by Mike Wallace
Concern was not the mood I encountered at the headquarters of the U.S. combat missioninSaigon, where I was ushered into the commanding presence of General Westmoreland. With his ramrod posture and firmly set jaw, “Westy” struck me as the very model of military assurance, and that initial reaction was reinforced when I was given the opportunity to spend some time with him. Not long
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after I arrived in Saigon, I was invited to accompany the general on a daylong air tour of firebases and field briefings across the length and breadth of South Vietnam. At one of our stops, we walked through the military hospital at Cam Ranh Bay, where wounded soldiers gazed up at their commander with admiration. It was an impressive performance, in keeping with the calm and steady optimism he exuded.
Westmoreland and his top aides kept insisting over and over that although the U.S. mission had gone through some rough patches, we had finally gained the upper hand in the war. (In hindsight, my main regret is that he refrained from uttering in my presence the phrase that would later cause him so much grief, his confident boast that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.”) From my own observations and conversations I had with reporters who had spent the past several years in Vietnam—especially R. W. Apple of The New York Times and William Touhy of the Los Angeles Times—I came to the sad conclusion that our troops were bogged downina quagmire. By the time I returned to the States that spring, I was more convinced than ever that our intervention in Vietnam had been a terrible mistake, a tragic waste of lives and resources.
Inspite of my disillusion, my reporting onVietnam was evenhanded (as, of course, it should have been), so Westmoreland had no reasonto believe that I had turned against the war. If he had been privy to my personal feelings, he probably would not have written the letter he sent me in 1972 after 60 Minutes aired anupdate of a story I had done a few years earlier on three wounded veterans who had beenshipped home from Vietnam without their legs. “Dear Mike,”
the general wrote in response to that broadcast, “I just want to tell you that it was a first-class piece of reporting. I have never seen better.” I wrote back to thank him, and that was the last contact I had with
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Westmoreland until May 1981, when I interviewed him for the documentary that brought our cordial relationship to a shattering end.
The catalyst who brought the two of us together for what proved to be a momentous encounter was the producer of the documentary, George Crile. A former editor at Harper’s magazine, Crile had been hired in 1976 to produce broadcasts for the documentary unit we called CBS Reports. Over the next five years, he put together a number of excellent, award-winning documentaries. I was well aware of his sterling reputation when he came to me one day in early 1981 and proposed that we work together on a new project he was developing for CBS Reports.
Crile said he was pursuing a story about an elaborate deception that had been carried out by senior officers in Vietnam over a period of several months in 1967. According to the primary source, a former CIA analyst in Vietnam, General Westmoreland’s intelligence apparatus had deliberately underreported the size and strength of enemy forces in South Vietnam. The motive was to give credence to all the optimistic claims that the U.S. military was in control of the war and moving toward an inevitable and decisive victory. But as a result of those doctored estimates, U.S. troops in the field, political leaders in Washington, and the American people were unprepared for the scope and intensity of the Tet offensive the enemy launched in January 1968, a full-scale assault that had a devastating impact on the course of the war.
Although I was fascinated by what Crile told me, I felt I had to decline the offer. I explained that because of my 60 Minutes obliga-tions, there was no way I could find time to get involved in such an ambitious undertaking. Crile persisted, assuring me that he would do all the time-consuming spadework and even most of the interviews.
He went on to say that, given the documentary’s explosive nature, the
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main correspondent had to be a seasoned reporter who had clout and authority, especially when it came to interviewing. Elaborating on that point, Crile said that much of the broadcast would be structured around interviews with Westmoreland and other high-ranking officials; Crile needed a correspondent who wouldn’t hesitate to press them for answers to tough and challenging questions. I found his argument persuasive, so I changed my mind and told Crile he could count on me, as long as he understood that my work for 60 Minutes had to remain my top priority.
Over the next several months, Crile diligently tracked down the information he needed to build his case, and true to his word, he kept my participation to a minimum. He did check in from time to time to let me know how he was progressing, and the more he told me, the more I came to realize how damaging the evidence was about the military intelligence operation in Saigon. Among the more startling revelations were those made by some of Westmoreland’s own top deputies, who acknowledged—for the first time in public—that there had been a conspiracy to “cook the books” and prevent the full strength of enemy forces from being disclosed in intelligence reports.
No indictment was more damning than one made by General Joseph McChristian, who had been the chief intelligence officer in Saigon.
He told Crile that when he had submitted accurate estimates of enemy troop strength, they were suppressed by Westmoreland. He described that and similar decisions to provide misleading numbers as
“falsification of the facts.” Crile then asked if such deceptions violated any statutes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and McChristian replied, “Not that I’m aware of. But there’s something on a ring that I wear from West Point that the motto is: ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’ It’s dishonorable.”
That was the kind of stuff I had in my arsenal of notes when the
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time came for my interview with Westmoreland. Although Crile had sent a letter spelling out the topics I’d be focusing on, Westy greeted me warmly and evinced no sense of foreboding. He seemed to regard me as a kindred spirit, and I could understand that. During my brief assignment in Vietnam, I had always treated him with the utmost respect, even after I became highly skeptical of the war and his assessment of it. But once our interview began, it did not take long for his mood to darken.
I brought up the critical moment in the spring of 1967 when General McChristian and his chief deputy, Colonel Gains Hawkins, came across information that enemy forces were much larger than previous intelligence reports had indicated. They presented that new information to Westmoreland along with a proposal that the official reports be revised to reflect the dramatic increase in the estimates of enemy strength. Westmoreland refused to accept their recommendation, and when I asked him why, he replied, “I didn’t accept it because of political reasons.”
“What’s the political reason?” I asked. “Why would it have been a political bombshell?”
“Because the people in Washington were not sophisticated enough to understand and evaluate this thing, and neither was the media.”
This was a stunning admission that cut straight to the heart of the matter. By the spring of 1967, both Westmoreland and his commander in chief, Lyndon Johnson, knew that neither Congress nor the American public would tolerate another major escalation in Vietnam, especially one on a scale necessary to defeat an enemy nearly twice as large as previous intelligence estimates had indicated. They also knew that such an escalation would have fanned the flames of the growing antiwar movement and touched off a fresh round of critical blasts from an increasingly hostile press. Those concerns were
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the main “political reasons” why
Westmoreland chose to reject the new and more accurate intelligence figures.
The official military term for the estimates of enemy troop strength is “order of battle,” and later in our interview, I asked Westmoreland about a decision in the summer of 1967 to drop an entire category of the Vietcong army—the self-defense militia—from the order of battle. He was, by then, acutely irritated with the whole tenor of our discussion, so instead of answering my question, the general decided that the time had come to put me in my place with a verbal reprimand. “This is a nonissue, Mike,” he snapped. “I made the decision. I don’t regret making it. I stand by it. And the facts prove that I was right. Now, let’s stop it!”
“All right, sir,” I said, and paused briefly to give him a chance to simmer down. But I had no intention of obeying his command. Instead, I rephrased the question in a more direct and detailed way.
W A L L A C E : Isn’t it a possibility that the real reason for suddenly deciding in the summer of 1967 to remove an entire category of the enemy from the order of battle—a category that had been in the order of battle since 1961—was based on political considerations?
W E S T M O R E L A N D : No, decidedly not. That—
W A L L A C E : Didn’t you make this clear in your August twentieth cable?
W E S T M O R E L A N D : No, no. Yeah. No.
W A L L A C E : I have a copy of your August twentieth cable—
W E S T M O R E L A N D : Well, sure. Okay, okay . . .
I then quoted from the cable in question: “We have been project-ing an image of success over the recent months. The self-defense
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militia must be removed or the newsmen will immediately seize on the point that the enemy force has increased. . . . No explan ation could then prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion.” Confronted with that solid evidence, Westmoreland had no choice but to admit that the major reason for the decision was, in effect, to conceal the true strength of the enemy forces from the media and their readers and viewers back in the States.
But time was running out for the U.S. command in Saigon. Just five months after that deception was put into effect, the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive, and we all learned, to our dismay, that the enemy we were up against in Vietnam was much larger and stronger than we had been led to believe.
Crile went on to explore other aspects of the story during the late spring and summer of 1981, and I conducted a few more interviews that were included in our report. When the editing was completed in the fall, everyone who screened the final cut agreed that it was a very strong documentary, and one bound to provoke some controversy, eventhough our focus was onevents that had occurred fourteenyears earlier during a war that Americans had not fought in since 1972.
“The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception” aired on January 23, 1982, and three days later, General Westmoreland held a news conference at which he denounced the documentary as “a preposterous hoax” and accused me of subjecting him to a “star-chamber” in-quisition. In spite of the general’s objections and a few other grumbles of dissatisfaction, the initial press reaction was overwhelm-ingly favorable, and the kudos did not come from just the usual suspects, the so-called liberal media. Among those who praised our report was the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, who had long been a staunch defender of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
But four months after we broadcast “The Uncounted Enemy,” TV
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Guide published a strident attack on the program, and that was when the real controversy began.
The magazine article, coauthored by Don Kowet and Sally Bedell, certainly had an eye-catching title: “Anatomy of a Smear—How CBS Broke the Rules and ‘Got’ Gen. Westmoreland.” The problem was that the text did not live up to the sensationalistic come-on. All the criticisms made in the piece dealt with Crile’s reporting and editing procedures, and while a couple of those complaints had some merit, the others were either specious or irrelevant. Far more significant was the fact that Kowet and Bedell stopped short of challenging the substance of the broadcast, the solid evidence we presented to back up our allegations about the deception in Vietnam. After all their huffing and puffing about process, they ended the article with the following conclusion: “We do not know whether Crile and his colleagues were right about General Westmoreland and his military intelligence operation.” At which point, a dispassionate reader might rise to inquire, “Well, if you’re not prepared to refute the CBS
charges against the general, then where is the ‘smear’?”
Unfortunately, that was not the position the new president of CBS News, Van Gordon Sauter, chose to adopt. Rather than taking the criticisms in stride and pointing out that the substance of the documentary was in no way discredited by the article, Sauter announced, with considerable fanfare, that he had ordered an in-house investigation of the magazine’s allegations. Crile and I were not happy about that decision, and we made no attempt to conceal our displeasure.
Crile, in particular, had more to worry about than the internal report Sauter had ordered. Throughout the spring and early summer of
’82, pressures were building within CBS News to isolate him as the culprit in the controversy. In fact, rumors began to spread that he was
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on the verge of being fired. When I got wind of them, I forcefully passed the word to Sauter (through intermediaries) that if Crile was sacked, I would have no choice but to resign. I pointed out that I was inextricably linked to the broadcast, and if Crile was guilty of the kind of grievous errors that warranted dismissal, then so was I. After all, I noted, the headline accusation in the TV Guide piece was that we had “smeared” General Westmoreland, and I was the one who had interviewed him.
Beyond that, there was a moral principle at stake that went to the heart of broadcast journalism. I strongly believe that a correspondent must bear major responsibility for what he reports on the air. This is especially true when the story in question is the kind of investigative piece that is apt to stir up controversy. After all, we reporters rarely hesitate to accept the plaudits that come our way when a story is well received, even though much of the time, it’s our off-camera producers who deserve most of the credit. So it seems to me we should shoulder our share of the blame when things go wrong.
Getting back to the summer of 1982, the in-house probe of the allegations leveled against “The Uncounted Enemy” was completed in July, two months after the TV Guide piece was published, and its findings only exacerbated the tensions within CBS News.
On one side of the dispute were colleagues who embraced the internal report in all its particulars, and on the other side were those who agreed with Crile and me that it was seriously flawed. Our faction believed that, among other misjudgments, the report gave far too much credence and legitimacy to charges in the article that, in our view, were too trivial or extraneous to warrant a serious response.
So the arguments raged on within our shop, and that discord put
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Van Gordon Sauter in a bind of his own making. Because he had made such a big public brouhaha about the internal investigation, there was no way he could keep the conclusions under wraps. He had to acknowledge them, and he did. However, in the statement he released to the press about the official CBS report on the documentary, he also cited the various in-house objections to its findings.
More than anything else, Sauter’s attempt to reconcile the opposing views was an exercise in equivocation, and as such, it resolved nothing and satisfied no one. That point was clearly grasped by Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post. In his column about the ambiguous tenor of Sauter’s statement, Shales wrote that
“instead of d
ispelling the cloud that had formed over the program, CBS News all but seeded it for rain.” And the cloudburst was not long in coming.
Ever since we broadcast our documentary, General Westmoreland had explored the prospect of a libel suit against CBS. The first few lawyers he contacted discouraged him from taking that legal action. All of them stressed how difficult it was for a public figure like the general to build a case for libel, and their judgments may also have been influenced by the initial public reaction to the program, which ran strongly in our favor. But the publication of “Anatomy of a Smear” in May—and CBS’s ill-advised reaction to it—ignited a storm of controversy that raged across most of the summer. By the early fall of 1982, the climate of public opinion had undergone a significant change. By then many Americans had come to believe that we had indeed perpetrated a “smear” in order to “get” General Westmoreland, and that was enough to persuade a Washington lawyer named Dan Burt to represent Westmoreland in a $120 million libel suit against CBS.
Burt was the president of the Capital Legal Foundation, a con-
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servative public-interest firm, and in taking on the case, he was no doubt driven by a political agenda. Perhaps the same could be said about our esteemed defender, David Boies, a partner in the New York firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. (This was the same David Boies who later fought so vigorously on behalf of Al Gore and the Democrats in the epic recount battle that took place in Florida during the weeks after the 2000 presidential election.) For the next two years, Burt and Boies were pitted against each other in the elaborate pretrial maneuvers, a kind of bloodless trench warfare fought with depositions and sundry legal strategies (a discovery motion here, a change-of-venue motion there) as well as in the media, where (ironically) Burt had the upper hand. He was adept at public relations, and he saw to it that in one forum after another, Westmoreland was portrayed as a maligned hero. Burt was so confident his PR manipula-tions would lead to legal victory that in an interview with USA Today in the spring of 1983, he proclaimed that “we are about to see the dis-mantling of a major news network.”