William P. Bundy Quotes

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.

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.

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

War is often about making the least-worst decision. The same could be said about politics. But the stakes are higher in war, when the commander-in-chief is called upon to defend the nation.

Other than being crazy enough to press a button, there is nothing that Putin can do militarily to fundamentally alter American interests.

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.

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

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

We cannot assert that the policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam. It may fail and we cannot estimate the odds of success with any accuracy.

I knew we were going to get into this sort of a mess when we went in there. And I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese.

Ever since 1954, when the United States did not sign the Geneva accords but instead started down the road of unilateral military action in South Vietnam, we have become a provocateur of military conflict in Southeast Asia and marched in the opposite direction from fulfilling our obligations under the United Nations Charter.

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.

The United States is involved in a war in Vietnam. American troops will stay until victory.

I agree that obviously we cannot retreat from our position in Vietnam…. But we are going to have to muddle through for a while and see what we do.

I felt only a conservative president could bring peace in Vietnam 'cause he wouldn't be accused of being soft on communism.

Obama's decision to leave, to not sustain the victory that resulted after eight years of fighting, from 2003 to 2011 in Iraq, was another incredibly stupid decision. It was totally based on politics, not based on any notion of national security. It's a nightmare for our national security. And then you have the Libya intervention.

Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective - taking over the South by force - could not be achieved.

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.

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

The Arab view that someone should bomb Iran and stop it from developing nuclear weapons is familiar to anyone who meets privately with Arab leaders, especially in the Gulf.

During the Cold War, America took sides not only in disputes between Arab countries, but also in debates within them.

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to 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.

I don't think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran.

You know, it's very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following the crisis in Cuba, following the Khrushchev - beating down of Jack Kennedy in Vienna, that President Kennedy believed that we had to join the battle for the Third World, and the next crisis that developed in that regards was Vietnam.