WASHINGTON — When General William Westmoreland died this week
in Charleston, South Carolina, the press erupted with
reminiscences, mostly about him and the Vietnam War, mostly
permeated with the myths of the Kultursmog, the
politically polluted culture of our elites, our liberal elites.
After Vietnam the general spent the rest of his life refighting the
war. He never learned that it was a war we could not win. He was a
failure. Those are three of the foul thoughts that pollute the
liberals’ culture and were repeated in many of his obituaries.
I knew Westmoreland later in life, not as a general but as a
private citizen. For years he served on the board of The
American Spectator. He was interested in journalism. He felt
many American journalists did a pretty shabby job in covering the
military. When a CBS News documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A
Vietnam Deception,” claimed in 1982 that he, as the commanding
officer in Vietnam, had engaged in a “conspiracy” to “suppress”
unfavorable intelligence and dupe America into believing we were
winning the war, Westmoreland sued. CBS, after four painful months,
admitted to grievous error and settled out of court. The general
felt vindicated, but I doubt he ever felt fully satisfied. Somehow
he could not accept that American journalists would get the facts
so wrong and apply the paranoid scheme of a “conspiracy” to his
generalship.
The old general I knew at American Spectator board
meetings and other events was as incapable of conspiracy as he was
incapable of bad manners. He was a thorough gentleman. Far from
being consumed by Vietnam he never mentioned it unless one of his
fellow board members brought it up. Nor did he talk much about
military matters or his own illustrious military service. He had
breezed through the Citadel and West Point, where in his last year
he received the Pershing Sword for achieving the highest command
position in the student body. He went on to fight valiantly through
World War II in Europe. In Korea he commanded paratroopers and late
in his career insisted on leaping out of airplanes. I once asked
him why as a relatively old man he attempted such derring-do. If
his young troopers could do it, he told me, he wanted to also. And
I remember his smile in answering my question.
He was a perfect gentleman, but he was also a can-do kind of
guy. Most of our soldiers are. Westmoreland was also a fount of
good sense. There was a serene quality to him, and far from being
preoccupied with anything from Vietnam to politics he always struck
me as level-headed and sagacious. At the magazine we have always
prided ourselves in developing younger generations of clear-headed
journalists, and that seemed to be an interest of his. With regard
to the Vietnam War he thought many of the journalists had gotten it
wrong, but I could only get that judgment out of him when I brought
the matter up. The war was never a military defeat, he believed. It
was a political defeat. The politicians did not have the stomach
for victory. What burned them most badly was the 1968 Tet
Offensive, during which the North Vietnamese launched a massive
assault that temporarily put them in control of critical parts of
the country. Westmoreland instantly counterattacked, vanquishing
the enemy and leaving 40,000 dead to the one thousand we lost. In
military terms it was equivalent to General Andrew Jackson’s
victory over the British at New Orleans, but the journalists
reported it as a defeat and so it was recorded for years.
Actually now historians are noting that in military terms Tet
was the Communists’ defeat. Our armies never lost in Vietnam, and
Vietnam only fell after our armies had been withdrawn and our
politicians reneged on their promise to resupply the South
Vietnamese and bomb the North Vietnamese in the event of further
aggression against the South. In the end the Vietnam War was very
useful to the defense of American interests. Westmoreland’s forces
held off Communist designs on the Pacific rim, showed Moscow and
Beijing that continued aggression would be costly, and demonstrated
the superiority of American military hardware and tactics, a
demonstration that did not escape the Communists’ notice,
particularly in Moscow. Vietnam was the last time the Communists
mounted such an assault.
Yet back home the liberal politicians and their intelligentsia
were whipped. They never again regained their resolve. Even today
after the American military’s demonstration of its effectiveness in
Afghanistan and Iraq, these bearers of the Kultursmog are
revealing their defeatist nature. In Vietnam they demanded that we
negotiate with Hanoi. Today the Taliban and the insurgents in Iraq
offer no such opportunities to negotiate. Nonetheless the liberals
are increasingly calling for withdrawal before our interests are
realized. One wonders. Can they screw things up as nicely as they
screwed up Vietnam?
