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ings, Westmoreland cooperated with the administration
and added his opinion. On 21
November, he addressed the National Press Club.
Among his remarks he said that "We have
reached an important point when the end comes
into view." He added that the transition to the
final phase "lies within our grasp." During questioning
he stated that the United States could
begin to turn the war over to South Vietnam in
two years." To some journalists, Westmoreland's
comments seemed to portend victory and reassure
people with doubts about the war. Those
discouraging or alarming reports tended to be
discounted by those in charge at both ends of the
Saigon-Washington command chairi."
(U) The rationale for the optimism of
Westmoreland and others lay in their view of the
progress in the war which, in turn, was based on
official reports from a variety of statistical
sources: the pacification programs, estimates of
order of battle, and numerical strength of communist
forces in Vietnam. On the civilian side, the
pacification program finally seemed to be working.
Robert Komer, who held the rank of ambassador
Gust below Ellsworth Bunker in the civilian
hierarchy), had reorganized all of the previous,
disparate rural pacification efforts under CORDS
(Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development
Support) with himself at the apex. Using
highly talented people like John Paul Vann (the
former military advisor) and Daniel Ellsberg,
Komer planned to contest the NLF's control of
the villages using their own tactics and techniques
against the communists - a call for an
American-supervised "revolution" in South
Vietnam." Bythe fall of 1967, Komer could claim,
based on the Hamlet Evaluation Survey, that
nearly 75 percent of South Vietnamese villages
were pacified. This percentage translated into
about twelve million people.
(V) General Westmo~e1qnc\ addresses the Nattonal
Press club in November 1967
Program was run by Komer's CIA assistant,
William Colby, formerly the COS, Saigon, who
had organized the predecessor efforts to OPLAN
34A. In later years, the Phoenix Program would
come under severe criticism. Left largely to the
South Vietnamese intelligence services to implement,
it became a means for settling blood feuds
and outright blackmail. Certainly, Phoenix hurt
the communists; they admitted as much after the
war. However, the extravagant claims for success
were measured by the numbers of suspects "neutralized"
in some fashion or another. No one
could be certain if the numbers bandied about the
offices in Saigon and Washington represented
real communists or innocents swept up in its
talons.
(U) Allied with the pacification program was
the infamous Phung Hoang, or the Phoenix
Program, which aimed at physically eliminating
the Viet Cong infrastructure. The Phoenix
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