William Westmoreland
William Westmoreland commanded in Vietnam for four years and won a battle that lost the war at home. He was a West Point first captain, an artillery officer in North Africa and Sicily, a regimental commander in Korea, and superintendent of West Point - a career of unbroken conventional success. He took command in Vietnam in 1964 and built a strategy of attrition: find the enemy with helicopters and firepower, kill more of them than they could replace, and measure it. The body count was the metric, and it was the wrong one, because it was reported by the units producing it and because the other side accepted losses on a scale the arithmetic assumed they would not. He asked for more men repeatedly and got them, to over half a million. In late 1967 he told Congress and the press that the end was coming into view. The Tet offensive began on 30 January 1968 with attacks on more than a hundred towns at once, including the American embassy in Saigon. Militarily it failed badly - the Viet Cong were shattered as a fighting force and never recovered - and politically it destroyed the credibility of everything he had said. His request for another 206,000 men leaked, Johnson declined to stand again, and he was moved to army chief of staff within months. He sued CBS in 1982 over a documentary alleging he had suppressed enemy strength estimates, and settled on the courthouse steps without damages or apology after his own intelligence officers testified against him. He maintained to the end that the war had been won militarily and lost by the politicians and the press.
- Lived: 1914 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: military
