Between You and Me (25 page)

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the main “political reasons” why Westmoreland chose to reject the new and more accurate intelligence figures.

The official military term for the estimates of enemy troop strength is “order of battle,” and later in our interview, I asked Westmoreland about a decision in the summer of 1967 to drop an entire category of the Vietcong army—the self-defense militia—from the order of battle. He was, by then, acutely irritated with the whole tenor of our discussion, so instead of answering my question, the general decided that the time had come to put me in my place with a verbal reprimand. “This is a nonissue, Mike,” he snapped. “I made the decision. I don’t regret making it. I stand by it. And the facts prove that I was right. Now, let’s stop it!”

“All right, sir,” I said, and paused briefly to give him a chance to simmer down. But I had no intention of obeying his command. Instead, I rephrased the question in a more direct and detailed way.

W A L L A C E : Isn’t it a possibility that the real reason for suddenly deciding in the summer of 1967 to remove an entire category of the enemy from the order of battle—a category that had been in the order of battle since 1961—was based on political considerations?

W E S T M O R E L A N D : No, decidedly not. That—

W A L L A C E : Didn’t you make this clear in your August twentieth cable?

W E S T M O R E L A N D : No, no. Yeah. No.

W A L L A C E : I have a copy of your August twentieth cable—

W E S T M O R E L A N D : Well, sure. Okay, okay . . .

I then quoted from the cable in question: “We have been project-ing an image of success over the recent months. The self-defense

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militia must be removed or the newsmen will immediately seize on the point that the enemy force has increased. . . . No explan ation could then prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion.” Confronted with that solid evidence, Westmoreland had no choice but to admit that the major reason for the decision was, in effect, to conceal the true strength of the enemy forces from the media and their readers and viewers back in the States.

But time was running out for the U.S. command in Saigon. Just five months after that deception was put into effect, the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive, and we all learned, to our dismay, that the enemy we were up against in Vietnam was much larger and stronger than we had been led to believe.

Crile went on to explore other aspects of the story during the late spring and summer of 1981, and I conducted a few more interviews that were included in our report. When the editing was completed in the fall, everyone who screened the final cut agreed that it was a very strong documentary, and one bound to provoke some controversy, eventhough our focus was onevents that had occurred fourteenyears earlier during a war that Americans had not fought in since 1972.

“The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception” aired on January 23, 1982, and three days later, General Westmoreland held a news conference at which he denounced the documentary as “a preposterous hoax” and accused me of subjecting him to a “star-chamber” in-quisition. In spite of the general’s objections and a few other grumbles of dissatisfaction, the initial press reaction was overwhelm-ingly favorable, and the kudos did not come from just the usual suspects, the so-called liberal media. Among those who praised our report was the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, who had long been a staunch defender of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

But four months after we broadcast “The Uncounted Enemy,” TV

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Guide published a strident attack on the program, and that was when the real controversy began.

The magazine article, coauthored by Don Kowet and Sally Bedell, certainly had an eye-catching title: “Anatomy of a Smear—How CBS Broke the Rules and ‘Got’ Gen. Westmoreland.” The problem was that the text did not live up to the sensationalistic come-on. All the criticisms made in the piece dealt with Crile’s reporting and editing procedures, and while a couple of those complaints had some merit, the others were either specious or irrelevant. Far more significant was the fact that Kowet and Bedell stopped short of challenging the substance of the broadcast, the solid evidence we presented to back up our allegations about the deception in Vietnam. After all their huffing and puffing about process, they ended the article with the following conclusion: “We do not know whether Crile and his colleagues were right about General Westmoreland and his military intelligence operation.” At which point, a dispassionate reader might rise to inquire, “Well, if you’re not prepared to refute the CBS

charges against the general, then where is the ‘smear’?”

Unfortunately, that was not the position the new president of CBS News, Van Gordon Sauter, chose to adopt. Rather than taking the criticisms in stride and pointing out that the substance of the documentary was in no way discredited by the article, Sauter announced, with considerable fanfare, that he had ordered an in-house investigation of the magazine’s allegations. Crile and I were not happy about that decision, and we made no attempt to conceal our displeasure.

Crile, in particular, had more to worry about than the internal report Sauter had ordered. Throughout the spring and early summer of

’82, pressures were building within CBS News to isolate him as the culprit in the controversy. In fact, rumors began to spread that he was

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on the verge of being fired. When I got wind of them, I forcefully passed the word to Sauter (through intermediaries) that if Crile was sacked, I would have no choice but to resign. I pointed out that I was inextricably linked to the broadcast, and if Crile was guilty of the kind of grievous errors that warranted dismissal, then so was I. After all, I noted, the headline accusation in the TV Guide piece was that we had “smeared” General Westmoreland, and I was the one who had interviewed him.

Beyond that, there was a moral principle at stake that went to the heart of broadcast journalism. I strongly believe that a correspondent must bear major responsibility for what he reports on the air. This is especially true when the story in question is the kind of investigative piece that is apt to stir up controversy. After all, we reporters rarely hesitate to accept the plaudits that come our way when a story is well received, even though much of the time, it’s our off-camera producers who deserve most of the credit. So it seems to me we should shoulder our share of the blame when things go wrong.

Getting back to the summer of 1982, the in-house probe of the allegations leveled against “The Uncounted Enemy” was completed in July, two months after the TV Guide piece was published, and its findings only exacerbated the tensions within CBS News.

On one side of the dispute were colleagues who embraced the internal report in all its particulars, and on the other side were those who agreed with Crile and me that it was seriously flawed. Our faction believed that, among other misjudgments, the report gave far too much credence and legitimacy to charges in the article that, in our view, were too trivial or extraneous to warrant a serious response.

So the arguments raged on within our shop, and that discord put

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Van Gordon Sauter in a bind of his own making. Because he had made such a big public brouhaha about the internal investigation, there was no way he could keep the conclusions under wraps. He had to acknowledge them, and he did. However, in the statement he released to the press about the official CBS report on the documentary, he also cited the various in-house objections to its findings.

More than anything else, Sauter’s attempt to reconcile the opposing views was an exercise in equivocation, and as such, it resolved nothing and satisfied no one. That point was clearly grasped by Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post. In his column about the ambiguous tenor of Sauter’s statement, Shales wrote that

“instead of dispelling the cloud that had formed over the program, CBS News all but seeded it for rain.” And the cloudburst was not long in coming.

Ever since we broadcast our documentary, General Westmoreland had explored the prospect of a libel suit against CBS. The first few lawyers he contacted discouraged him from taking that legal action. All of them stressed how difficult it was for a public figure like the general to build a case for libel, and their judgments may also have been influenced by the initial public reaction to the program, which ran strongly in our favor. But the publication of “Anatomy of a Smear” in May—and CBS’s ill-advised reaction to it—ignited a storm of controversy that raged across most of the summer. By the early fall of 1982, the climate of public opinion had undergone a significant change. By then many Americans had come to believe that we had indeed perpetrated a “smear” in order to “get” General Westmoreland, and that was enough to persuade a Washington lawyer named Dan Burt to represent Westmoreland in a $120 million libel suit against CBS.

Burt was the president of the Capital Legal Foundation, a con-

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servative public-interest firm, and in taking on the case, he was no doubt driven by a political agenda. Perhaps the same could be said about our esteemed defender, David Boies, a partner in the New York firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. (This was the same David Boies who later fought so vigorously on behalf of Al Gore and the Democrats in the epic recount battle that took place in Florida during the weeks after the 2000 presidential election.) For the next two years, Burt and Boies were pitted against each other in the elaborate pretrial maneuvers, a kind of bloodless trench warfare fought with depositions and sundry legal strategies (a discovery motion here, a change-of-venue motion there) as well as in the media, where (ironically) Burt had the upper hand. He was adept at public relations, and he saw to it that in one forum after another, Westmoreland was portrayed as a maligned hero. Burt was so confident his PR manipula-tions would lead to legal victory that in an interview with USA Today in the spring of 1983, he proclaimed that “we are about to see the dis-mantling of a major news network.”

In his quiet way, Boies was just as confident. While Burt was scoring flashy points in the media, Boies was building his defense around what he called “a fortress of depositions” that either reaffirmed our broadcast’s disclosures or corroborated them. “Our case could not be stronger,” he assured us at one point during the pretrial phase. Boies also kept reminding us that the official verdict would be delivered not in the court of public opinion, where Burt and his team were playing to the grandstand, but in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, where the trial in the case of Westmoreland v. CBS finally began in October 1984.

In spite of Boies’s optimism, the early weeks of the trial did not go well for us. As the attorney for the plaintiff, Burt had the first shot at the jury, and the witnesses he called took turns denouncing “The

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Uncounted Enemy” and the network that had put it on the air. We were accused of using “lies” and “fakery” to achieve our goal, which (according to their testimony) was to destroy the reputation of a great American military hero. The hero himself was on the witness stand for nine days. At the age of seventy, Westmoreland still cut an impos-ing figure, one that projected all the patriotic virtues of a West Point man who had devoted his life to serving his country in uniform. That gave weight to his repeated denials of the charges we had leveled against him and to his countercharges that CBS had been one of the media culprits whose “negative reporting” had helped to bring about the failure of the U.S. mission in Vietnam.

The trial dragged on for four months, and through it all, the only personal contact I had with Westmoreland took place on the very first day of the proceedings, when I went to a men’s room in the courthouse and found myself standing at a urinal next to him. The general and I exchanged curt nods and proceeded to go about our business at our respective urinals—at swords’ point, so to speak.

I attended most of those early sessions that fall, which was not a pleasant experience. It was no fun sitting in a courtroom day after day and hearing yourself and your colleagues vilified as liars and frauds and even traitors. I knew most of what was being said about us was nonsense, but that was small consolation. My reputation as a fair and credible reporter was being torn asunder by the calumnies coming out of that courtroom, and I thought that even an eventual verdict in our favor would not be enough to repair the damage.

The more I heard, the more dejected I became. The trial was upsetting me so much that I couldn’t go to sleep at night, and when I took sleeping pills to overcome the insomnia, I woke up in the morning so groggy that I didn’t want to get out of bed. I lost my appetite and no longer had any interest in doing things I normally enjoyed do-

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ing. Like most people, I’d been down in the dumps on other occasions for one reason or another, but never before had I experienced this kind of constant, mind-racking despondency. I felt as low as a snake’s belly, yet when I sought help from a doctor I’d been going to for years, he assured me that I had nothing serious to worry about.