Orson Bean Quotes

We in the United States are aware of the vital importance of the struggle in Indochina to the cause of the free world

My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists frankly that they've got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the stone age.

President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone.

From its inception, South Vietnam was only considered to be an outpost in the war against communism.

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

Reviewing the record of American intervention in Indochina in the Pentagon Papers, one cannot fail to be struck by the continuity of basic assumptions from one administration to the next. Never has there been the slightest deviation from the principle that a noncommunist regime must be imposed and defended, regardless of popular sentiment.

A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.

The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.

Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.

The United States of America… cannot have a viable foreign policy if we are humiliated in Vietnam. We must not lose in Vietnam. It’s as cold as that. Right?... And they have not given us any way to avoid being humiliated. And since they have not, we must draw the sword, so the blockade is on.

These four mongrels are supposed to be our defense against Communism and the extremes of Arab Nationalism in the Middle East.

I was never able to convince myself that there was a cost-free alternative course, as from 1961, or that any of the different strategies since proposed, especially those involving stronger military action, would have made sense.

Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.

As for Vietnam, what matters is that Kennedy successfully resisted pressure to send anything more than military advisers, a stance that was a likely prelude to complete withdrawal from the conflict. There is solid evidence of his eagerness to end America's military role in that country's civil war.

Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.

The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.

The Sandinista government became consumed with fighting a war of survival. They were up against the biggest superpower in the world.

Johnson had been the most powerful man in the world, yet the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had resisted, overcome his power, broken his will.

In the end, we lost IndoChina to the communists. But we did not lose Southeast Asia.

In Asia, the 2 Vietnams will be united under a Communist regime, as will North and South Korea.

I'd drop a low-yield atomic bomb on Chinese supply lines in North Vietnam.

We do not stand equally distant from the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union … American troops are in West Germany in order that free trade unions exist and Soviet troops are in Poland to see to it that free trade unions there do not exist. That is the difference.

If South Vietnam falls to the Communists, Laos and Cambodia would certainly go, followed by Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and eventually the Philippines

Actually, the United States has been deeply involved in the fate of Vietnam since 1949 when the decision was made to subsidize the continuation of French rule against the Communist Vietminh rebellion

Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force.