The Nation: Defeat in South Carolina

In his first—and perhaps last —brush with politics, former Army Chief of Staff and retired Viet Nam Commander General William C. Westmoreland, 60, last week discovered that a political campaign cannot be run like a military one. In the state's first Republican primary (the G.O.P. previously picked its candidates in convention), a mere 34,000 voters went to the polls.

Unable to attract the independent "antipolitician" voters he sought, "Westy" lost by more than 5,000 votes to Archconservative State Senator James B. Edwards, 47, a Charleston dentist with a hard-core right-wing following.

Admitting that he had been "an inept candidate," undone by his blunt...