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 offensive 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 Gen. 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 Our armies never lost in Vietnam, and Vietnam only fell after our armies had been withdrawn and our politicians reneged on their promise to resupply the South Vietnamese and bomb the North Vietnamese in the event of further aggression against the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?