Stephen Ambrose Quotes

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Lyndon Johnson WAS the Vietnam War. Without the paranoia of Johnson there would never have been a Vietnam.

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

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

One hour ago, President Johnson informed me that Egyptian forces are preparing an attack on Israeli positions and that this attack is to be launched. If such a thing happens, then the United States will consider itself freed from the commitments it gave to the USSR to exercise restraint.

America never formally surrenders, so we have to call surrender something else. In Vietnam, we called it Vietnamization.

If America would withdraw from South Korea, there could be a power struggle between such as China and Japan.

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

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.

President Bush spent last night calling world leaders to support the war with Iraq and it is sad when the most powerful man on earth is yelling, 'I know you're there, pick up, pick up.

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.

I don't think the Middle East could afford another war.

I believe Johnson understood that the reason was Vietnam. I also believe that he felt that if there was a way to communicate the real issues in Vietnam, that the reasons would be answered or understood. But there was just no way to communicate.

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.

When two giants meet with each other, when there is too little room for them on the world's surface, they try to measure their strength in order to decide by war the debatable question of hegemony.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

Word War III is about to start and we cannot change the position on Vietnam.

[On Vietnam:] Kennedy cooked the soup that Johnson had to eat.

I know you Americans want a war but I'm not going to let you have it.

For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent …