Word: westmorelands
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...first mistake, however, seems to have been General William Westmoreland's. As commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam in 1967, he created Task Force Oregon, a pastiche of units, to relieve Marines in I Corps. Several months later the task force received a new commander, Major General Samuel W. Roster (later demoted because of My Lai), and was incarnated as the Americal Division,* composed of the 196th, 198th and 11th Light Infantry Brigades and others. The union was unfortunate...
...something more impressive than that. "What the hell is going on?" CBS Correspondent Walter Cronkite fairly shouted when he first saw footage of the raid. "I though we were winning the war." So did many of his countrymen, who had taken at face value General William Westmoreland's expansive claim, a few weeks before Tet, that "with 1968 a new phase is starting. We have reached the important point when the end begins to come in view...
Indeed it did, although not in the way that Westmoreland meant. As Washington Post Reporter Don Oberdorfer notes in this skillful analysis of the Tet offensive and its aftermath, "The North Vietnamese lost a battle. The United States lost something even more important -the confidence of its people at home...
...hopes of creating a general uprising that never happened; the Communist assaults on Saigon and Hue were bloodily repulsed. But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers were able to strike at will all over the country and penetrated Allied lines with ease. This was dramatic evidence that Westmoreland's "success offensive" and his claim of imminent victory had been greatly oversold. The impact of Tet in the press and on TV screens directly challenged the comfortable words from Saigon and Washington...
...round the walls of the gallery: Arlene Francis blindfolded. A masked Lone Ranger. Premier Kosygin. Indistinguishable beauty contest winners. Teddy Kennedy delivering his Chappaquiddick apologia. Truth or Consequences. David Susskind. Moon shots. Spiro Agnew cooking linguini with Dinah Shore. Mr. Ed. Fulton Sheen. A sportscast logo. Truman Capote. General Westmoreland with Ed Sullivan. Perry Como. U Thant, Joe Namath, and so on, for a total of 1,000 slides that are continuously seen on the walls from museum opening to closing. Simultaneously, four TV sets in the corners of the gallery carry live local channels to relate...