WILLIAM WESTMORELAND, 1914-2005
NEW YORK POST
July 20, 2005
Gen. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. troops in Vietnam during the four most critical years of America's most controversial war, had a thankless - likely impossible - task: He was ordered to fight a war without actually winning it.
Westmoreland died Monday at 91.
Perhaps Vietnam was an unwinnable war, as the critics contend, at least in the conventional sense.
But we'll never know for sure.
President Lyndon Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, would not permit taking the war to enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam - making the outcome a foregone conclusion.
America's explicit goal became "Vietnamization" - to weaken the enemy sufficiently so that the army of South Vietnam could successfully defend itself.
And that - as Westmoreland, a hardened combat veteran of two previous campaigns (WWII and Korea), surely knew - was no way to fight a war. So he waged a thankless war of attrition in pursuit of a misguided political policy.
Already under fire from the antiwar hard left, Westmoreland later was accused by a CBS News documentary of deliberately deceiving the public about the state of war and of involvement in a conspiracy to destroy evidence.
He sued the network for libel, but settled for an apology before the case went to the jury. Later, an independent investigation by noted documentarian Burton Benjamin confirmed that CBS had unfairly slanted the broadcast against Westmoreland, repeatedly violating the network's journalistic standards.
Even McNamara, in a book trashing himself and everyone else who'd been involved in Vietnam policy, hailed Westmoreland's "determination and patriotism." And those should be the final words in defining William Westmoreland's life and career.
He was, indeed, a patriot.
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