit war with terrible losses to his own men. By his own admission, by early 1969, I think, he had lost, what, a half million
soldiers?

He reported this. Now such a disregard for human life may make a
formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius. An
American commander losing men like that would hardly have lasted more
than a few weeks." In the 1974 film Hearts and Minds, Westmoreland
opined that "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as
does a Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as
the philosophy of the Orient expresses it: Life is not important."

Westmoreland's view has been heavily criticized by Nick Turse, the
author of the book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
Vietnam. Turse said that many of the Vietnamese killed were actually
innocent civilians, and the Vietnamese casualties were not just caused
by military cross-fire but were a direct result of the U.S. policy and
tactics, for example the policy "kill everything that moves" which
enabled the U.S. soldiers to shoot civilians for "suspicious behavior".

He concluded that, after having "spoken to survivors of massacres by
United States forces at Phi Phu, Trieu Ai, My Luoc and so many other
hamlets, I can say with certainty that Westmoreland's assessment was
false". He also accused Westmoreland of concealing evidence of
atrocities from the American public when he was the Army Chief of Staff.

In more than a decade of analyzing long-classified military criminal investigation files, court-martial transcripts, Congressional studies, contemporaneous journalism and the testimony of United States soldiers
and Vietnamese civilians, I found that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, his subordinates, superiors and successors also engaged in a profligate
disregard for human life.

—

Nick Turse

Historian Derek Frisby also criticized Westmoreland's view during an
interview with Deutsche Welle:

General William Westmoreland, who commanded US military operations in
the Vietnam War, unhesitatingly believed Giap was a butcher for
relentlessly sacrificing his soldiers in unwinnable battles. Yet, that assessment in itself is key to understanding the West's failure to
defeat him.

Giap understood that protracted warfare would cost many lives but that
did not always translate into winning or losing the war. In the final
analysis, Giap won the war despite losing many battles, and as long as
the army survived to fight another day, the idea of Vietnam lived in the
hearts of the people who would support it, and that is the essence of "revolutionary war".

—

Derek Frisby

For the remainder of his life, Westmoreland maintained that the United
States did not lose the war in Vietnam; he stated instead that "our
country did not fulfill its commitment to South Vietnam. By virtue of
Vietnam, the U.S. held the line for 10 years and stopped the dominoes
from falling."

Personal life[edit]

Westmoreland first met his future wife, Katherine (Kitsy) Stevens Van
Deusen, while stationed at Fort Sill; she was nine years old at the time
and was the daughter of the post executive officer, Colonel Edwin R. Van Deusen. Westmoreland met her again in North Carolina when she was
nineteen and a student at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The couple married in May 1947 and had three children: a daughter,
Katherine Stevens; a son, James Ripley II, and another daughter,
Margaret Childs.

Just hours after Westmoreland was sworn in as Army Chief of Staff on
July 7, 1968, his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Van
Deusen (commander of 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment), was killed
when his helicopter was shot down in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam.

Westmoreland died on July 18, 2005, at the age of 91 at the Bishop
Gadsden retirement home in Charleston, South Carolina. He had suffered
from Alzheimer's disease during the final years of his life. He was
buried on July 23, 2005, at the West Point Cemetery, United States
Military Academy.

The General William C. Westmoreland Bridge in Charleston, South
Carolina, is named in his honor.

In 1996, the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution
(SAR) authorized the General William C. Westmoreland award. The award is
given each year in recognition to an outstanding SAR veterans volunteer.

William Westmoreland was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy
of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the state's highest honor)
by the governor of Illinois in 1970 in the area of Government.

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