Viet War General `Lives With The Facts' -- Westmoreland Insists U. S. Wasn't Defeated

CHARLESTON, S.C. - Twenty years after the fall of Saigon, Gen. William Westmoreland is often recognized by Vietnam veterans on his way to the post office in this historic Southern port city.

"There's the old man," they cry, and cross the street to shake his hand and ask him to pose for a snapshot. And he always does, standing ramrod straight, that jutted jaw breaking into a smile beneath those darkly furred eyebrows now streaked with white.

"I'm still the old man to them," said the general, who turned 81 on March 16. "And I get a warm feeling at the pride we share in having worn the uniform at so divisive a time in our country's history."

Westmoreland was seven years gone from Vietnam and three years retired as Army chief of staff when Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. But he knows his name and fame are inexorably linked with what commentators - galling to his ears - constantly call "the only war America ever lost."

"I could make myself miserable reflecting on what could have been, but you learn to live with the facts," the general said.

Sad at fall of Saigon

"America was NOT defeated militarily on the battlefield," Westmoreland still assures veterans he greets on the street or from the rostrum. "You know that, and the American people are beginning to realize it."

The general remembers feeling "very sad, depressed" when Saigon fell. "There's no question we could have won that war but for the restraints put on our use of military power, plus the legitimate fear that China would come in, as happened in Korea."

He is certain Vietnam's fate was sealed "when Henry Kissinger signed that cease-fire in place allowing many thousands of NVA (North Vietnamese) regulars to remain in the South. Then the Case-Church amendment made it unlawful for us to provide any assistance whatsoever when Hanoi ignored the accords. Watergate had rendered the administration impotent to rescue South Vietnam."

While South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu was rationing his troops to 85 rifle bullets and one hand grenade a month per man, Westmoreland recalls a phone call from Vietnamese friends hoping to stave off the final onslaught by purchasing weapons from arms dealers. "They had scraped up $10 million, but I disagreed with the whole idea," he says. "They didn't have the mechanism to carry it out."

South Vietnam, he sighs, "deserved a more dignified end. We just abandoned them." He quotes his idol, Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "There is no substitute for victory."

Westmoreland's career took a dizzying roller-coaster ride from the time he arrived in Vietnam in January l964, as successor to Gen. Paul Harkins.

Riding a crest of optimism, he was named Time magazine's 1965 Man of the Year for pursuing the Viet Cong into their jungle strongholds and turning the numbers around in the grim game called the body count.

Then he was an overnight guest in the White House. He was summoned to breakfast by a wakeup call from the president: "come in your bathrobe." Lyndon Johnson was in bed in his pajamas, eating off a tray and scanning three TV monitors. "I hope you don't pull a MacArthur on me," the commander in chief drawled, warning Westmoreland against going public with differences about bombing the North and attacking bases in Laos and Cambodia.

The next day, Westmoreland was addressing a joint session of Congress, with the thunderous applause continuing long after he left the chamber. The straggle of anti-war protesters in the Capitol parking lot was then only a minor irritant.

From there, the roller coaster plunged precipitously: the siege at Khe Sanh, the Tet offensive, the massacre at My Lai. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was calling him "our most disastrous general since Custer." Columbia University law Professor Telford Taylor, former chief prosecution consul at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials after World War II, said if similar standards of holding commanders responsible were applied to My Lai, Westmoreland could be tried as a war criminal.

The most vociferous condemnations came on college campuses. "I have been reviled, hung in effigy, spat upon," the general remembers with a wan shake of his head.

For him, the roller coaster hit bottom with a 1982 Mike Wallace CBS documentary accusing him of deceiving the president, Congress and the public on progress in the war by minimizing Viet Cong strength and suppressing intelligence about North Vietnamese regulars coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Suit against CBS dropped

"That was the lowest blow," said Westmoreland, who filed a $120 million libel suit. It was dropped a week before going to the jury, with CBS in a joint statement saying it never intended to impugn the general's loyalty or patriotism. Both sides claimed victory.

Says Westmoreland in retrospect, "The media is inclined to close ranks. It's the most powerful institution in this country. There's no real recourse against that power." Westmoreland didn't win a dime in court but gained enormous popularity among Vietnam veterans, who chipped in to help with his legal bills.

In the long run of 20 years Westmoreland finds some vindication for the lost cause in the thousands of boat people who fled Vietnam and in Hanoi's move away from doctrinaire communism toward a free-market economy. Reports of growing tension in the South against rule by the North reinforce his opinion:

"There's no question democracy is the wave of the future, and communism is a dead ideology. It's just a matter of time before Vietnam makes the complete break with communism. What that country needs now is a free-enterprise, democracy-oriented Ho Chi Minh to lead them."

Westmoreland doubts any Americans missing in action are still alive. "Too much time has gone by," he says. "Gosh, they'd be old men now. And what would be the communists' motivation for keeping them? We'd know by now if they were going to be used as any kind of diplomatic pawns."

At peace with himself

Unlike a growing number of veterans, the general has no urge to return to Vietnam as a tourist. "Unofficially," he has been told Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, his old adversary, "would love for me to come to Hanoi. And I would be pleased to meet him. Now, however, is not the time."

Since losing South Carolina's GOP primary for governor in 1974, Westmoreland's only venture into politics was to endorse Democrat Charles Robb over Republican Oliver North in the Virginia U.S. Senate race. "That issue of lying to Congress bothered me."

These days, he keeps fit by playing golf once a week and taking daily long walks in Charleston's historic district where he built a retirement home less than a third the size of his Saigon villa.

In peacetime, the old soldier is at peace with himself. "I did my best," he said. "I have no regrets, no apologies. I've fought three wars, lived all over the world. I've had a few successes and all kinds of disappointments. But why dwell on those unhappy phases? My personal life has been blessed: a wonderful wife, three kids all happily married and six grandchildren."

Now, he says with rising emotion, "I devote what time is left to making the public aware that our troops performed admirably in Vietnam. They fought under difficult circumstances, both on the battlefield and psychologically because of the attitude back home.

"There was nobody waving flags when they got home, no bands playing. They were an embarrassment, forgotten, even reviled, for doing what their country asked of them. My proudest moment was when we dedicated that memorial to fallen comrades on the Mall in Washington. The vets built that themselves without government funds.

"Maybe it's too late for gratitude, but they deserve the respect of the American people."