War and Remembrance

By Evan Thomas

McNamara breaks 16 years of silence on Viet Nam

At a White House ceremony in February 1968 to bid him farewell as Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, exhausted and anguished over the Viet Nam War, became so choked up that he could not speak. For the next 16 years McNamara remained speechless about that agonizing conflict, refusing to make any public statements. Last week, summoned to testify in General William Westmoreland's $120 million libel suit against CBS, McNamara finally broke his long silence. Even then, as he began to recall the controversies of the time, his raspy voice cracked once again, his lips trembled.

The emotions of the bitter Viet Nam era lived on in Room 318 of the U.S. courthouse in lower Manhattan last week, and so did the war's ambiguities. At issue was a 1982 CBS Reports documentary that accused Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam from 1964 to 1968, of participating in a "conspiracy" to understate the true strength of the enemy in order to make the war appear winnable. McNamara spoke emotionally in the general's defense. He stated that Westmoreland is "a person of tremendous integrity" who could never have lied to his superiors, and he said that he had told CBS Producer George Crile as much, off the record.

CBS Lawyer David Boies promptly tried to discredit McNamara by showing that he too had deceived Congress and the public. McNamara testified that he had believed ever since early 1966 that the war was not winnable and had expressed his doubt to President Lyndon Johnson. Boies read back snippets from what McNamara had said at the time. In August 1967, for instance, he told a Senate committee that the war was "not a no-win program." When a reporter asked that same year if the U.S. was mired in a stalemate in Viet Nam, McNamara replied, "Heavens, no!" On the stand, he tried to qualify such declarations by insisting that while he had been pessimistic about winning the war militarily, he still held out hope for a political solution.

When Boies queried the witness about Westmoreland's estimates of enemy troop strength, McNamara readily acknowledged that the numbers did not "add up." He disputed, just as the CBS documentary did, Westmoreland's claim in 1967 that the U.S. had finally reached the "crossover point," at which more enemy forces were being killed than could be replaced. But he characterized his dispute with Westmoreland as an honest difference of opinion. Actually, he testified, he regarded estimates of enemy strength as inherently unreliable and unimportant. It was a remarkable aside from the precision-minded man who was often accused of being in the thrall of statistics.

McNamara was the last in a parade of 17 witnesses, most of them former high officials, produced by Westmoreland's lawyer to testify that the substance of the CBS documentary was untrue. CBS has attempted to poke holes in their testimony: last week Boies told the jury that Westmoreland had contradicted himself 20 to 25 times during his ten days on the stand.

As a former public official, Westmoreland must meet a stiff legal standard to win his libel case: he must prove not only that the CBS story was false but that CBS knew it was false or recklessly disregarded whether it was. In an effort to demonstrate such "actual malice," Westmoreland's lawyer Dan Burt will play for the jury CBS's "outtakes," the unused portions of film and interviews. He will ask CBS staffers, principally Producer Crile and Correspondent Mike Wallace, why reporting that contradicted their thesis was left on the cutting-room floor.

This part of the trial promises to be a revealing seminar on how TV packages news. All reporters, print as well as broadcast, face the difficult task of choosing which facts to highlight and which ones to leave out when trying to shape coherent stories out of complex issues and conflicting accounts. But the time constraints and film-editing exigencies of TV news, and the powerful impact of televised interview clips, make the process even more difficult for broadcast journalists. -By Evan Thomas. Reported by Marcia Gauger/New York

With reporting by Marcia Gauger/New York