The Vietnam War Quotes

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but human nature remains the same.”
― Ken Burns, The Vietnam War

“It's difficult to dispel arrogance if you retain ignorance.”
― Ken Burns, The Vietnam War

“Nixon became tense and agitated, had trouble sleeping, drank heavily in the evenings, and wrote himself notes to keep his courage up—“Need for Self-Discipline in all areas. Polls v. right decision. Dare to do it right—alone.” He repeatedly watched the film Patton, in which George C. Scott, playing the World War II hero and standing before a giant American flag, intoned lines he especially liked: “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war…because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Twenty months had now gone by since Nixon’s inauguration, and peace seemed no nearer. Thwarted in his desire to strike a bold blow against the North, frustrated at the continuing impasse in Paris, and angered by the antiwar demonstrations that had undermined his ultimatum, the president searched for another opportunity to make the kind of dramatic show of force he thought would force Hanoi to make the concessions that would lead to peace. Cambodia would provide it.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“So I went to Canada,” he recalled. “I remember that last beautiful drive, from Seattle to Vancouver, all the towering Douglas firs along the road. It was January 4, 1970. After we crossed the border, it was a breeze, they just sort of waved us through and I remember just looking in the rearview mirror, thinking, ‘Man, there goes my country. I’ll never see it again.’ I get called a coward all the time. It took me a long time not to feel that what I had done was cowardly, because I still had that ingrained military feeling inside. Now I think that was the bravest thing I ever did.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“ON THURSDAY EVENING, November 13, the day after the My Lai story ran in newspapers across the country, more than forty thousand people began gathering at Arlington National Cemetery for what was called a “March of Death.” For thirty-eight straight hours and in the face of biting cold and gusts of driving rain, they streamed in single file across the Arlington Bridge and on into the heart of the nation’s capital. A placard hung from each marcher’s neck bearing the name of someone who had been killed in the war, and when they passed the White House they shouted it out. Most marchers were young, but here and there were older people—parents or family members, presumably—who had asked for particular names. (Thirty-odd names had tactfully been withdrawn when families objected to their being displayed.) The long procession ended at the Capitol, where each placard was slipped into a wooden coffin.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“President Nixon’s first reaction when he heard the story was to investigate those who reported the killing. He demanded to know who was backing them: “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it,” he was sure of it. He instructed his aides to “discredit witnesses,” investigate Seymour Hersh and Mike Wallace, “get ring-wingers with us,” and “get out the facts about [communist] atrocities at Hue.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“What had happened at My Lai may have shocked the American public. But it was not news to the Army. Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had tried to stop the massacre, reported what he had seen. So did at least five other pilots. The word went steadily up the chain of command—all the way to the division commander, Major General Samuel W. Koster. No one took any action. Instead, the brigade log was falsified to say that 128 Viet Cong had been killed by U.S. artillery. The slaughter was covered up. The Army Public Information Office released a widely disseminated story that described an operation that “went like clockwork” in which the “jungle warriors” of the Eleventh Brigade had killed 128 Viet Cong in a running “day-long battle,” chalking up the largest body count in the brigade’s history. On the strength of reports like these, General Westmoreland had sent his official congratulations.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Hanoi professed to be unimpressed by what it called “puppetization.” “It is nothing but hackneyed juggling,” said the North Vietnamese premier, Pham Van Dong. “To use Vietnamese to fight Vietnamese is indeed an attractive policy for the United States. When one has money and guns, can there be a better way to reach one’s aims than simply to distribute money and guns? Unfortunately, in the present epoch, such a paradoxical move is flatly impossible….Certainly there is no means, no magic way, to ‘ize’ the war into something other than the most atrocious and most abominable war in history.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“On election day, Nixon was elected president with 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, a margin of just seven-tenths of 1 percent. Clandestine maneuvering may have helped him win that narrow victory—“Nixon probably would not be president if it were not for [President] Thieu,” his speechwriter William Safire once admitted—but Nixon’s fear that the maneuvering might someday be exposed would eventually help bring about his undoing.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Walt Rostow encouraged Johnson to “blow the whistle” and “destroy” Nixon. Dean Rusk urged him to keep silent: since the story came from someone in Saigon, the White House need say nothing, he argued, and to confirm it would expose the “special channels that we don’t make public.” Clark Clifford shared Rusk’s concern, and added another: he found “some elements of the story…so shocking that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story, and then possibly have a certain individual elected. It could cast his administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interest.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“My God, I would never do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean Saigon—not to come to the table because, basically, that was what you got out of your bombing pause, that, good God, we want them over in Paris. We’ve got to get them to Paris or you can’t have peace….I just want you to know, I’m not trying to interfere with your conduct of it. I mean I’ll only do what you and Rusk want me to do, but I’ll do anything…”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“JOHNSON: And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason. [The 1799 Logan Act forbids any American citizen from negotiating with a foreign government without authorization.] DIRKSEN: I know. JOHNSON: I know this, that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war. DIRKSEN: That’s a mistake. JOHNSON: And it’s a damn bad mistake. Now, I can identify them, because I know who is doing this. I don’t want to identify it. I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“The crowd began chanting, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“The editors of The Boston Globe wrote that there really was a “new Nixon.” “Gone is the lack of self-confidence, gone the scarcely concealed conviction that he was just a political accident who really did not belong in the Big Time, gone the almost self-evident apprehension that he would be found out sooner or later as an upstart tyro….What Mr. Nixon has done and done superbly is to list the problems confronting the nation. His testing period will come when (and if) he spells out what he proposes to do about them.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“When Nixon won the nomination on the first ballot, James Reston of The New York Times called it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” For his running mate Nixon picked Spiro Agnew, the once-moderate governor of Maryland, who had won conservative support for the hard and dismissive line he’d taken toward African American leaders after the Baltimore riots following the death of Dr. King.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“THAT SUMMER, before shipping out to Vietnam, Mogie Crocker came home for a visit. “We were at dinner one evening,” his mother recalled, “and just talking in generalities about the war. And he said, ‘Of course if I were Vietnamese I probably would be on the side of the Viet Cong.’ I puzzled over that. And my husband did, too. I suppose Mogie was relating it to our American Revolution, that he saw their need for their own freedom. But as an American citizen, he also saw the larger picture of trying to prevent communism.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“THE AMERICAN PEOPLE,” Dean Rusk warned not long after the Gulf of Tonkin confrontation, “are already beginning to ask what are we supporting.” President Johnson agreed. “The weakest link in our armor is public opinion,” he said.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say “Vietnam muôn năm,” but, because he wasn’t aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like “The little duck, he wants to lie down.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be “the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went,” he said. “I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists,” he said. “And then I want ’em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“But privately, the ongoing struggle in Indochina filled him with dread. “I feel just like I grabbed a big juicy worm,” he told an aide, “with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.” The president had opposed the coup that overthrew and murdered Ngo Dinh Diem, fearing it would make a bad situation worse. It had.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“In foreign affairs, Johnson was admittedly less self-assured. “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to,” he once said. To deal with them, he retained in office all of his predecessor’s top advisers—Dean Rusk at State, Robert McNamara at Defense, McGeorge Bundy as his National Security Advisor. “You’re the men I trust the most,” he told them. “You’re the ablest men I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that you’re President Kennedy’s friends, but you are the best anywhere and you must stay. I want you to stand by me.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“President Kennedy was not so sure. He was appalled that Diem and Nhu had been killed. Three days later, he dictated his own rueful account of the coup and his concerns for the future. Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon….I feel that we [at the White House] must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of…August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined. I was shocked by the deaths of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem…many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether…public opinion in Saigon—the intellectuals, students, etc.—will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Tension between Catholics and Buddhists was not new. Many Buddhists identified Catholicism with France and foreignness, and saw the Ngo brothers’ doctrine of “personalism” as equally alien. (Communism, too, was seen as foreign and therefore unsuited to Vietnam.)”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“On April 24, the CIA reported that Diem was about to ask that the number of American advisers be greatly reduced. “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam,” President Kennedy privately told a friend that evening. “These people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the communists and then get the people to reelect me.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Defense Secretary McNamara agreed with Taylor and Rostow that their report should be fully implemented. But Secretary of State Rusk thought such a small force was unlikely to alter the outcome in Vietnam and worried that Diem might prove in the end to be a “losing horse.” Assistant Secretary of State George Ball was more blunt. “Taylor is wrong,” he warned the president. “Within five years we’ll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again. That was the French experience.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“But for all of Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric, for all the talent he gathered around him, the first months of his administration went badly: the president failed to call off a CIA-inspired invasion of Cuba that ended in disaster; he was unable to keep Khrushchev from building the Berlin Wall; and he was harshly criticized when, rather than commit U.S. forces to fight communist guerrillas in the jungles of Laos, as ex-President Eisenhower had urged him to do, he had instead agreed to enter negotiations aimed at “neutralizing” that kingdom. “There are just so many concessions that we can make in one year and survive politically,” he told a friend in the spring of 1961. “We just can’t have another defeat this year in Vietnam.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“This is another type of warfare,” Kennedy said, “new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Like most Americans,” McNamara remembered many years later, “I saw communism as monolithic. I believed the Soviets and the Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony.” To him—and to Kennedy and most of the men closest to him—it seemed clear that the “Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines….We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements—as they largely appear in hindsight—but as signs of a unified communist drive for hegemony in Asia.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Mai was thirteen years old in 1954, when fear forced her and the rest of her family to flee the North and begin new lives in Saigon. “Saigon was like a foreign country to us at the time,” she recalled. Some hated us for having abandoned the Viet Minh and clung to the French; others saw us as carpetbaggers who were going to steal their jobs and their rice bowls, or who were going to drive up the price of everything and make life difficult for everyone….Instead of seeing us as compatriots, many people thought of us as aliens: they called themselves “Vietnamese,” while calling us “Northerners.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History