Barry Goldwater Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When the United States bombs South Vietnam, it is defending South Vietnam.

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

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

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.

The decision to use the atom bomb on Japanese cities, and the consequent buildup of enormous nuclear arsenals, was made by governments, on the basis of political and military perceptions.

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

By the mid-sixties, the United States had poured more than half a million troops into South Vietnam.

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.

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.

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

I do not regard the atomic bomb as a new weapon merely, but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man in the universe.

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.

The only way we want to give them [the Iranians] arms is dropping them from the bay of a B-1 bomber.

Our best chance of success is a policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam. We believe the risks of such a policy are real but acceptable. Measured against the cost of defeat, this program seems cheap.

The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available. ... Therefore, we must expect that if another war — a serious war — breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form.