William Westmoreland

Biography

William Westmoreland was born in 1914 in Spartanburg, South Carolina, into a family active in banking and textiles. After a year at The Citadel he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and graduated in 1936 as First Captain, the top cadet rank. As an artillery officer in the Second World War he commanded a field artillery battalion of the 9th Infantry Division in Tunisia and Sicily and became the division's chief of staff.

After the war he qualified as a paratrooper, served with the 82nd Airborne Division and taught at the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College. He commanded the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team in Japan and Korea, became a brigadier general at 38, led the 101st Airborne Division and was superintendent of West Point from 1960 to 1963.

Sent to South Vietnam in January 1964, he took over Military Assistance Command, Vietnam that summer. He fought a war of attrition built on large-unit battles, massive firepower and body counts while American troop numbers rose to about 535,000. His upbeat public assessments were badly undercut by the 1968 Tet Offensive, and Creighton Abrams replaced him.

As Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972 he oversaw the move toward an all-volunteer force and commissioned a critical study of officer professionalism after the My Lai massacre. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of South Carolina as a Republican in 1974. His libel suit against CBS over the 1982 documentary The Uncounted Enemy ended in February 1985, when he withdrew it before it reached the jury. He died in Charleston in 2005.