General William Westmoreland: At the height of the 1968 Tet offensive, Gen William Westmoreland, the US military commander in South Vietnam, who has died aged 91, gave a press conference in Saigon.
He was continually interrupted by the sound of artillery as he accused the communist forces of deceitful behaviour by attacking during what was supposed to be a holiday ceasefire.
Not that he was concerned, because the offensive was "about to run out of steam" and besides, it was "a diversionary effort to take attention away from the northern part of the country".
American television viewers were getting very different messages, with the communists briefly capturing the US embassy in Saigon and overrunning the imperial capital of Hue. It was the high water mark of the Vietnam war, and, once again, the US public felt they had been misled by the general's ever-optimistic line.
In the event, a Westmoreland request for a further 200,000 troops - to add to the existing 550,000 - was quietly shelved and, by the end of March, President Lyndon Johnson was announcing peace talks and his imminent retirement from politics. Westmoreland was moved to Washington as army chief of staff, but the Nixon administration rarely consulted him, and he never made it to chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
Westmoreland was permanently tainted as the commander of what became the worst military defeat ever suffered by the US. This aura clung to him even years after he had retired. In 1980, during the presidential primaries, he was on the same flight to Charleston, South Carolina, as Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. Reagan's aides whispered to him not to sit next to the general, lest he be smeared by association.
During his four-year spell as commander in Vietnam (1964-68), Westmoreland was a textbook version of how a general should look: ramrod straight, well over 6ft tall, with a purposeful jawline and always confident of victory. He never accepted that the North Vietnamese or the Vietcong were capable of ambushing his troops; even incidents where upwards of 50 US troops were killed were invariably described as a "meeting engagement" - an unexpected encounter, rather than an organised one.
The worst example of this wilful misrepresentation was his press conference in October 1965, after the slaughter of 155 US troops at Landing Zone Albany, in the battle of la Drang: "I consider this an unprecedented victory. At no time during the engagement were American troops forced to withdraw or move back from their positions, except for tactical manoeuvres. The enemy fled from the scene."
This deceit led to widespread cynicism among the US press corps, while much of the rest of the world came to loathe the wholesale destruction heaped on Indochina by his prosecution of the war.
Westmoreland was born near Spartanburg, South Carolina, into a business and banking family. He attended South Carolina's Citadel military college, and, in 1936, went on to graduate from West Point, the leading US military academy, where his academic record was average. However, he was awarded the highest command position in the cadet corps in his senior year.
As a young colonel during the second World War, he commanded an artillery battalion in north Africa and was decorated during the invasion of Sicily in 1943. After further action in France and Germany, he was made chief of staff of the Ninth Infantry Division, and shortly after the war ended, he was given command of a regiment in the 82nd Airborne Division.
From 1952, Westmoreland served in the tail end of the Korean war, where he was promoted to brigadier, and was then given command of the prestigious 101st Airborne Division, though he never actually made a combat jump. He had gained the approval of senior US military figures during a spell in the Pentagon, and, in 1960, was made superintendent of West Point, where he was noticed by President Kennedy.
Two years later, he was promoted to lieut-gen and given command of the XVIII Airborne Corps, which included both the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. After a brief spell as deputy US commander in South Vietnam, he was made commander in April 1964, in part because of his ostensible knowledge of guerrilla warfare.
In a rarely mentioned radio interview in November 1965, he actually showed a sense of reality about what he faced in Vietnam: "When the American people read the headlines about victories, there may be a tendency for them to magnify the magnitude of these actions. I do believe that there is a certain danger that we will be overwhelmed by a feeling of optimism and may lose sight of what I consider a true appraisal of the situation . . . It involves a long conflict and we must be prepared to accept this."
Westmoreland's main flaw was that he thought that if he confronted the communist forces directly, either on the ground or with his massive airpower, he could simply win by attrition. The communists' death toll was very heavy and this encouraged the delusion that the war was being won, as Westmoreland could not imagine how relatively small countries like North or South Vietnam could sustain such massive casualties.
This led to the policy of search and destroy, along with massive bombing, artillery and defoliation campaigns. There are no accurate figures for Vietnamese war dead, but they are conservatively estimated to be two million, compared to the total American deaths of 58,000.
The communists were taking the punishment, and occasionally having success in their military confrontation, but they still relentlessly pursued their political campaign from village level up. This was the reason president Johnson decided to call it quits in March 1968, despite Westmoreland's confidence that more troops could turn the tables.
As Stanley Karnow, the Vietnam reporter and historian noted: "Westmoreland did not understand - nor did anyone else understand - that there was not a breaking point. Instead of breaking their morale, they were breaking ours."
Westmoreland never grasped this vital point and continued to claim that the Vietnam war was not lost, as it kept the communists at bay for a further decade. In later years he came across as an old and stubborn warrior, still blaming the US public for not supporting the troops in the field.
In 1982, Westmoreland waged a long and costly libel action over a CBS documentary which claimed that he had deliberately misled the Pentagon and the public about the true strength of the communist forces in South Vietnam. It ended in an uneasy draw, when the general withdrew from the case with a grudging statement from CBS that it did not mean to impugn his honour.
Although he was considered to have been deeply hurt by others' perception of him, he put a brave face on it: "I have no apologies, no regrets. I gave my very best efforts . . . I've been hung in effigy. I've been spat upon. You just have to let those things bounce off."
His wife Katherine, whom he married in 1947, survives him, along with their son and two daughters.
William Childs Westmoreland, born March 26th, 1914; died July 18th, 2005