The documentary that television viewers saw on CBS on Jan. 23, 1982, was glossy and seamless. In The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, CBS's Mike Wallace, his voice resonating with authority, charged that there had been a "conspiracy at the highest levels of American military intelligence" to underreport enemy troop strength in Viet Nam in order to deceive President Lyndon Johnson and the American people into believing that the U.S. was winning the war.
For the past three months, a six-man, six-woman jury in a federal courtroom in Manhattan has been listening to witnesses for General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam, tell a very different story. By painstakingly unraveling The Uncounted Enemy, Westmoreland's principal attorney, Dan Burt, is trying to convince the jury that the only public deception was by CBS, not by Westmoreland and the high command in Saigon. Last Tuesday, Westmoreland rested his case in his $120 million libel suit against the network. CBS Lawyer David Boies immediately began the arduous process of piecing the documentary back together in an effort to show that it was true, or at the very least that CBS had every reason to believe it was true.
The trial has offered a glimpse into the workings of television. Most of the field reporting was of course done not by Correspondent Wallace--that is not his job--but by a CBS producer, George Crile. His task was difficult. In sorting through events more than a decade old, Crile had to discount the prejudices and bitterness left over from a war riddled with ambiguities. His sources sometimes waffled and contradicted each other. After 80 interviews, Crile had to whittle down dozen of hours of videotape and volumes of information into a tight 70-minute package. By necessity, most of the evidence wound up on the cutting-room floor.
In a courtroom studded with ten television monitors, Burt tried to build his case by contrasting the documentary as it was aired with CBS's outtakes, the portions of filmed interviews that were cut from the program. For example, in the documentary, Wallace asks Westmoreland, "Was President Johnson a difficult man to feed bad news about the war?" Westmoreland's answer strongly implies that the general had a motive for being less than frank with the President: "Well, Mike, you know as well as I do that people in senior positions love good news. Politicians or leaders in countries are inclined to shoot the messenger that brings the bad news. Certainly he wanted bad news like a hole in the head." Yet Burt brought out that CBS had cut Westmoreland's next remarks: "He welcomed good news. But he was given both the good and the bad . . ." Confronting Crile on the witness stand, Burt demanded: "Omitting the portion where General Westmoreland said he (Johnson) was given both the good and the bad distorts what General Westmoreland said, does it not, sir?" Crile's response was that Wallace's question turned on what it was like to give bad news.