Testimony in Libel Case to Resume : Westmoreland Trial Holds Narrow Focus

Last October, attorney Dan M. Burt, representing retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland, told a U.S. District Court jury in New York: “The issue here is not the Vietnam War . . . it is, did Gen. Westmoreland lie to his superiors?”

Thus began the much-publicized trial of the 70-year-old general’s $120-million libel suit against CBS over “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” a “CBS Reports” documentary that charged that Westmoreland engaged in a “conspiracy” in 1967 to under-count North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces to show that the enemy was being ground down and thus buck up waning home-front support for the war.

Burt’s statement has proved prophetic. As testimony resumes today after a two-week recess, the trial remains focused on the narrow issue of Westmoreland’s 1967 enemy strength estimates and has not been especially illuminating on the conduct of the war.

Trial Echoes War

But at the same time the trial itself seems to echo the war by its grinding progression and by the inability of either side thus far to break an apparent stalemate.

George Crile, who produced and co-reported the disputed CBS documentary and is a co-defendant in the case, is expected to resume testifying today. Then Burt, who called Crile as his only “hostile” witness, will wrap up his presentation by calling Ira Klein, a film editor who worked on the CBS broadcast and is voluntarily testifying for the general.

Crile thus far has seemed to hold his own against Burt, responding to the lawyer’s lengthy, often-tart questions about the fairness and accuracy of his work with equally lengthy answers delivered in tones of mild disdain.

But Klein’s testimony could prove damaging for CBS. In an affidavit for Westmoreland in April last year, Klein said he’d expressed concern to Crile and others at the network about the fairness of the documentary and its thesis of a “conspiracy” in Westmoreland’s command to distort enemy troop strength figures.

The editor also said in his affidavit that after the documentary aired on Jan. 23, 1982, and was denounced three days later by Westmoreland and others at a press conference, Sam Adams, a paid consultant on the program, told him:

“We have to come clean. We have to make a statement that the premise of the show is inaccurate. L.B.J. (President Lyndon B. Johnson) had to know” of the deliberate under-counting of enemy troops for which the program assigned blame to Westmoreland.

Adams, who has denied he said that, is a former CIA analyst and, like Crile and CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, a co-defendant in the suit.

CBS will then begin its defense. George Vradenberg III, a CBS attorney, said that the network plans to call two key witnesses who formerly served under Westmoreland and have volunteered to testify for CBS--retired Maj. Gen. Joseph McChristian, Westmoreland’s former intelligence chief in Vietnam, and retired Col. Gains Hawkins, who was Westmoreland’s briefer on enemy strength in 1967.

Infantrymen to Testify

And, Vradenberg said, CBS also will call a small group of former infantryman who, unlike any witness thus far, actually faced combat on a daily basis in Vietnam. They will testify, he said, about their experiences in Vietnamese hamlets and villages during the war.

Their testimony will likely bear on a key issue in the case--whether Westmoreland distorted the true size of enemy forces in 1967 by excluding from reports sent to his superiors estimates of more than 100,000 hamlet-level Viet Cong “self-defense” militia forces.

Westmoreland contends that he included these units in his reports, though not counting them as fighters with an offensive capability. They were militarily insignificant “home guard” units, he testified, largely consisting of old men, women and young boys and “not really a threat”--an assertion the CBS program disputed.

So far the jury has been shown portions of the disputed documentary, unaired “outtakes” from it and a seemingly endless array of declassified government documents.

They’ve also heard from 17 witnesses, including Walt W. Rostow, one-time national security adviser to President Johnson; the Johnson Administration’s fomer Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, who broke a self-imposed 16-year silence about the Vietnam War to testify for the general, and Westmoreland himself.

By most accounts, Westmoreland did well under cross-examination by CBS lawyer David Boies. Firmly, occasionally with some feistiness, the silver-haired general defended his conduct as commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968.

General Did Well on Stand

He repeatedly denied suggestions by Boies--and the accusations in the CBS documentary--that he blocked or suppressed intelligence reports showing an increase in enemy strength in Vietnam in 1967. And, in direct testimony earlier, he charged that he was “rattlesnaked” and “ambushed” by Crile and Wallace when interviewed for their documentary.

They hadn’t told him, the general said, to prepare for questions on a debate between the military and the CIA in 1967--the CIA at one point argued that enemy strength could be perhaps twice the approximately 300,000 troops estimated by Westmoreland’s command--or about North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam prior to the enemy’s massive Tet offensive of 1968. Both assertions were later denied by Crile.

“This was an inquisition,” the general said of the interview. “I realized I was participating in my own lynching, but I didn’t know what I was being lynched about.”

As he has before, Burt declined to say how he thinks his case is going. CBS’ Vradenberg said “it’s an impossible task” to predict the outcome of the trial. However, he added, “I think the case has gone quite well for us.”