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Saigon 30 April 1975: The last Americans and their Vietnamese dependents are evacuated from the roof of the US Embassy.
WORDS ON WAR
Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, speech, New York Times, October 13, 1960:
Should I become President...I will not risk American lives...by permitting any other nation to drag us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time through an unwise commitment that is unwise militarily, unnecessary to our security and unsupported by our allies.
President John F. Kennedy, 1962:
Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.
Governor Ronald Reagan, 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.
US General Curtis LeMay, May 1964:
Tell the Vietnamese they've got to draw in their horns or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964:
This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.
Ronald Reagan, interview, Fresno Bee, October 10, 1965:
It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home for Christmas.
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965:
I have asked the commanding general, general Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting agression. He has told me. And we will meet his needs. We cannot be defeated by force of arms. We will stand in Vietnam.
Reverend Martin Luther King, 1967:
“One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society...shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”
US Senator George McGovern, speech to U.S. Senate, April 25, 1967:
We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it....I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.
President Richard Nixon, 1973:
We have finally achieved peace with honor.
Professor Marshall McLuhan, 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.
US ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1979:
Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 1982: Vietnam is still with us. Ít has created doubts about American judgement, about American credibility, about American power - not only at home but throughout the world. So we paid an exorbitant price for the decisions that were made in good faith and for good purpose.
US novelist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, 1986:
America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We are the richest people in the world and they are among the poorest. We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them help - because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.
Vietnam War correspondent and author Michael Herr, 1989:
All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect, 1995:
One reason the Kennedy and Johnson administrations failed to take an orderly, rational approach to the basic questions underlying Vietnam was the staggering variety and complexity of other issues we faced. Simply put, we faced a blizzard of problems, there were only twenty-four hours in a day, and we often did not have time to think straight.
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