Personal Life
While stationed at Fort Sill, he first met the daughter of the post Executive Officer, Katherine (Kitsy) Stevens Van Deusen, 9 years old at the time. They were married in 1947 and had three children: a daughter, Katherine Stevens; a son, James Ripley II; and another daughter, Margaret Childs.
Just hours after Westmoreland was sworn in as Army Chief of Staff on July 7, 1968, his brother-in-law, LTC Frederick Van Deusen (Commander of 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment), was killed when his helicopter was shot down in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam.
Westmoreland died on July 18, 2005, at the age of 91 at the Bishop Gadsden retirement home in Charleston, South Carolina. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease during the final years of his life. He was buried on July 23, 2005, at the West Point Cemetery, United States Military Academy.
The General William C. Westmoreland Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, is named in his honor.
In 1996, the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution authorized the General William C. Westmoreland award. The award is given each year in recognition to an outstanding SAR Veterans Volunteer.
Read more about this topic: William Westmoreland
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the
certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless,
the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called;
nevertheless, the radio broke,
And twelve o’clock arrived just once too often,”
—Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961)
“When this ring
Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)