Word: westmorelands
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Virtually from the moment it was broadcast on Jan. 23, the CBS documentary The Uncounted Enemy: A Viet Nam Deception came under attack. The prime-time program, which featured a memorable heated interview between CBS News Correspondent Mike Wallace and retired U.S. Army General William Westmoreland, had as a central thesis the charge that in 1967 Westmoreland led a top-level military conspiracy to sustain public support for the war in Viet Nam by giving the White House gross underestimates of the size of enemy forces. Three days after the show was aired, General Westmoreland angrily denied the allegations. Other...
...General Westmoreland," which questioned CBS'S evidence for claiming a conspiracy and challenged the network's reportorial procedures and the integrity of its editing...
...also appeared on air as a principal witness for the conspiracy theory. Crile and Adams had teamed to publish a story in Harper's magazine in 1975 along similar lines. Their CBS documentary, as Sauter's memorandum in effect conceded, let every "judgment call" go against Westmoreland. Whether by accident or design, admitted Sauter, "in two cases, journalistic oversight resulted in material relating to one set of events being connected to another [unrelated] set of events." Moreover, in violation of net work guidelines, the show's creators were guilty of "combining answers from sever al questions...
Such distortions, unsettling enough in the abstract, in practical terms undermined Crile and Adams' often substantial case. In one instance of sleight of hand, Westmoreland was shown apparently acknowledging awareness of a meeting at the Pentagon in Washington at which military officers allegedly pared down enemy troop estimates to stay be low a ceiling of 300,000. But Westmoreland's remarks were directed to an entirely different meeting that took place in Saigon. For his part, the general has claimed that he was sandbagged by Wal lace and Crile, that he was not informed in detail about what...
...Says Westmoreland of the Sauter report...