WESTMORELAND, William Childs

(b. 26 March 1914 in Spartanburg, South Carolina), career military officer who was from 1964 to 1968 commander in chief of the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, the American establishment formed to help South Vietnam in its battle against Communist forces; he was instrumental in expanding the U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War.

The son of James Ripley Westmoreland, a prosperous manager of a textile plant, and Eugenia Childs, Westmoreland showed a military bearing from his earliest days. He was a serious, well-behaved boy who showed leadership qualities and excelled in extracurricular activities, becoming president of his senior class in high school, and an Eagle Scout. He particularly enjoyed the camaraderie of the Boy Scouts and took pride in wearing a uniform. A scout trip to Europe during high school stoked his desire to see the world.

That journey began, ironically, within his home state of South Carolina, at The Citadel, the prestigious military college in Charleston. Westmoreland was a good but unexceptional student who was nevertheless viewed by his fellow students and instructors as a "prototype military man" with a bright future in the armed forces. He felt at home in the discipline and regimentation of The Citadel, and planned to dedicate his life to the military. With the help of family friend, James Byrnes, a U.S. Senator from South Carolina, Westmoreland won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. There he won the Pershing Award for military proficiency and leadership and was named captain of cadets, the highest honor available to a cadet. His closest friends believed he would rise to become army chief of staff, and Westmoreland proved them right.

After graduating from West Point in 1936 with a second lieutenant's commission, Westmoreland decided to enter field artillery, the military discipline concerned with large mounted firearms. After stints in Oklahoma and Hawaii, he was posted to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was promoted to the rank of major. During World War II, he fought Rommel's forces in North Africa and landed at Normandy on D-day, leading the 9th infantry. After the war, Westmoreland's star was in ascendance, and he was rumored to be on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "rocket list" for promotion. In 1947 he married Katherine Stevens Van Deusen, the daughter of his first commanding officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. They had three children.

Westmoreland sought to make himself a well-rounded soldier, alternating his assignments between field operations and the more intellectual pursuits of high strategy and military policy. To bolster his combat skills, he enrolled in paratrooper and glider training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was chief of staff of the 82nd Airborne at Fort Benning from August 1947 to July 1950. He also served as a faculty member at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, for a year before becoming commander of the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team in Korea. By 1953 he was promoted to brigadier general and took over the army's manpower office at the Pentagon. In December 1956 he received his second star, becoming the youngest major general in the U.S. Army. Westmoreland was a soldier's officer, committed to troop morale; the men knew that "Westy," as he was called, would look out for them.

In July 1960, after two years as commander of the 101st Airborne Division "Screaming Eagles" at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Westmoreland was appointed superintendent of West Point. At forty-seven, he was the second-youngest commandant ever, after General Douglas MacArthur, who took over at just thirty-nine. It was through West Point that Westmoreland met President John F. Kennedy. The two men discovered that they shared the same goal with respect to Vietnam: increasing the military presence of the United States in South Vietnam as necessary to prevent the expansion of Communism in Southeast Asia.

The men also shared a mutual friend in General Maxwell D. Taylor, who served as Kennedy's personal military adviser, and who later became President Lyndon B. Johnson's ambassador to South Vietnam. Taylor and Westmoreland had met in Sicily in World War II. At that time, Taylor was a brigadier general, and Westmoreland an aggressive young officer known for venturing alone into enemy territory to identify potential targets. They forged a life-long friendship, and their careers advanced somewhat congruently, with Westmoreland at one point serving as secretary to the general staff when Taylor was army chief of staff.

When Kennedy came into office, he had been determined to counter Communist aggression anywhere in the world, on any terrain. He instructed Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to develop a counterinsurgency force, known as the Special Forces of "Green Berets." In 1962 and 1963 Vietnam was beginning to look like a test case for Kennedy's policy. After Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, President Johnson maintained Kennedy's policy, but accelerated the pace of events, determined to win the war. Taylor was dispatched to Vietnam as ambassador, and Westmoreland joined him in December 1963 as commander of the Eighteenth Airborne Corps. Shortly thereafter, Johnson handpicked Westmoreland to command the growing contingent of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam. The president had a simple charge: "Don't pull a MacArthur on me," a reference to MacArthur's defiance of President Harry Truman during the Korean War.

Initially, Westmoreland was a media darling. When he first arrived in Vietnam, Americans were there only in an advisory capacity, and he was a handsome man with a military bearing straight out of central casting. His favorable press coverage culminated in recognition as Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1965. Westmoreland continued to cultivate the press throughout the Vietnam conflict, organizing a daily press briefing at command headquarters peppered with kill ratios, body counts, and other statistics designed to portray the war effort in a positive light. The honeymoon would not last, however. As the conflict in Vietnam drew on, the media began to view the military-supplied statistical information as a farce, and the daily briefing became known as the "five o'clock follies."

On 2 August 1964 Johnson received reports that U.S. destroyers had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson seized the opportunity to push a resolution through Congress. This resolution, which became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, effectively gave Johnson a blank check to broaden the war effort as he saw fit, without congressional interference. In late 1964 and early 1965 the U.S. began air strikes against North Vietnam. This was the first major escalation of the conflict—but not the last. On 7 February 1965 Vietcong troops attacked the U.S. air base at Pleiku, killing eight U.S. soldiers and destroying six helicopters and a transport plane. McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to President Johnson, went to the scene for an inspection. He urged a retaliatory strike, a recommendation supported by Ambassador Taylor and Westmoreland. Within twelve hours, retaliation was ordered.

As the pressure mounted to introduce ground troops, the issue divided Taylor and Westmoreland. The two men were the senior U.S. political and military officials in Vietnam, respectively, and their counsel would be influential with President Johnson. Prior to the initial air strikes, Westmoreland advised Taylor that he did not believe the strikes would be militarily effective. He believed that the real battleground was in South Vietnam, and that ground troops would be required. Taylor was growing increasingly wary of bringing in more troops, and argued for the political benefits of striking by air. Westmoreland deferred to Taylor's political judgment, as he always had before, but he felt that a ground war was both desirable and inevitable. As early as August 1964, shortly after the Tonkin incident, he began planning the logistics necessary to accommodate an influx of combat troops.

The introduction of ground troops would have another effect; it would elevate Westmoreland to the status of commander of chief of the Military Assistance Command. He relished the chance, not merely because he had been training for it all his life, but because he was troubled by the fact that official Washington remained deeply divided by the war. The determination to send combat troops, Westmoreland believed, would settle the question, committing the United States once and for all to the job at hand. This would in turn ensure that he would have access to the means necessary to properly prosecute the war; surely, he reasoned, the politicians would not endanger the welfare of the troops.

After much internal debate, on 8 June 1965 Johnson authorized U.S. troops to engage in ground combat. Soldiers began to embark for Vietnam, and their arrival was made virtually seamless by Westmoreland's advance work on logistics—a monumental effort that remains a textbook case since studied at West Point and other military colleges. It was an auspicious beginning to the ground war. But the presence of combat troops in Vietnam did not, as Westmoreland had hoped, stop the dithering within the U.S. government over tactics and goals. Nor did it provide him with any certainty when it came to resources.

Militarily, Vietnam would prove a difficult test. It was necessary to fight the war on two fronts, employing a conventional defense against North Vietnamese units infiltrating the south, while developing a new set of tactics to hold off guerrillas (the Vietcong, or Vietnamese Communists) attacking South Vietnam from within. This would be a proving ground for the Green Berets, the counterinsurgency force developed by Kennedy and McNamara, and a chance for Westmoreland to flex his strategic muscles. Westmoreland needed a way to pin down a mobile and elusive enemy, and he and his staff developed the so-called search and destroy mission, which took the fight to the enemy. Helicopter gun ships carried troops deep into the jungle, their trails blazed by heavy bombs and Agent Orange, a defoliating chemical.

Search and destroy was effective as a tactic, but not as a strategy, as short-term successes failed to translate to long-term strategic gains. Vietcong casualties were extraordinarily high, but there seemed no end to the enemy's will. Much of the military establishment, Westmoreland included, had held as an article of faith that the Vietnamese would surrender once they had a full taste of superior troops, training, and firepower. Yet despite ever-increasing body counts, the Vietcong were as fierce and determined as ever. The American public was less cavalier about casualties, and as the military commitment mounted in terms of dollars, troop levels, and lives lost, opinion began to turn against the war. But Westmoreland would remain committed to the war in Vietnam, believing in the rightness of the cause and the prospects for victory until the bitter end—and beyond.

In late 1967, Johnson recalled Westmoreland to the United States to sell the president's rosy projections—a role that had previously fallen to McNamara, until he appeared to lose faith in the war effort. In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Westmoreland boldly declared, "I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing." He predicted victory within two years, insisting that the success of the U.S. war effort was both possible and necessary.

Just a few months later, in January 1968, came Tet, a Vietnamese religious holiday, when Communist forces launched a surprise offensive. The attacks were swift and brutal, and the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were driven from the countryside into the cities. In one fell swoop, the optimism of Johnson and Westmoreland had been shown to be a lie. The administration tried gamely to suggest it was a last-ditch offensive, but the success of President Johnson's opponents in the Democratic presidential primaries suggested that few Americans believed it. Westmoreland, who was apparently among the few true believers, requested 200,000 more additional troops. From Johnson's perspective, this would have necessitated two politically untenable actions: calling up the reserves and expanding the draft. Shocked by this confluence of events, Johnson announced on 31 March 1968 that he was abandoning the bombing campaign in North Vietnam and withdrawing from the presidential race.

With little if any credibility left, in July 1968 Westmoreland was sworn in as U.S. Army Chief of Staff and left Vietnam. He returned to Washington to assume his new position; the role he had once dreamed of as a young West Point cadet was now thrust on him as a demotion. He retired from the army after thirty-six years of service on 30 June 1972. He moved back to South Carolina and, at the urging of President Gerald R. Ford, ran for the Republican nomination for governor in 1974. He was soundly defeated in the primary.

Westmoreland has continued to insist that Vietnam was a winnable war, had Johnson not restrained the military from the full application of its capabilities. Speaking to a reporter more than twenty years after he left Vietnam, Westmoreland said: "One can make a case for the proposition that we should have never made the political commitment to the people of South Vietnam. But, having made it, we should have made good our pledge."

Westmoreland's memoirs are A Soldier Reports (1976). He has also been the subject of two full-length biographies: Ernest B. Ferguson, Westmoreland: The Inevitable General (1968), and Samuel Zaffiri, Westmoreland: A Biography of General William C. Westmoreland (1994). Westmoreland is also featured in a number of books about the Vietnam War, including Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1983); General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25 Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam (1984); and Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988).

Timothy Kringen