Charging CBS

The general takes the stand

In a courtroom six floors below the one in which Ariel Sharon testified, another general last week took the stand in a $120 million libel suit against CBS. Dressed in a crisp, gray suit and sporting a small red-and-white striped Viet Nam service ribbon, the ramrod-straight William Westmoreland, 70, former commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam, recounted his 36 years of military service. Then he launched into a rebuttal of The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, the 1982 CBS documentary that is at issue in the trial.

According to the broadcast, Westmoreland had engaged in "a conspiracy at the highest levels" of the military to "suppress and alter" intelligence data regarding enemy troop strength in the months before the January 1968 Tet offensive. Westmoreland, said CBS, omitted from the order of battle, the official estimate of enemy forces, some 100,000 self-defense, secret self-defense and political cadre. Westmoreland's suit challenges the CBS charge that hi doing so he deceived President Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the Westmoreland growing military threat facing U.S. servicemen.

In his testimony last week, Westmoreland insisted that the nonuniformed forces in dispute were civilians, mainly old men, women and youths engaged in such home-guard activities as digging fortifications, laying mines and planting poisoned punji sticks as booby traps near their villages. They were not, he said, "fighters who could damage us, who we had to destroy." Westmoreland maintained that listing these irregulars as enemy troops could have sapped the spirit of U.S. soldiers. Said he: "It would be terribly detrimental to the morale of my troops to find out the enemy has increased."

In response to the charge that he had concealed crucial information from President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs, Westmoreland pointed out that he did not report directly to them; his "bosses" were Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, the commander of U.S. armed forces in the Pacific, and Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam. Moreover, Westmoreland said that on several occasions he had discussed with Admiral Sharp the disagreement among intelligence sources over the significance of the nonuniformed cadre.

As Westmoreland's testimony continues this week, the first major confrontation of the trial is scheduled to take place when he is cross-examined by CBS Lawyer David Boies. In coming weeks, Reporter Mike Wallace, the chief correspondent for the documentary, and other CBS journalists will testify.