Word: westmorelands
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Retired Major General Joseph McChristian looked straight at the jury in a Manhattan federal courtroom last week, recalling a day in May 1967. He had brought to General William Westmoreland a carefully researched proposal to virtually double the official estimate of enemy troops in Viet Nam. "I stood in front of his desk, and I handed it to him," McChristian said. "I gave him a little bit of background on what it was. He read it. He looked up at me and he said, 'If I send that cable to Washington, it will create a political bombshell...
With that statement, McChristian, who was Westmoreland's chief of intelligence for two years, contradicted sworn testimony by the former commander of U.S. armed forces in Viet Nam. Earlier in the trial Westmoreland declared that he had sought an explanation from McChristian of how he had calculated the troop estimates, and had then disputed inclusion of civilians because, Westmoreland felt, they had a limited impact in combat. McChristian said he never learned what happened to his report, but added, "I think that for a military man to withhold a report based on political implications would be improper...
While McChristian testified, he did not look at his former boss, who sat 20 feet away. Westmoreland, the plaintiff in a $120 million libel suit against CBS News, has charged that a 1982 documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, falsely accused him of "conspiracy at the highest levels of military intelligence" to mislead President Lyndon Johnson about the success of the war of attrition against Communist insurgents. CBS contends that the documentary was true and that much of the program's evidence came from Westmoreland's colleagues...
...courtroom studded with ten television monitors, Burt tried to build his case by contrasting the documentary as it was aired with CBS's outtakes, the portions of filmed interviews that were cut from the program. For example, in the documentary, Wallace asks Westmoreland, "Was President Johnson a difficult man to feed bad news about the war?" Westmoreland's answer strongly implies that the general had a motive for being less than frank with the President: "Well, Mike, you know as well as I do that people in senior positions love good news. Politicians or leaders in countries are inclined...
...past three months, a six-man, six-woman jury in a federal courtroom in Manhattan has been listening to witnesses for General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam, tell a very different story. By painstakingly unraveling The Uncounted Enemy, Westmoreland's principal attorney, Dan Burt, is trying to convince the jury that the only public deception was by CBS, not by Westmoreland and the high command in Saigon. Last Tuesday, Westmoreland rested his case in his $120 million libel suit against the network. CBS Lawyer David Boies immediately began the arduous process of piecing the documentary...