TRAVELS WITH WESTY
Wasserman, Harvey
TRAVELS WITH WESTY A scruffy peacenik encounters the General from Central Casting BY HARVEY WASSERMAN My first view of William Westmoreland is from the rear. The General is traveling first...
...My graduate deferment had kept me out until I was twenty-two, and then I had put in a year with fifth graders in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I had no business being...
...I don't know," he said...
...I mean, what did you see as being at the root of our failure...
...I had felt that those who were really sane were the ones who stayed out, and those who were really brave were the ones who threw in their deferments and went to prison...
...Those students who groaned when Westmoreland talked about cheerleaders smile now, but this time those who liked his talk-about half of the 300 students in the audience—roll their eyes...
...I should have taken my opposition to its logical conclusions...
...But this time he was a formidable foe, and the debate was much more interesting...
...But whenever we talked about that sort of thing back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we were accused of succumbing to left-wing paranoia, of dabbling in conspiracy fantasies, as if we were too muddled and stupid and, above all, too ideological to understand the truly profound and subtle workings of American foreign policy...
...He waffled a bit, sounding almost testy...
...With our host and three students we pick through the hors d'oeuvres, gingerly avoiding the topic of Vietnam while devising a mutually acceptable format for our debate on the nuclear freeze...
...I was at the Chicago Convention," I said...
...I couldn't manage a reply...
...I remembered how my comrades in SDS and other antiwar groups had insisted time and again that the war was really about the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia—that Vietnam itself was of only marginal significance and that democracy itself was, at best, a peripheral issue...
...When it was time for my physical exam, I had enough paperwork in my file and enough years in my body to obtain a coveted I-Y deferment...
...Perhaps it occurred to him that the ninety minutes we still had to spend together on the road were going to pass more slowly than he had hoped...
...I couldn't have gone and patched people up...
...Nuclear weapons were one thing...
...You can't approach them the way you do the kinds of people we are used to dealing with...
...There was, he confessed, no precedent in his family...
...I've heard such questions before, and usually they are leveled in a hostile, accusatory tone...
...The larger objectives of the war had indeed been achieved, he said, but the specific case of Vietnam didn't go exactly as we'd wanted...
...Was that really why we were there...
...I won't bore you with details of the debate...
...Does he suffer from some sort of need to reassert his own global stature...
...There isn't much time for more questions...
...The Russians, he suggests, are not quite human beings: "They're different from us...
...I had watched part of that program but had turned it off in disgust...
...The China card was also ours to play, as it might not have been without the war...
...In the back seat, Westmoreland waited with what seemed like a kind of fatherly expectation...
...He is about to embark on a lawsuit that will once again put his picture on newspaper front pages and news magazine covers...
...Still, he jumps at every opportunity to drop the name of a famous person...
...The first question from the floor has to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...The General worried about making his very early morning ail connection...
...It struck me as nothing more than a lot of pandering to the age of Reagan...
...the oil was flowing freely from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Japan...
...At the lecture hall, Westmoreland's opening remarks do little to enhance his stature...
...The General, pedantic, fatherly, continued his lecture...
...And if not the money, what would induce him to share the stage with a scruffy radical like me...
...his daughter was to be mar* ried the next day...
...He certainly would have no financial need to shuttle around the lecture and debate circuit, nor would he need another evening with a freezenik who was also eager to talk about the U.S...
...I noticed that part of me, the son in me, wanted to say something that would make the old man happy...
...But my lecture agency had laid its prestige on the line, and it may have taunted Westy by suggesting I had bested him in Gainesville...
...If the United States were to freeze nuclear weapons, the other side would forge ahead...
...Maybe he thought it was only fair: If I could prefer going to prison over fighting in his war, if I could dodge Chicago cops and block his own Pentagon door, he could break the rules of the debate and jump me out of turn...
...He had attended the Citadel and then West Point, and had climbed up through the ranks without the help of family connections...
...The University of Florida students who greet us on arrival are polite, tempering their deference with curiosity and a hint of amusement...
...I did what I saw as my patriotic duty, which was to oppose that war...
...I did stop and think about it for a while...
...It was an interesting and candid statement—and so were the remarks that followed about the war in Vietnam...
...The conversation did not turn back to Vietnam...
...There were six of us listening—the Gannons, the three student leaders, and myself—but Westmoreland avoided our eyes...
...I was thrown off balance, but not enough to keep me from enjoying the spectacle of the General resorting to a bit of civil disobedience of his own...
...You didn't fight, did you...
...I argue that while it would be comforting to get the Russians to stop building weapons, we need not wait for them...
...The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand...
...Since we already have the capacity to destroy human life on this planet many times over, we can gain no additional security by building even a single new warhead...
...We are sharing a plane from Atlanta to Gainesville on our way to debate the merits of a nuclear freeze...
...Did I hear you right...
...And now, in 1984, here was confirmation straight from the horse's mouth— the Great Helmsman himself supporting all those back-alley conspiracy theories...
...Then, too, there was all that tungsten and tin, and the trade routes via Singapore and Hong Kong to Japan and the Middle East, and the whole U.S...
...I can't say whether anything else in our encounter really affected him...
...I suspect there has been some beery speculation about how the two of us will hit it off, since my resume says I was heavily involved in protests against the war the General helped prosecute as commander of U.S...
...He seemed genuinely at a loss...
...But the war...
...What strikes me most about his twenty-minute talk is how little information it contains...
...Why not...
...That's what the war was about...
...He was articulate, self-assured, and upright, radiating a genteel personal magnetism...
...He is in fine shape for a man of seventy-one, and the steely glint is still there under the familiar bushy eyebrows...
...I think we would have been a whole lot better off without it...
...If I had it to do over again, I'd go to jail...
...So yeah, I am ashamed of some of what I did during the war, but what I'm really ashamed of is that I didn't do more to stop it...
...I stayed out of the war until I was twenty-three, and then they didn't want me any more...
...I marched at the Pentagon...
...You could have done that...
...You said something about a 'defeat' in Vietnam...
...We all know he commanded half a million troops in a war that is not likely to be forgotten...
...Ten years of all-out struggle against that war rushed through my memory...
...Does he need the money, which in this case could be no more than $2,000—a pittance compared to the lecture fees routinely paid these days to Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and others of that ilk...
...The General was still cordial and charming...
...He's suing CBS for alleged damage to his reputation, but he still doesn't understand why the war he lost was so widely hated and had such a devastating impact...
...It's a hell of a way to end the debate...
...In Chicago, police had kicked the shit out of me at the 1968 Democratic Convention because of the war this man had helped direct...
...Of course, I say to myself...
...the revolution had been crippled in Malaysia, crushed in Singapore and Indonesia, greatly impeded in the Philippines...
...The General proceeds to draw the inevitable analogy between football and the nuclear arms race...
...We were buying time for them, and we succeeded...
...And did he really expect me to redeem his soul and his reputation...
...But it didn't...
...He has no special expertise on nuclear arms...
...We didn't lose there...
...He seemed to be talking to some greater entity, lecturing in a room filled with maps and charts, with Robert S. McNamara waiting in the wings, pointer in hand, to back the General up...
...I don't know why the public didn't support it...
...And maybe those of us who suspected it had nothing to do with democracy in Vietnam felt for precisely that reason—among many others—that it was wrong for us to be there...
...I thought he was going to blame it all on the media, on the commies, on a lack of backbone in our spoiled generation...
...Though we are assigned to adjacent rooms at Gainesville's Hilton, near a pond inhabited by live alligators, we are diplomatically shuttled to the hotel in separate cars...
...Ithought about that exchange for the next four months...
...We had argued from 1965 on that the United States was not in Vietnam to "protect democracy" but that we had intervened in a civil war, aligning ourselves with forces that were profoundly anti-democratic, in order to hold on to a Southeast Asian empire threatened by a regionwide grass-roots revolution...
...I wonder, too, why Westmoreland agreed to this debate...
...Harvey Wasserman is the author of "America Born and Reborn...
...No, I wouldn't have," he replies softly, and more or less leaves it at that...
...Could it be that he really didn't know why the war was a fiasco...
...And then I said, "Well, yeah, I do have some pretty deep regrets about the war and what I did...
...posture toward the Third World, the unwillingness to "lose" a war to any insurgents anywhere, allowing another domino like Cuba or the Congo to tip over...
...We were all too civilized to let a mere disagreement about history spoil the trip...
...That war was my youth, and the youth of so many others like me...
...Well, we did lose in Vietnam itself, didn't we...
...A unilateral decision to stop building warheads, he says, is a decision to disarm...
...He's polite enough, she concedes, even gracious...
...And here, again, he surprised me...
...And so those 50,000 boys—my classmates—had not died in vain but so that an entire region could be stabilized...
...Were you draft-eligible...
...Our mission in Southeast Asia was to buy time for the ASEAN nations," he said, instructing rather than conversing...
...Is it because his own name is most clearly identified with a defeat...
...Perhaps he was just being discreet, thinking that this young man was friendly enough but still an adversary—and a journalist, at that, who might be compiling evidence for CBS to use in defending itself against the immense libel action he had filed...
...However it happened, one day last spring we were together again, heading from the Harrisburg airport two hours into the Pennsylvania countryside, preparing for another debate...
...It wasn't really necessary...
...Why not...
...After a television taping, we find ourselves at the home of Mike Gannon, the priest-turned-professor who will moderate our debate...
...Students chortle and roll their eyes...
...He did it with zest, as if liberated for once from the bonds that usually hold him in check...
...Would the General have dropped those Bombs...
...We had to make a stand against communist aggression, buy time for them to stabilize their governments...
...He had already made his rebuttal and I hadn't finished mine, but he stood up and shouted, "I knew Eisenhower, knew him quite well, and I can tell you that if he were alive today, he would never have supported a nuclear freeze...
...That had always bothered me, though...
...It was based on precisely the same assumptions he had used before—that we must be strong, that the Russians are a different species that can't be trusted...
...It took a while for that to sink in...
...But God damn it, hadn't he learned anything...
...military forces in Vietnam...
...Instead of rambling on about football and cheerleaders, he opened with a well-prepared, fully scripted attack on the nuclear freeze...
...That was wrong...
...I taught school," I said...
...That's right," he said...
...Our driver, the director of student activities, had told me beforehand that he was looking forward to an interesting ride, and later he said he had not been disappointed...
...I couldn't have taken jail at that time...
...Somewhere I read that Westmoreland had signed a lucrative contract to do promotion work for a home products company, Amway...
...I didn't believe in what we were doing...
...I got out of it, and I'm ashamed of that...
...They were pacifists," I said...
...ASEAN is safe now...
...At the same time, I was recovering physically and psychologically from the beatings I had received at various antiwar marches, including one at Westy's office in the Pentagon...
...He didn't seem terribly eager to return to the subject...
...But my hunch is that it was the real William Westmoreland sitting there in the back seat, still mystified after almost two decades about why the campaign that was the high point of his entire life was not supported by the country he loves...
...And that was that...
...His preoccupation with celebrity intrigues me...
...The Kennedys would have been impressed, and Mc-Namara's Pentagon whiz kids would have considered him a rare find...
...We returned to the Hilton...
...He wondered how I could have broken the law at such bloody events as the Chicago Convention and the march on the Pentagon...
...Westmoreland's response is predictable...
...We hated it, and we hated him, this elderly gentleman man resting comfortably, if stiffly, in the back seat of this automobile...
...I turned around and sank back into my seat...
...Westmoreland had avoided it, and I had merely referred to our "defeat" in Southeast Asia, wondering whether the people who brought us that disaster could be trusted to formulate an acceptable policy regarding atomic warfare...
...And it opened up this whole Pandora's Box of an arms race...
...The war was a success in that respect...
...Then, suddenly he brightened, and engagingly took another tack: "What did you do...
...There was proof that we won the war in Vietnam: King Bhumibol was solidly entrenched in Thailand...
...Like a football team, he argues, a nation must always strive to be stronger...
...But Westmoreland seemed genuinely interested, and he obviously was trying to make a point...
...Is this 1966...
...He rose from his chair and stood facing me, fingers interlaced at the small of his back as if he were briefing President Johnson's Cabinet...
...I begin by observing that few people have had a more direct impact on my life than the man I am now debating...
...I deeply resented having to claim physical injury to stay out of the army...
...The General goes on to emphasize that he's been personally acquainted with at least three-quarters of the sources I have cited, from Generals Eisenhower and Omar Bradley to Admiral Gene La Rocque and former Secretary of State Haig, and he's sure none of them would ever agree to a nuclear freeze...
...By now I was wound up...
...He was Time's Man of the Year when I was a junior at the University of Michigan, writing student editorials denouncing "Willy Wastemoreland...
...The law suit against CBS would never remove the stain of having lost the battle in Vietnam even if he had, as he claimed, won the war in ASEAN...
...That, I should think, says more about Westmoreland than anything Mike Wallace asserted on the air...
...He has no specifics about weapons systems, arms control talks, the killing power of nuclear stockpiles amassed by each of the superpowers...
...But he didn't back down...
...Is this 1956...
...After I brought it up, he once again asserted that he would not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Well, we didn't have sufficient forces there, there wasn't the public support for it...
...I was hospitalized...
...I wish I had been strong enough to have joined my brother-in-law and thousands of other hard-core resisters who went to prison rather than to Southeast Asia...
...They don't think the way we do...
...Last time we talked, General, I thought I understood you to say we were really in Vietnam to protect ASEAN...
...But he didn't...
...up to a point, we were even able to agree on that topic...
...Westmoreland is obviously sincere in his beliefs, but he hasn't bothered to do his homework...
...He is erect in an aisle seat, reading what are probably legal briefs...
...The Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand...
...As we rode along, the General in the back seat as must have been his custom in the military, I asked him how he had come to choose a career in the armed forces...
...That was all true, but it wasn't the whole story...
...But he also had a surprise for me...
...I thought the war was wrong...
...Westmoreland offers a firm handshake, calls me Harvey in a fatherly way, and departs...
...That's basically it, yes...
...The General had not responded on stage, but in the Gannons' book-lined living room he suddenly turned to me: "You know, Harvey, there was something you said tonight that I was sorely tempted to call you on...
...As we returned to the Gannons' home for post-mortems on the debate, my first question to the General was obvious: "You really wouldn't have dropped the Bomb...
...I thought we had no business being over there...
...It was getting late...
...From time to time, an admiring fellow passenger stops to shake his hand...
...After a short silence, he commented on the scenery...
...Then he replied, again with a sort of boyish hopefulness, "Well, you know, a lot of brave boys were COs...
...The subject had hardly come up in the debate...
...He had been there...
...Unlike most nuclear freeze advocates, I favor a unilateral freeze...
...Similarly, Phil Donahue had devoted a television program to men who had avoided the draft but now wanted to come forward and state that they wished they had fought...
...But Westy was getting to his point: "You know, Harvey, a lot is coming out now about men your age who feel guilty about not having fought, who wish they had gone over there and done their duty...
...The General silently looked out the window...
...In the kitchen, Mimi Gannon, the only woman present this evening, confesses her distress at having in her home the General who directed a war she remembers with deep bitterness...
...I should have gone to jail...
...He knew...
...As we make small talk, the General mentions the great men he has known, from Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy to George Patton and Bob Hope...
...Maybe we weren't told it was really about ASEAN...
...I could see how he had made his way up in the Army...
...In my rebuttal statement, I quoted a particularly effective paragraph from Eisenhower's farewell address—his warning about the military-industrial complex and the endless spiral of the arms race...
...The General was referring to an Esquire article by Christopher Buckley, son of right-wing columnist William F. Buckley, who "confessed" to guilt pangs about not having fought in Vietnam...
...Now the door was open...
...Well, I said, turning back to him, maybe the American public didn't support the war because it didn't think we could win there, and that if we could, we shouldn't win there...
...Perhaps he was being coy, but my impression was one of genuine perplexity and confusion...
...We had no business winning—what was there to win...
...They served with distinction and honor as medics...
...Why didn't the public support it...
...His vague allusions to football and military history make my task much easier...
...Westmoreland's was not a "good" war, and in the back rooms, away from the demands of propriety, we remember...
...we talked about football, the countryside, the effects of radiation released by the nuclear accident at nearby Three Mile Island...
...his ancestors had not been warriors...
...And we did it...
...He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by talking about the American public's attitude toward the war in Vietnam...
...I put my body on the line and so did a lot of other people...
...I wasn't...
...We didn't really accomplish our goals there, or did we...
...It's a great quotation from a general who made a surprising number of great statements, but Westy was not about to let it stand...
...I spent endless months being hassled by my draft board...
...Therefore, we might as well stop now, whether the Russians agree or not...
...That night he came to the debate far better prepared than he had been in Gainesville...
...Every dollar spent on war," Eisenhower said, "is a dollar taken from the hungry who are not fed, the poor who are not clothed, from the birthright of our children yet unborn...
...defeat in Vietnam...
...In the car, the General who had commanded 500,000 troops and helped lay waste to an entire nation abroad and an entire generation at home apparently spoke at some length about my violent nature...
...The General is traveling first class, and from coach I can see a white mane over a gray suit...
...The man who drove us from the airport that wet April day drove Westmoreland back the next morning so he could fly off to hear his daughter's vows...
...But Westmoreland's moral and ethical values seem light-years removed from those of the one "celebrity" whose friendship she and I share, Studs Terkel...
...I should have gone to jail, but I wasn't brave enough, I wasn't strong enough...
...He broke the rules of debate and of decorum...
...He talks about the Florida football team (the Gators) and its "lovely cheerleaders...
Vol. 49 • March 1985 • No. 3
