McGeorge Bundy Quotes

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.

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

Let us talk honestly. You know that your troops are in Laos; we know it; the Lao people know it; and the world knows it.

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.

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.

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 Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

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.

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.

We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. But I can't give up a piece of territory as big as South Vietnam and still have the people re-elect me.

The U.S. never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war.

The reality is that we have missed a lot of opportunities in Iraq because of a failed policy.

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 journalistic mission was straightforward: to await the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nobody knew quite when this would be. But the diplomacy - the meetings in the U.N. security council, the allegations about weapons of mass destruction, the martial language of Tony Blair and George W. Bush - all suggested a war was brewing.

The fact is, Bush's war policy has failed. It's failed! Who better to say so than Jack Murtha?

Carter's hopes died when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and he ended up having to reverse policy and launch the military buildup that Reagan continued. Mr. Obama would be forced back into a war on terror if terrorist groups pull off enough damaging or frightening attacks to force this issue to the fore.

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

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

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

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

In North Korea, grass is a vegetable eaten by the people, and they've got nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, something more stringent than what's been done to North Korea is going to have to work; otherwise, a military strike is the only option.

After Vietnam, the Democrats became fundamentally the anti-military as a party.

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.