Saturday, May 20, 2006
CBS's George Crile dies (and a snippet from my George magazine interview with Gen. Westmoreland)
CBS producer George Crile, died earlier this week.
See here.
As many of you may remember, he was the guy who produced a documentary about Vietnam that said General Westmoreland "under-reported" enemy troop strength around the time of the TET Offensive.
I drove down to Charleston to interview Westmoreland for George magazine in 1997. And John Kennedy, Jr. went to Vietnam to interview Westmoreland's counterpart Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.
Kennedy's and my pieces were published together as a single point-counter-point project on the anniversary of TET (George, Nov. 1998).
Anyway, as I sat in Westmoreland's living room sipping iced tea, I asked him the following question (from the actual unedited transcript), which led to his comments about George Crile:
SMITH: General, as I understand it, you filed a $120 million suit against CBS after they aired a television documentary (The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception) which made the allegation that you deliberately underestimated enemy strength in Vietnam in order to bolster your own claims of military success. Then the case was settled out of court?
WESTMORELAND: Well, I went against the entire network. The man that brought about that event was George Crile. He caused me to sue them. They put him on ice. He disappeared. But I think he’s still on the payroll. He was an SOB. He fabricated a story to make headlines and they got hurt. It was not a happy time. But I couldn’t have slept if I hadn’t taken them on. And they got what they deserved. They got their just desserts. They were the outstanding network at the time, but they haven’t been since.
See here.
As many of you may remember, he was the guy who produced a documentary about Vietnam that said General Westmoreland "under-reported" enemy troop strength around the time of the TET Offensive.
I drove down to Charleston to interview Westmoreland for George magazine in 1997. And John Kennedy, Jr. went to Vietnam to interview Westmoreland's counterpart Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap.
Kennedy's and my pieces were published together as a single point-counter-point project on the anniversary of TET (George, Nov. 1998).
Anyway, as I sat in Westmoreland's living room sipping iced tea, I asked him the following question (from the actual unedited transcript), which led to his comments about George Crile:
SMITH: General, as I understand it, you filed a $120 million suit against CBS after they aired a television documentary (The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception) which made the allegation that you deliberately underestimated enemy strength in Vietnam in order to bolster your own claims of military success. Then the case was settled out of court?
WESTMORELAND: Well, I went against the entire network. The man that brought about that event was George Crile. He caused me to sue them. They put him on ice. He disappeared. But I think he’s still on the payroll. He was an SOB. He fabricated a story to make headlines and they got hurt. It was not a happy time. But I couldn’t have slept if I hadn’t taken them on. And they got what they deserved. They got their just desserts. They were the outstanding network at the time, but they haven’t been since.
# posted by W. Thomas Smith, Jr. @ 8:42 AM 
