Patience plays an important role in almost every cross-examination. You’ve got to be sure that you have patiently laid the trap in a way that the witness is not gonna be able to get out of before you spring it. Far too many lawyers rush in and sorta close the trap before they got the witness entirely encircled. So, I think patience is important in every cross examination. But patience was particularly important in the cross-examination of General Westmoreland.

This was more than 30 years ago, and at that point in time, General Westmoreland was an American hero. There’d been a lot of criticism of the Vietnam War while it was going on. 10, 15 years afterwards, people were, I think, reflecting on it. He’d been a commander, and he looked every inch a general. He was strikingly handsome, sat erect, you know, 6’3, 6’4. He looked like the kind of person central casting would give you to play an American general.

And he was a person of great integrity, and that came across. He was simple, he was direct, and his direct examination was very, very powerful. And what was important was for the jury to understand that he had, despite these qualities, that he was obviously a patriot, he’s obviously somebody who had dedicated his life to serving his country. But what the jury had to understand is those very qualities of commitment to what he was doing had led him to deceive the American people about the war.

The basic principle of the documentary that he claimed libel was that an order to gain American support to win the war, he had misled the public about how well the war was doing. Now, in fact, I think the evidence of that is pretty overwhelming. But to try to convince a jury of that in the face of his denials was something that took a lot of patience, because if I’d gone at him directly, right after his direct examination, I would have, I think, gotten the jury unhappy with me, mad at me, because they clearly liked him.

And he was very likeable, and they wanted to believe him. And so I had to them to begin to doubt him before I really began to press him. And I had some things that he had said that were inconsistent, and there’s a natural tendency to want to just pound him with those. But if I’d done that early on, I could have risked offending the jury, and I could have risked the jury beginning to be sympathetic for him and failing really, to focus, on some of the inconsistencies.

So, it took me three days, really, to take him down, but it was a process of slowly getting the jury to understand that this was not quite as straight, quite not as direct, quite not as honest a person giving answers as he had appeared. And what you would do, is you would say, Now, General, you said this, and I think understand what you’re saying. But it’s a little confusing to me because you also said this. Now, I’m sure there’s an explanation, but could you give me that explanation?

And he’d give you an explanation, and you’d say, Well, I don’t really understand how what you just said reconciles these two. Could you explain it again? And then he’d give an explanation, and you’d move on. It wasn’t satisfactory, but instead of just beating him up on that, you’d go on and say, I’m not sure I understand, but let me move on to another point. And then you’d give him another thing, and you’d go through the same process.

And as you went through those, the jury began to understand that those answers didn’t really mix and match. Those answers didn’t really answer the question of how could you reconcile these two statements. He’d say one thing in his testimony, and then here’s a document that appears inconsistent. And his attempt to say, Oh, that’s entirely consistent, the jury could see that they weren’t entirely consistent. And now they’re beginning to doubt him a little bit.

And that allowed me to step up the pace, begin now to press him a little bit more, until finally in the last day it was pretty intense.