You can kill ten of my men for everyone I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.

–Ho Chi Minh to the French, late 1940s

You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.

–Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

–John F. Kennedy, 1961

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.

–Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

Tell the Vietnamese they’ve got to draw in their horns or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.

–Gen. Curtis LeMay, May 1964

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

–Lyndon Johnson, Oct. 1964

We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.

–Ronald Reagan, 1964

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . .We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

–Ronald Reagan, 1965

I see light at the end of the tunnel.

–Walt W. Rostow, National Security Adviser, Dec. 1967

The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I’d call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America’s whole culture–aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn’t part of the local atmosphere.

–Stephen Vizinczey, 1968

Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

–Richard M. Nixon, 1969

I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war.

–Richard Nixon, Oct. 1969

This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart.

–Sen. Frank Church, May 1970

By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.

–Frances Fitzgerald, 1972

We believe that peace is at hand.

–Henry Kissinger, Oct. 1972

You have my assurance that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.

–Richard Nixon in a letter to President Thieu, Jan. 1973

If the Americans do not want to support us anymore, let them go, get out! Let them forget their humanitarian promises!

–Nguyen Van Thieu, April 1975

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America–not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

–Marshall McLuhan, 1975

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.

–Gerald Ford, April 1975

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

–Michael Herr, 1977

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

–Henry Kissinger, 1979

It’s time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause.

–Ronald Reagan, Oct. 1980

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.

–Philip Caputo, 1982

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.

–Myra MacPherson, 1984

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

–Richard M. Nixon, 1985