Col. William Corson; Critic of U.S. Policy in Vietnam War

William Corson, a retired Marine colonel and expert in counterinsurgency who was threatened with a court-martial when he wrote a scathing analysis of U.S. military strategy in Vietnam at the height of the country’s antiwar movement, has died.

Corson, who was 74 and suffered from emphysema and lung cancer, died Monday in a Bethesda, Md., hospital.

He was the author of “The Betrayal,” a book published amid unusual rancor in 1968.

Arguing that America would lose the Vietnam War if it supported a corrupt Saigon government, it was to be released on the day after Corson’s retirement from the Marine Corps.

But Corson, who had fought in three wars during 24 years in the Marines, was not permitted to retire on his scheduled date. Marine Corps officials accused him of violating a regulation requiring approval of statements on public policy by officers. Corson had believed he was exempt from the regulation because the book would be published when he was a civilian.

Unpersuaded by his arguments, a task force was convened to consider his court-martial. The investigation was dropped when publicity over the controversy seemed to be heightening public interest in the book. Corson was given a nonjudicial reprimand and cleared for retirement a month later.

The book won praise from critics. Corson later became a consultant to the Senate Intelligence Committee during its investigation of the CIA in the 1970s. He also taught history at Howard University and wrote several books on national security issues and a Penthouse magazine column for Vietnam veterans.

Once described as looking “surprisingly like a scaled-down George C. Scott with his broken nose, thin lips and high forehead topped by graying curly hair,” Corson showed early the mettle that later would rattle the Pentagon.

He grew up “a slum kid,” by his own account, on the wrong side of Chicago, raised much of the time by grandparents after his parents divorced when he was 2. At 10 he was working a newsstand. At 14, he was touring the country as a migrant worker, picking fruit and learning to gamble. At 15, he entered college, a scholarship student in math and physics at the University of Chicago.

He left the university at 17 to join the Marines and fought in Guam and Bougainville during World War II. After the war, he went back to school, eventually earning a doctorate in economics at American University in Washington.

He fought in Korea, then studied Chinese at the Naval Intelligence School in Washington, mastering four dialects. In the late 1960s he taught a course on communism and revolution at the U.S. Naval Academy, where one of his most devoted students was Oliver North, the White House aide dismissed for his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Ronald Reagan administration.

Twice married, Corson is survived by his second wife, Judith, five children and five grandchildren.

In 1966, he was given command of a tank battalion in Vietnam, whose history he had been studying since the early 1950s when it was still a French colony. He served 13 months in the country, leading 3,500 men in 114 platoons scattered across five provinces in South Vietnam. He headed the combined action program in which a Marine squad of 15 men was merged with a Vietnamese Popular Force platoon of 35, and earned praise for his ability to relate to the Vietnamese peasants and inspire their confidence.

But his job exposed Corson to the rampant dishonesty of local government officials, who often sold U.S. supplies meant for refugees and gouged villagers on rent.

By the time he left Vietnam, he was angry.

“The peasant sees that we are supporting a local government structure he knows to be corrupt,” Corson said in a July 1967 interview with The Times, “so he assumes that we are either stupid or we are implicated. And he decides that we are not stupid.

“The problem here is that we treat the government of Vietnam like we should treat the people, and we treat the people like we should treat the government. Frankly,” he said, “I am not sanguine about the prospects here.”

He returned to a desk job in the Pentagon, but the frustrations he had felt in battle-torn Southeast Asia gnawed at him. He decided to write a book that would blast the South Vietnamese government, American involvement and the military strategy that not only failed to crush the enemy but also turned the South Vietnamese people against their vaunted saviors.

Rising at 5 a.m. every day to write, he was driven by the memory of a young Marine whom he had cradled in his arms in the moments before his death.

“He said to me, ‘Colonel, doesn’t anybody care?’ I told him they did,” he told the Washington Post a short while later. “He asked me why someone didn’t tell them the truth about the war. I said I would. And he grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘Colonel, do it!’ Then he died, right there in my arms.”