Man Of The Year: Gen. Westmoreland, The Guardians at the Gate

MAN OF THE YEAR

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Nothing is worse than war? Dishonor is worse than war. Slavery is worse than war.

—Winston Churchill

To the quickening drumfire of the fighting in South Viet Nam, Americans sensed early in 1965 that they might have to choose between withdrawal or vastly greater involvement in the war. By year's end, it was clear that the U.S. had irrevocably committed itself to the nation's third major war in a quarter-century, a conflict involving more than 1,000,000 men and the destiny of Southeast Asia.

It was a strange, reluctant commitment. As the small, far-off war grew bigger and closer, it stirred little of the fervor with which Americans went off to battle in 1917 or 1941. The issues were complex and controversial. The enemy was no heel-clicking Junker or sadistic samurai but a small, brown man whose boyish features and emaciated body made him look less like the oppressor than the oppressed. The U.S. was not even formally at war with him. Nor at first could Americans be sure that divided, ravaged South Viet Nam had the stomach or stability to sustain the struggle into which it had drawn its ally.

The risk and the responsibility for the war were, of course, Lyndon Johnson's. "We will stand in Viet Nam," he said in July. Thereafter, the President moved resolutely to make good that pledge, weathering open criticism from within his own party, strident protest from the Vietnik fringe, and the disapprobation of friendly nations from the Atlantic to the China Sea.

All No Man's Land. It fell to the American fighting man to redeem Johnson's pledge. Plunged abruptly into a punishing environment, pitted against a foe whose murderously effective tactics had been perfected over two decades, the G.I. faced the strangest war of all.

Professing to scorn the U.S. as a paper tiger, Communist China had long proclaimed Americans incapable of combat under such conditions—while prudently allowing North Viet Nam to fight its "war of liberation." The Americans turned out to be tigers, all right—live ones. With courage and a cool professionalism that surprised friend and foe, U.S. troops stood fast and firm in South Viet Nam. In the waning months of 1965, they helped finally to stem the tide that had run so long with the Reds.

As commander of all U.S. forces in South Viet Nam, General William Childs Westmoreland, 51, directed the historic buildup, drew up the battle plans, and infused the 190,000 men under him with his own idealistic view of U.S. aims and responsibilities. He was the sinewy personification of the American fighting man in 1965 who, through the monsoon mud of nameless hamlets, amidst the swirling sand of seagirt enclaves, atop the jungled mountains of the Annamese Cordillera, served as the instrument of U.S. policy, quietly en during the terror and discomfort of a conflict that was not yet a war, on a battlefield that was all no man's land.

20-Year Problem. In the process, American troops gave an incalculable lift to South Viet Nam's disheartened people and divided government. And, important as that was, they helped preserve a far greater stake than South Viet Nam itself. As the Japanese demonstrated when they seized Indo-China on the eve of World War II, whoever holds the peninsula holds the gate to Asia. Were Hanoi to conquer the South