Word: westmorelands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sell anything you do, but not about Viet Nam." Except for a foolishly frisky little combat comedy called The Boys in Company C, Hollywood would not touch the war-unless you count John Wayne's 1968 Green Berets, which might as well have been produced by William Westmoreland. As Director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) put it several years ago, "I don't believe the war in Viet Nam can be treated in a 'popular film.' We have no capability to confront events of that enormity head-on." It was taboo, a secret, like a spectacular...
...course, believe Americans are an oblivious people, who have simply cruised on and learned nothing. "We have no national memory," Lillian Hellman once told Gloria Emerson. "Maybe it's a mark of a young and vigorous people. I think we've already forgotten Viet Nam." When William Westmoreland, former U.S. commander in Viet Nam, appears on campuses these days, he finds "total change. Crowds are larger, open-minded. Now there's very little criticism, and mostly from professors." Of course, the kids Westmoreland is addressing would have been only about eight years old at the time...
Apparently the most popular psy-war technique in Viet Nam was the most traditional-leafleting. General William Westmoreland was said to be so enthusiastic about the printed propaganda that he wrote some of the pieces himself, and in one typical month in 1969, the U.S. dropped 713 million leaflets over Viet Nam. At least a few pilots developed their own distribution system, dropping leaflets in tied bales to get the chore done quickly. Sometimes the system worked. One harried Viet Cong defector told Americans that his will to resist was broken one day by an astonishing incident: an enormous bundle...
Many of those gathered in the historic building had helped to make history during the past 30 years: Senator Eugene McCarthy, Lady Bird Johnson, General William Westmoreland, Judge John Sirica, Buckminster Fuller, Julia Child, Van Cliburn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. They were talking with a dozen artists who had been associated with them and other leading figures in a special way-painting or sculpturing portraits for the cover of TIME...
...cover subjects were less effusive-or perhaps just more modest. Senator McCarthy thought his portrait "captured the sort of impressionistic spirit of 1968." Judge Sirica admitted to having a framed copy of his own TIME portrait in his den ("My law clerks gave it to me"), but General Westmoreland had a different attitude. "My house is a home, not a museum," he declared. "Besides, any recognition I got was attributable to my troops, who did a magnificent job." And Lady Bird Johnson did not want to talk about her por trait at all. She graciously steered conversations to the exhibit...