Poor William Westmoreland. No one understood him. General Westmoreland’s forces and their South Vietnamese allies had fended off the attacks of National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese forces at the Vietnamese new year, Tet. He claimed victory. Alluding to Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II, Westmoreland had compared the enemy at Tet to the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. He considered the Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese on the ropes, and headed for defeat.
So when he asked, after the fighting sputtered out at Hue and Khe Sanh, for more resources, he figured he was negotiating from a place of strength, exploiting his success. His initial requests were simply for accelerated equipment deliveries for the South Vietnamese military and additional aerial transportation resources to sustain the troops he had put at the combat base at Khe Sanh.
What followed was a lesson in the unforeseen results of bureaucratic politics — a turn of events that would be funny, if it didn’t have such negative consequences for the American war effort. Within months, Westmoreland was reassigned, President Lyndon B. Johnson had withdrawn from the 1968 race and Washington had more or less soured on the pursuit of victory in Vietnam.
