The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  He had had an enviable boyhood and career. The son of upper-middle-class people in South Carolina; goals set, goals achieved, values confirmed. A classic American story. Career admired. A low quotient of materialism, the goals, the goals were loftier, to serve, to protect. The son of people who belonged, who had been on that soil for 150 years. Ten of his ancestors had fought in the Civil War. His father had attended the Citadel, probably the South’s best-known military school, but had been expelled for what was boyish enthusiasm, and thus had never served himself. He had become a businessman, a banker, married a Childs, a well-known Columbia family.

  William Childs Westmoreland was born on March 26, 1914, in Saxon, three miles west of Spartanburg. Westmoreland’s father was soon made manager of a major textile mill, an important job in the local social hierarchy; it meant a big two-story house with a simple cabin in back for the Negro servants. The Westmorelands lived in sharp contrast to the stark poverty of the mill workers; Westy as a young boy was allowed to play with his schoolmates who were the children of mill workers, but his younger sister, in keeping with local class and caste, was not. The Westmorelands were well connected in the hierarchy of that time. Childs, as he was known, knew the right people, went to the right church, with the right Sunday school teacher, James Byrnes, then a congressman, later a senator and Secretary of State, a family friend who would keep an eye out for this well brought up, serious young man. The young Westmoreland, who liked soldier suits as a boy, went into the Boy Scouts and did particularly well. Even then he seemed to love uniforms. As he won merit badges he was always careful to make sure that his mother sewed them onto the uniform with just the right spacing. He moved ahead quickly as a scout, First Class and then Eagle, and in 1929, when there was a World Scout Jamboree in Europe, Westy went, though it cost $395, a good deal of money in those days; a special court of honor had to be set up in South Carolina to qualify him as an Eagle Scout so he could go. When he returned he was interviewed in the local paper with a photograph and the caption “Spartanburg’s Own.”

  He went on to Spartanburg High, the diligent young man, always well dressed, always very correct, his parents always proud of how many of their friends would tell them what a fine boy he was. The model boy. Studious but not brilliant, but on the basis of application, grades in the 90s, physically sound and dedicated but not a particularly gifted athlete. Inevitably class president. Upon graduation he decided to go to the Citadel (which he almost became the head of in 1970; when it appeared that he might leave the job of Chief of Staff, there was considerable talk that he would head the Citadel for a year or two and then perhaps run for governor of South Carolina). He did well at the Citadel, finishing 33rd in a class of 169 members, but impressing others with more important qualities, his leadership ability, evident even then. Others deferred to him. Even then he liked to drill, he liked the military austerity and discipline; he liked the ordered world, he was to be more at ease in it than the freer, open, less ordered world of the civilian; in the military you knew what was expected of you, others knew what was expected of them.

  After his first year there he decided that he did want a military career, so he went to see his old friend Jimmy Byrnes about an appointment to Annapolis; the standing offer from Byrnes had been: “Just let me know when you’re ready for that appointment, young man.” Byrnes suggested that West Point offered a better and fuller life than Annapolis, and so West Point it was.

  There for the first time in his life he became Westy, and he seemed to stand out, the dedication, the energy, the bearing; within a few months his classmates were discussing whether or not he would be First Captain of his class. It was 1931, the height of the Depression, which had hit the country but not his family. He was younger than most of his classmates, many of whom were college graduates, now turning to the Academy because there were no civilian jobs. He did well as a plebe, finishing 71st among 328 in his class. Again, not brilliant, but intelligent and very hard-working. He liked West Point; the values inherent in the discipline and the sacrifice came easily to him and he sensed he would do well in his career (indeed, even on summer vacation he would put in extra hours practicing parade-ground commands in isolated South Carolina forests). Those years also meant that the Depression, which would sharply touch so many young men of that era, would have little effect on him; West Point was a particularly sheltered place. If not the most brilliant member of his class, he had other qualities, bearing, leadership—other men would look to him to lead. He had the capacity to impress both his superiors and his contemporaries. This was the model young man, with a certain maturity to him. That Southern manner was disarming: he had ambition without seeming ambitious. So Westy became First Captain of his class, the Point’s highest honor, which in itself seemed to guarantee a brighter career. He finished with an overall academic standing of 112 out of 276 for his four years, but he ranked eighth in his class in tactics. He wanted to join the new Army Air Corps upon graduation, but his eyes were too weak; he had studied too hard in keeping his grades up, and so, because he was good in math, he settled for the field artillery.

  The years between the wars were slow ones, slow advancement, slow in challenge, though the pace would quicken as World War II approached. Even then Westmoreland was the kind of young officer that the older officers’ wives coveted for their daughters. But he was also serious, painstakingly creating his own charts for artillery guides (only to find that though they were accurate, researchers at Fort Sill had beaten him with similar charts produced by slide rules). He was a young officer that more senior men kept their eye on, and when the war finally came he moved ahead quickly; by September 1942, at twenty-eight, he was a lieutenant colonel, commander of an artillery battalion, ready and anxious to get into the middle of the war, superbly trained for what was ahead, wanting to play his part. One of those men who never feared, who can only go forward, who sensed his own destiny.

  Two months later he got his first chance in the North African campaign with the 9th Division, pushing his big guns into action at the Kasserine Pass and catching the Germans by surprise, making the Germans feel that the Allied forces were larger in number than they in fact were. He gained a Presidential Unit citation for his 34th Field Artillery Battalion, and throughout the North African campaign there was a new subsurface reputation. Hot unit, hot commander; Westy, it was said, could really move his unit. But Westy was not satisfied. He wanted more action, and he wanted to be with the hot new mobile units, the Airborne, the exciting units which were going to go where the action was the heaviest. Westmoreland had tried to get into Airborne earlier in his career, and he had struck up a friendship with Colonel James Gavin, obviously a comer and a leading proponent of airborne tactics. With the 82nd Airborne leading the invasion into Sicily in July 1943, Westy made a move to go Airborne. He drove up to General Ridgway’s headquarters, introduced himself, said he had heard what the Airborne was going to do, and he wanted to offer the general the best artillery support he could get, adding that in addition to his artillery pieces, four dozen trucks, scarce as to be almost sacred, a great sweetener, came with the deal. Ridgway, needing more wheels for his division, immediately asked his division artillery commander, a particularly sharp young brigadier named Maxwell Taylor, to go and take a look at this new unit with its 155-mm. howitzers which he was about to acquire. Taylor, who felt himself an expert on the use of 155s, was visibly impressed with the sharpness of Westy’s unit and went back to tell Ridgway that they had made a very good deal. This was, among other things, the beginning of the Westmoreland-Taylor friendship.

  Westmoreland’s unit, attached to the 82nd, moved rapidly across Sicily with the Airborne troops until the 82nd was pulled out for more traditional infantry, but his reputation as an aggressive commander with a sharp unit grew. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his part in Africa and Sicily. He and his unit then went to England to prepare for the coming Normandy invasion. Taylor, now a major general and commander of the elite 101st Airborne, asked f
or Westmoreland, offering him a job as division artillery executive officer and a colonel’s eagles. If there was any doubt about his future, it was ended with that request. But the 9th Division was unwilling to give him up. He was slated for the same job in the 9th, where he again excelled, became chief of staff although only a bird colonel, and gained a Bronze Star for co-ordination of other units in the bridgehead at Remagen.

  He stayed chief of staff of the 9th throughout the rest of the war, and then at the end he was advised by the commander, General Louis Craig, that his career was very bright, but that it was time to switch to the infantry, where the real future for the very best still resided. He was wary at first, thinking that too much careerism might be implicit, but he soon accepted command of an infantry regiment, and shortly afterward was made commander of the 71st Division, being largely in charge of taking the division home. Still, he was only thirty years old, he had commanded a division, and as his West Point classmates might have predicted, he had not bothered to marry, it might have slowed him down.

  He was barely back home and on his way to a Pentagon assignment when he got a phone call from his old friend Jim Gavin, now commander of the 82nd Airborne and one of the most celebrated officers in the Army, a dashing, romantic figure. “Slim Jim” Gavin, who had led the jump on D-Day into Normandy, now offered Westmoreland one of three parachute regiments in the 82nd. Westmoreland wanted it, but, he reminded Gavin, he had never jumped. So he went to jump school at Fort Bragg, and returned as a regimental commander. It was the Army system very much at work; he was a much sought after officer. There were always too few men of that caliber and too many slots, so everyone in the Army was on the lookout for excellence, and the word would go up and down who were the special ones. A fine commander made himself look even better by collecting and using other, younger marked men in his unit, culling out the best, using the back-channel grapevine to pick the winners. Gavin was a winner and now he was picking a winner. It helped Westmoreland and it helped Gavin too.

  Now, never having jumped in combat, Westmoreland was commanding some of the most combat-toughened men in the Army, men who built their very special mystique because they jumped out of airplanes, and very few of their fellow troopers and almost none of their fellow countrymen did. (There is the classic Airborne story about a general inspecting Airborne troops. “And do you like to jump out of planes, soldier?” asks the general. “No, sir,” answers the trooper. “Then why are you here?” “Because I like to be around men who do,” answers the trooper.)

  Westmoreland was soon made chief of staff of the division, at Gavin’s request, a particularly flattering recommendation; indeed it was soon said that when Gavin left the division, there would be no trouble finding his successor, since there was a young light colonel named Westmoreland who could run the division as well as Gavin. Westmoreland had made it, chief of staff of the 82nd at the age of thirty-two. There was even time now to get married to an Army brat named Kitsy Van Dusen (who friends found had a leavening influence on Westmoreland). At the 82nd he impressed his superiors with the dedication, the organization, the skill, the attention to detail, the enormous industry, the valued—in the Army, and business—capacity to anticipate demands. To his contemporaries he was a cold one, you did not get close to Westy, you kept your distance. He seemed to have no confidants; the system was his confidant.

  He was marked for great things; when as chief of staff of the 82nd he received a letter suggesting that his next assignment be the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, a plum assignment for most officers his age, a reassurance that they were on their way, Westmoreland was irritated. He thought he was beyond that, that he was something special, which he was, for his commanding general, Williston Palmer, said not to worry, that his career was being guided on a different level, above all the usual mechanics. When Westmoreland finally went to Leavenworth it was not as a student, but as an instructor; he would teach there and at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks. They were good assignments but irritating to him because the Korean War had started and he wanted to get there for the action. He finally did, in July 1952, as commander of the 187th Regimental Combat Team; it was once again a plum and a sign that he was special. During the Korean War the Pentagon was flooded with requests for Westmoreland, every division seemed to want this letter-perfect soldier who had been sponsored by both Taylor and Gavin. The command he got was the choicest one; the 187th was the only Airborne unit in Korea, an elite team, which meant that its commander had ultrahigh visibility. Yet Korea was not a particularly harsh war to him, he did not see that much action, and he came out of Korea with his first star at the age of thirty-eight.

  From Korea he went back to the Pentagon, this time as Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Manpower Control, from there to Harvard Business School, and in 1955 to Secretary of the General Staff under the new Chief of Staff, Max Taylor. (It was as if history were repeating itself; Taylor had held the same job under George Marshall.) It was a very difficult job, serving essentially as secretary and chief protector of the Chief, making sure he knew what he should know, that he see whom he should see, that he was protected if necessary, that his time was not wasted. If Taylor was cold and austere, so was his Secretary. Later, when the revolt of the colonels broke out, Westmoreland assured Taylor that he would clean it up for him and did, in the view of the colonels, a little too quickly and antiseptically. They felt that Westmoreland had played the game very skillfully during the growing rebellion: had it succeeded, he was in deeply enough to go along; had it failed, he was not sufficiently involved not to be absolved. So there was a feeling among some of them that he had been almost too ruthless in crushing it and wiping out the traces (it was the coldness which some of them remembered, the lack of a phone call saying, in effect, we know what you were doing and that you were authorized to do it—lie low and we’ll take care of you).

  He handled the difficult assignment with his usual excellence and in 1958, when Taylor was reactivating his old division, the 101st, Major General Westmoreland, the youngest major general in the Army, was given the command, another plum, plus a word from Taylor that the officers of Taylor’s generation were already plotting the career of men like Westmoreland. He did well at Fort Campbell with the 101st, was superb at public relations, so good in fact that it was part of Tennessee and Kentucky gossip at that time that he might well have political ambitions. He also pushed very hard at efficiency, trying to translate it into percentages. He had always liked figures and statistics (Westmoreland, says a friend, is not much interested in sociology or personality; he is much more interested in facts and figures; if he had to describe your personality he would probably do it in percentages). He launched a program called Overdrive to gain greater efficiency at the post; the results of it a year later would have delighted McNamara had he then been at Defense, and would show why McNamara and Westmoreland got along so well for such a long time. Overdrive, it seemed, had brought an increase of 420 percent in valid suggestions from men and civilians on the post; a 24 percent drop in combat troops doing administrative work; and a 12 percent reduction in rations ordered for the same post population. It was also at Campbell that a practice jump saw a last-minute wind foul the planes and result in the death of six paratroopers; the next day Westmoreland was the first to jump.

  After Fort Campbell he was given another dream assignment, Superintendent of West Point, a slot in the past held by MacArthur and Taylor. He stayed there for three years, and was credited with vast improvement in managerial techniques (Taylor, his predecessor there, had expanded the curriculum). At West Point he again had ultrahigh visibility and he impressed everyone. The appearance—to look that good, that straight and soldierly—was not without its immense benefits; and Westmoreland was far from unaware of the peripheral impact, particularly upon civilians. He knew that it was money in the bank, that they were in awe of him, and he was not above using it. More than other generals he had always sought out political figures where he w
as stationed, gotten to know them, to let them know he would work with them, to impress and reassure them. In 1962, when President Kennedy was going to visit West Point, Westmoreland was not particularly pleased when he looked at the preliminary schedule for the trip because it did not provide enough time for the general to be with the President. Over a period of days Westy’s aides very carefully and thoroughly renegotiated the entire schedule, doubling the amount of time that Westmoreland would spend with the President, which had its effect because Kennedy came away from the visit deeply impressed with Westmoreland. For a time in 1962 when Kennedy was looking for a new Chief of Staff of the Army, he wanted to reach down and pick Westmoreland until he was finally advised by others that you simply did not make a very junior major general Chief of Staff. At least not in peacetime.