Gen. William C. Westmoreland Dies

General Westmoreland dies; led US in Vietnam
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff | July 19, 2005

General William C. Westmoreland, who as commander of US forces in South Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 presided over the period of greatest escalation in the Vietnam War, died last night. He was 91.

General Westmoreland died of natural causes at Bishop Gadsden retirement home in Charleston, S.C., where he had lived with his wife, Katherine, for several years, his son, James, told the Associated Press.

General Westmoreland's experience mirrored that of the United States in Vietnam, going from forceful confidence to bewildered frustration. Time magazine named him its Man of the Year in 1965, hailing him as ''the sinewy personification of the American fighting man." Barely two years later, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was writing that ''Westmoreland may go down in history as our most disastrous general since Custer."

Such an assessment would have been unthinkable when General Westmoreland took charge of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (the official designation of US headquarters in Saigon). By most measures, he qualified as the best the Army had to offer: a battle-tested artilleryman-turned-paratrooper, who had six rows of ribbons on his chest (his decorations included four Distinguished Service Medals and a Bronze Star).

He had commanded an infantry division at 31, been the Army's youngest major general at 42, and boasted such nontraditional accomplishments as the ability to fly a helicopter and such experiences as studying management at Harvard Business School. General Westmoreland's combat record in World War II and Korea attested to his bravery, and he was an officer of notable conscientiousness (he personally signed every letter of condolence sent to the families of US troops killed in Vietnam).

General Westmoreland's suitability for command extended to his appearance. With his jutting jaw, prominent brow, and erect bearing, ''Westy," as he was known to officers and enlisted men alike, could have come straight from central casting.

Yet along with many of its strengths, General Westmoreland embodied at least two cardinal weaknesses of the US military in the pre-Vietnam era: unimaginativeness and complacency.

In his book of Vietnam reportage, ''Dispatches," Michael Herr describes interviewing General Westmoreland. ''I came away feeling as though I'd just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says, 'This is a chair,' points to a desk and says, 'This is a desk.' "

Such literalness defined his generalship. ''Militarily," he told the Washington Post in 1986, ''you must remember that we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there."

It was an emblematic statement. Correct as far as he went, General Westmoreland failed to grasp the larger truth implicit in the phrase so commonly used during the war, ''hearts and minds." Vietnam was nothing if not a political war -- in the United States as well as Indochina -- and that was a type of conflict General Westmoreland was ill suited to wage.Continued...

In a war where the United States was never altogether sure of its strategy, he focused on tactics. He fought a war of attrition, one predicated on kill ratios, body counts, and search-and-destroy missions (which by his order were to be conducted by no fewer than 750 men).

It was a textbook application of what the military historian Russell Weigley has called ''the American way of war," a style of combat in which overwhelming firepower and numerical superiority are brought to bear to grind down the enemy. Yet the conflict in which General Westmoreland strove to apply those methods could be found in no textbook, and what had worked so well for Grant and Pershing and Eisenhower did not work for him.

Few understood General Westmoreland's plight better than Eisenhower, who once told President Lyndon B. Johnson that his commander in Saigon had ''the greatest responsibility of any general I have ever known in history." When Johnson suggested Eisenhower's own responsibility as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II had exceeded General Westmoreland's, Ike replied, ''Westmoreland's job is tougher. I always knew where the enemy was."

The son of Eugenia (Childs) and James Ripley Westmoreland, William Childs Westmoreland was born on March 26, 1914, in Saxon, S.C. A military career was all but preordained for the future Eagle Scout. There were Confederate veterans on both sides of the family; and his father, a textile-mill executive, was a graduate of The Citadel military academy.

General Westmoreland won appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point. He won the Pershing Sword, which goes to the cadet deemed foremost in military proficiency.

General Westmoreland served in the Ninth Infantry Division during World War II, fighting in North Africa and Sicily (where he met the future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell D. Taylor, whose protege he would become). He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day and played a crucial role in helping keep the bridgehead at Remagen --the first Allied crossing over Rhine River.

General Westmoreland joined the 82d Airborne as chief of staff in 1947. After commanding a regimental combat team in Korea, he became secretary of the Army General Staff in 1955. Three years later he assumed command of the 101st Airborne Division. He was superintendent at West Point from 1960 to 1963 and commander of the 18th Airborne Corps when sent to Saigon in 1964.

If any one episode defined General Westmoreland's tenure in Vietnam, it was the Tet Offensive. In November 1967 he said, ''We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view." The words returned to haunt him two months later when Communist forces simultaneously struck more than 150 cities and hamlets on the Vietnamese lunar new year, Tet. The attackers met with horrendous casualties; and, militarily, Tet was in no uncertain terms a US and South Vietnamese victory. Politically, however, it was disastrous, demonstrating the extent to which Washington and Saigon had misperceived the Viet Cong's warmaking capacities.

Soon thereafter, when it was announced that General Westmoreland was being promoted to Army Chief of Staff, he confided to General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that ''he has now been made the goat for the war," as Wheeler later recalled.

The new job was less daunting but still ardous and complicated. Over the next four years, he had to deal with an institution shaken by drug abuse, racial strife, and the discovery that US troops had committed war crimes at the Vietnamese village of My Lai. General Westmoreland also oversaw the shift to an all-volunteer Army (a move he opposed) and instituted a liberalization program that included such reforms as abolishing reveille and allowing soldiers to sport longer hair and sideburns.

General Westmoreland retired from the Army on June 30, 1972. Two years later, he sought the Republican nomination for governor of South Carolina, but drew only 43 percent of the vote. He published his memoirs, ''A Soldier Reports," in 1976.

A 1982 CBS documentary alleged that General Westmoreland had deliberately undercounted the number of enemy forces during 1966 and 1967. He sued for libel. The high-profile trial was settled out of court, with CBS disavowing any imputation that ''General Westmoreland was unpatriotic or disloyal in performing his duties."

Asked once how he wanted to be remembered, General Westmoreland cited the last sentence of his memoirs, ''As a soldier prays for peace, he must be prepared to cope with the hardships of war and bear its scar. He added, ''I bear its scars."

In addition to his son and wife, General Westmoreland leaves two daughters, Katherine and Margaret, and six grandchildren.

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