The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  It was at this point that Taylor voiced the first of a series of objections. On February 22 he cabled back to Rusk, his reservations beginning:

  As I analyze the pros and cons of placing any considerable number of Marines in areas beyond those presently assigned I develop grave reservations as to wisdom and necessity of so doing. Such action would be step in reversing long-standing policy of avoiding commitment of ground combat forces in South Vietnam. Once this policy is breached, it will be very difficult to hold the line. If Da Nang needs better protection, so do Bien Hoa, Tan Son Nhut, Nha Trang . . .

  Then, he noted, the sending of U.S. troops would almost surely see a decrease in responsibility on the part of the Vietnamese and encourage the instinct to let the Americans carry even more. It would not, he thought, release many ARVN troops for other duties. In addition, he was uneasy about the political problems of the war:

  White-faced soldier, armed, equipped and trained as he is, not suitable guerrilla fighter for Asian forests and jungles. French tried to adapt their forces to this mission and failed; I doubt that U.S. forces could do much better . . . Finally there would be ever present question of how foreign soldier would distinguish between a VC and a friendly Vietnamese farmer. When I view this array of difficulties I am convinced that we should adhere to our past policy of keeping our ground forces out of direct counterinsurgency roles.

  Having outlined all objections as strongly as he could, Taylor then deferred to the commander. Westmoreland was, after all, responsible for the base, and his concern, Taylor said, was “understandable.” With these warnings against the inherent dangers, Taylor agreed to the most limited use of a one-battalion landing team limited force. He was the first to see the concomitant problems; one reason that he did was that unlike the civilians, he understood how the military played the game; if you opened the door slightly, the crack would slowly and quietly but inevitably become wider; and he knew also the degree of planning that was going on in Saigon. Once Westmoreland went for troops, it would not be just Westmoreland, it would be CINCPAC and the JCS as well, and it would be very hard to hold the line. He was absolutely correct; at the same time that he was expressing doubts, CINCPAC was signing on enthusiastically to the idea of the Marines going to Danang, implying that Admiral Sharp would not be responsible for the damage if they were not sent, and showing good old-fashioned American ignorance of the complexity of the war, by belittling Taylor’s doubts about the capacity of the Marines to fight in a war like this (“the Marines have a distinguished record in counter-guerrilla warfare”). Under pressure like this, and being asked really for very little, Washington, with almost no debate, on February 26 approved two Marine battalion landing teams for Danang (there was a last-minute attempt by John McNaughton to send the 173rd Airborne from Okinawa to Danang, apparently because the sending of the 173rd would seem a less permanent commitment, and because the Marines had a history of being occupying forces in small banana republics and thus there was less stigma attached to the Airborne. For reasons of their own, largely logistical, the military quickly blocked McNaughton).

  On March 8, 1965, the first of two Marine battalions started coming ashore at Danang, and though the Vietnamese government had asked that it be done as quietly and inconspicuously as possible, they had waded ashore in full combat dress and had been garlanded with flowers by young Vietnamese girls. They were to protect American facilities, secure the airfield, and as far as engaging the enemy was concerned, all public statements emphasized that they would not engage in day-to-day actions against the Vietcong. But the foot was now in the door, and in a subtle sense the balance of power within the U.S. mission in Saigon had begun to change. Westmoreland was now a new and more powerful figure than Taylor, he had taken the initiative; Taylor was on the defensive, from now on his cables and arguments would be attempts to limit the use of force. And at the same time Westmoreland would become the most important new player. The commander.

  It was a role Westy was ready and prepared for, born to, eager for. His biographer, Ernest Furgurson, would title his book Westmoreland: The Inevitable General. Surely he looked like a general, the jaw jutted out, the features were forceful and handsome, there was no extra poundage; he played tennis in ferociously hot weather to sweat the weight off because he thought a general should look like a general, that troops commanded by a fat sloppy general would give fat sloppy performances. The face was strong and sharp, and finally clean, Westy was something clean. It was not surprising that as the war dragged on and became messier and messier, the Administration and the prowar media turned more and more to Westmoreland as a symbol of the U.S. presence, something clean in a very messy war. It was, in fact, hard to imagine him as anything else, and later it became something of a joke that Westy could never have been anything but a general. “Well, what about as a brand-new baby?” someone suggested. “No,” said another friend of his, “can’t you see it? The doctor arrives with a spanking new naked baby and he holds the baby out to the proud parents. 'Mr. and Mrs. Westmoreland, I’d like you to meet your son . . . General Westmoreland.’ ”

  Everyone had always thought he would be a general; he had loved uniforms as a young boy, had looked good in them, had been an Eagle Scout, a reputation which had stayed with him during all his Army career, when he always seemed a little straighter, a little more clean-cut than the other officers. Even when he was a cadet, he and his roommates had sat around discussing when he should get married, if he should marry right after graduation or wait, serve for ten years, advance high in rank, and then get married. Wouldn’t too early a marriage slow him down on his way to being a general and Chief of Staff of the Army? They had in fact talked long and frequently of his career in those days and they had all decided that Westmoreland would be Chief of Staff of the Army, a job about which they knew nothing except that it was the top job, and thus Westy should have it. And so Westmoreland’s friend and classmate Chester V. Clifton, who later became military aide to Kennedy, would refer to Westmoreland in cadet days as Chief, making it a nickname. They did of course have to disguise it, because when people asked why they called him Chief it would be embarrassing to say that he was to be Chief of Staff, so Clifton, when questioned by superiors, said that it was because Westmoreland had some Indian blood.

  He was the organization general, superb at managing; it would later be said of him that his logistical build-up in those early months of Vietnam was an act of pure brilliance (no one had gone without a hot breakfast in those difficult days) and that it would be long studied at West Point and other military schools for its textbook excellence. When he was a general and he took a special course at the Harvard Business School he made an unusually good impression on his corporate business contemporaries, better than the generals usually made, and several tried to lure him away from the military for their companies (indeed as the business school made a better impression on him than it did on most generals, so too Westmoreland enthusiastically recommended it to some of his Army contemporaries, who, accepting his advice, went there and were completely bored). His business school classmates had the feeling that he would have gone right up in corporate life, risen to the top at Chase Manhattan; if later there were other generals who had some reservations about him, about his aloofness, his lack of feel for the country and the war, he nonetheless never failed to impress civilian visitors. The higher they were in corporations or institutions, the more effective he was with them; they seemed to understand how his mind worked, each had a natural appreciation of the other’s positions and problems.

  He was aloof, reserved, a decent man with a high moral tone in the American sense (he would not, as an aide noted, fire a man for incompetence but he would fire one for the suggestion of immorality); one had a sense of Westy’s moral tone, and a sense that he was aware of it too. He was a reserved man with few close friends, terrible at small talk, totally committed to his work, his job of being an inspiring commander. He was in fact inspirational-looking, inspirational-acting and inspi
rational-sounding, and yet, curiously, in Vietnam there was no Westy cult (as later there would be an Abe Abrams cult, a kind of anticult; Abrams gruff, rough, patterning himself after a sort of latter-day U. S. Grant. Abrams came in when the war was very old and tried to hold it down under limited post-Tet resources, and suddenly he got all the good publicity when Westmoreland was getting all the bad publicity and somehow being blamed for Tet. Westmoreland was deeply depressed about it and wanted to make a public statement saying that the gains which were being made under Abrams had been originated during his tour, and friends had to take him aside and tell him that the last thing a very troubled United States Army could stand at that particular moment was a public split between Westmoreland and Abrams).

  Westmoreland had trained and studied and prepared for an entire career for this command, but he would, like so many others, be a victim of his own war; in another time, a simpler war, he would have been the ideal general, decent, intelligent but not brilliant, hard-working, courageous, respectful of civilian authority, liked by the men who served under him, ideally trained to fight a great, well-organized war on the plains of Germany. Perhaps his name would have ranked with that of Eisenhower, Bradley, Ridgway, the best of our professional soldiers. But this war would stain him as it stained everything else. As many of his countrymen came to doubt the war, they would come to doubt him; as so many of the civilians who had helped plan the war bailed out on it, thinking it unwinnable and not worth the cost, Westmoreland, his name somehow attached to it more than anything else in his career, the men he commanded still serving there, could not let go, and public antagonism would center on him. Even the men who had once praised his sense of duty, his caution, his decency, turned cool. “A blunt instrument,” Bill Bundy would say of him in private.

  He was dedicated, and unbelievably hard-working; if sheer attention to detail, long hours of work and right attitudes could have done it, then he would have come home a success, his country proud, an acceptable figure at college campuses as well as American Legion halls. If going by the book could have done it, he would have been a success too, for he was a stickler for the book; it had brought him far. Instead he came home to a country torn apart by the war, and he himself was one more symbol of that division, a painful and bitter reward for a lifetime of service. He was of course always aware of his role as a symbol (he could at times breakfast in his underwear in order to keep his fatigues pressed) and he had an almost mystical sense of himself as a symbol of the mission, keeping morale up, letting the troops know that he, Westmoreland, was with them, it was really slightly MacArthur-like; if no one else was aware of them, cared about them, then he, General Westmoreland, did. He knew what he looked like and that it was an asset to his job: the cap was tilted at just the right angle, the step was always double time. Once when Westy was out driving his own jeep in the boondocks, he saw two nurses in the distance. He stopped the jeep, double-timed over to them, introduced himself, “I’m General Westmoreland,” shook hands, had his picture taken with each nurse, double-timed back to the jeep, telling friends that it was good for their morale, adding that he must be the most photographed man in the world because every man in Vietnam had a camera and they had all taken his picture.

  The impression he made was a very good one, particularly on civilians. There was nothing of the braggart in him; his estimates on the war were, if anything, a good deal more restrained than many of his civilian superiors. He did not seem like a man who enjoyed killing, there was no stench of death around him, he seemed more like what you would want a citizen army to produce in a great democracy, an intelligent, reasonable, dedicated man. It was the war which was unreasonable yet it was in his tour of command that events like My Lai took place; it was his command and the McNamara command which had produced things like the body count, in a war which turned so much American might loose at an enemy sheltered so often in the population. When Neil Sheehan traveled with Westmoreland on his plane in the summer of 1966 he asked if Westmoreland was not worried by the enormity of civilian casualties which the bombing and shelling were causing in the South. “Yes,” said Westmoreland, “but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?” It was a significant comment; it meant that for all the Army’s distaste for the war, the fire power loosed on both enemy and population, the American command was aware of what it was doing and sanctioned it; messy, yes, but the only way to separate the Vietcong from his strategic base. MACV knew about it, it didn’t want to know too much, it would look the other way if possible, but it knew it was all going on out there.

  He looked so good, and his presentations were always very good, yet for all of this there was something a little wooden about him. He was a fine physical specimen, and yet he was not a particularly good tennis player, not that good an athlete. No rhythm. There was a sense that his presentations were a little better than his true grasp, as if somehow it had all been memorized just before he walked into the room. He articulated the war well, or at least he seemed to, having been taught by some of the best phrase makers in the business to articulate it, that you had to win the people, that this war was different from all other wars, that it was political, but there was a feeling that he spoke the war better than he felt it, that in a war where so much of it was a sense of nuance and feel, he was particularly without feel. He could say that control of the population was important and that the Vietcong were linked to the people, and yet there was a sense that he did not really understand the root of the war. He believed that if you knocked off the enemy’s main battalions, destroyed them, then that would do it, and he never really understood that the enemy’s great strength was his political strength, that the main-force units were the visible part of the iceberg, and that above all he had a capacity to replenish, that if a battalion was destroyed it would be painful but they could replace it. A dangerous enemy to choose to fight a war of attrition against.

  He liked the Vietnamese and was genuinely committed to their cause, but there was never a real sense or feeling for their frailties, fallibilities, their corruption, their loss of innocence (had they ever been innocent?). He was, finally, too American, too successful in the American and Western sense, too much a sterling product of a success-oriented country to feel the rhythms and nuances of this particularly failed society; he was the finest product of an uncorrupted country where doing good was always rewarded, one worked hard, played by the rules, went by the book, and succeeded. Success. Theirs was a corrupted, cynical society where the bribe, the lie, the decadence had become a way of life, where Vietnamese officers lied frequently and readily to their American counterparts, thinking this was what the Americans wanted, surprised later that the Americans should feel even a minor betrayal in this. Westy gleaming in his decency, the Vietnamese never quite comprehending it. Westy at the Cercle Sportif, playing his last tennis game, at the end lining up the little Vietnamese urchins who had served as ball boys, street-tough from some of the meanest streets in the world, unlikely candidates for Eagle Scouts, learning the black-market rate before they learned arithmetic, knowing even before they reached their teens the full glory of East-West decadence. Westy lining them up as if in company formation, telling an American who had played with him to translate. “You have been my ball boys.” Nods of their heads. “You have served well. You have been faithful.” More nods of heads. “I would like to reward you.” Nods. Expectant smiles. The tip. “Here is your reward. You may have all my tennis balls.” Looks of immense disappointment.

  It was typical. The Americans, particularly the military, were so straight and Westy was the classic example; he was so American, like all Americans in Vietnam he wanted the Vietnamese to be Americans, he saw them in American terms, he could never seem to see them as themselves. He was not really at ease with them, though he wanted to be, and a friend would remember one of Westy’s first field trips when he was still deputy commander, a trip to Chau Doc province, which seemed to sum up Westmoreland’s frustration and inability to penetrate the society:
Westy having lunch with the very sophisticated province chief, who spoke classic Sorbonne French and no English and who had laid on a great feast. Midway through the meal, about the third serving of rice, it became clear that Westmoreland had nothing to say to this man, that he wanted almost desperately to talk with him, but there was no common bond, no real curiosity about the society. Finally the conversation going like this—Westy: “I notice in your country your people eat a good deal of rice.” Translated. Province chief: “Oui, oui.” Westy: “In my country, our people eat a good deal of bread.” Translated. Province chief a little puzzled and a little worried. “Oui, oui.” Westy: “In my country, we call bread 'the staff of life.’ ” Translated. Province chief nods, very puzzled and very worried—is this American general about to spring a trap, is he subtly edging the conversation toward the subject of corruption? Is he suggesting that the province chief is allowing the landlords to tax the peasants working the paddies too heavily? Westy: “I guess in your country your people could say that rice is the staff of life.” Translated. Province chief heaves a sigh of relief. Agrees readily. Westy: a supremely conventional man in a supremely unconventional war.

  He was a general who obeyed his orders; Johnson had chosen him in part because he had sensed in Westmoreland a man who would not play games or try to circumvent him, and in that sense he had chosen well. (Johnson subsequently did not worry too much about Westmoreland turning on him; he knew that Westy was straight, and more, that he was extremely ambitious. When an aide once mentioned the possibility that Westy might go public with the war, Johnson quickly deflected it. “No, he won’t,” the President said, “because I’m the one person who has what he wants.” By that he meant future promotion. Then the President suddenly added, “It’s the same with Hubert.” Johnson, the aide thought, was always more at ease with ambitious men, he could understand them, know their price; it was men with a sharp limit on their ambitions who were a problem for him.) The general was very honest, he shunned a political role. He never protected himself in his cables, and he tried to do the job the civilians set for him; his greatest failing was in believing it could be done. He was never aware of just how much doubt there was about the war in Washington among the civilians; everyone seemed to have signed on, and thus to Westmoreland there was a sense of a clear mandate, he was not aware of the extent of misgivings, signature by signature. When he finally came back and spoke to the Congress, he did it at the request of his Commander in Chief. It was something he was not that eager for, and he had turned down a similar but somewhat vaguer request from McNamara a year earlier (he had written his speech for the Congress himself, and when a civilian friend looked at the opening paragraph he suggested that he change it, since it began “I stand here today where General MacArthur stood . . .” Typically, of course, there was no element of chance even to that speech: Pentagon janitors checking the building very early in the morning of his address were stunned to find the main auditorium absolutely empty except for one man, General William Childs Westmoreland, booming away, loudspeakers all go, his forthcoming speech blaring out. Time after time). He had played by the rules even when they had all turned away from the war, and he did not go public with complaints, though he had them. Johnson had chosen well in that sense; whatever hurts there were, were private ones. He would not feed the right wing, the jingoists, although occasionally some of the hurt showed through in talking about the civilians. Bob McNamara was someone who told him not to worry about resources, we were the richest country in the world. So it had not ended for him as auspiciously as it had begun. After Tet even Rostow, the last believer, was heard around the White House to have a change in tone. Rostow, who had been so proud of talking about Westy, Westy wanted this and Westy said this, and Westy feels, was heard in those weeks after Tet to say that General Westmoreland felt, and General Westmoreland believed.