Word: westmorelands
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...seven other major towns, breaking the Tet truce. Within 24 hours they hit 36 of 44 provincial capitals and overran almost all of the former colonial capital of Hue. Communist shock troops penetrated the heart of Saigon to attack the U.S. embassy and presidential palace. They drove General William Westmoreland into a windowless command bunker. "What the hell is going on?" Walter Cronkite wondered aloud as he prepared the evening's newscast. "I thought we were winning this...
...Marines held out for weeks after being surrounded at Khe Sanh, a redoubt in the chilly, wet South Vietnamese highlands. The heroism under heavy fire reminded many of the French troops who surrendered in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. But the Marines did not surrender. In March, Westmoreland was replaced as U.S. commander in South Viet Nam by General Creighton Abrams. President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. In the same month, whispers spread of a horrifying massacre of civilians carried out by U.S. troops at a hamlet called My Lai. In May, North Vietnamese representatives landed...
...caused dissension at home, an unlikely assortment of public figures gathered in Arlington National Cemetery to pay their final respects to a man very few Americans had ever heard of. Secretary of State William Rogers, Senator Edward Kennedy and conservative columnist Joseph Alsop were there, as were General William Westmoreland and Daniel Ellsberg, who was about to stand trial for leaking the Pentagon papers. They had come to mourn John Paul Vann, one of the nation's proconsuls in Viet Nam, who had died in a helicopter crash. "In this war without heroes," writes Neil Sheehan at the beginning...
...Vann, retired from the Army, was back in Viet Nam as a civilian "pacification officer" for the Agency for International Development. He opposed Westmoreland's attrition strategy because he believed it resulted in needless U.S. and Vietnamese casualties. The U.S., he argued, should reform the corrupt Saigon regime and woo the peasantry. Despite his role as gadfly, Vann rose through the system, ultimately becoming the top U.S. adviser for central Viet Nam and the first civilian, according to Sheehan, ever to command U.S. troops in wartime...
Libel suits are a clumsy, costly and inefficient way of getting at the truth. The defending press can be grateful not to have to pay out the millions of dollars demanded in the Westmoreland and Sharon cases (large awards were becoming fashionable), but it cannot be happy about the prolonged and critical examination of flaws in its newsgathering processes...