[On April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his position as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. MacArthur is one of many U.S. Generals who have a great deal to tell us about our wars, our military histories, and many other political and social contexts, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of other famous generals, leading up to a complex layer of our current military and American moment.]
How the controversial General embodied the war’s tragedies and falsehoods alike.
I’ve written a good deal in this space about the importance of not viewing history as inevitable, of recognizing how contingent every single thing that happened was and always would have been. (Which doesn’t mean that some events weren’t far more likely than not, of course, just that nothing was or is a given.) A striking example of that reality is the dramatic escalation of U.S. troops in Vietnam, which took place in a very short time and through explicit policy decisions: between his appointment as the U.S. commander in Vietnam in June 1964 and his promotion to U.S. Army Chief of Staff in 1968, General William Westmoreland increased that troop presence from just over 15,000 to 535,000. It’s important to note that he did so with the full support of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and their mutual boss, President Lyndon B. Johnson. But nonetheless, McNamara recommended Westmoreland to Johnson because he saw him as “the best we have, without question,” and it the dramatic escalation in troop numbers, which required the full implementation of the increasingly controversial draft to create and maintain it, was most definitely Westmoreland’s idea.
Obviously no one person is responsible for the tragedy of the Vietnam War, not in terms of U.S. involvement and casualties or the effects on the Vietnamese people or any other aspect (and if I were going to go with one, it would probably be Henry Kissinger). But Westmoreland bears as significant a share of the blame as anyone, and moreover he made the case for those destructive policies by helping create one of the most blatant falsehoods about the war: addressing a joint session of Congress in April 1967, he argued, “In evaluating the enemy strategy, it is evident to me that he believes our Achilles heel is our resolve…Your continued strong support is vital to the success of our mission…Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience, determination, and continued support, we will prevail in Vietnam over the communist aggressor!” Even though he famously came to see the war itself as a mistake, he continued advancing that mythic narrative about how it could have been won with just a bit more “resolve,” arguing late in his life (pace one John Rambo, natch) that “our country did not fulfill its commitment to South Vietnam.”
Ironically enough given that last sentiment, Westmoreland also consistently expressed even more controversial and destructive views of the Vietnamese people and Asian cultures more broadly. In an interview for the 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, he stated, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it: Life is not important.” And more than two decades later, in a 1998 interview with George magazine, Westmoreland doubled down on that sentiment, saying of the North Vietnamese commanding officer Võ Nguyēn Giáp that “Now such a disregard for human life may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius.” It’s pretty damn rich for the military leader most responsible for sending half a million American soldiers into a needless war, a conflict from which nearly 60,000 of them never returned and which badly scarred every one of those who did, to discuss another man’s or culture’s disregard for human life.
Contemporary post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Generals or other military histories you’d highlight?
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