William Westmoreland Quotes

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

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

It became very clear that Hanoi was in effect strategically running the Viet Cong operation.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

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

Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam were perfect for Lyndon Johnson: 220 million against 18 million, water buffalo and all. No risk, really.

Over time the maintenance of U.S. credibility quietly supplanted the stated policy objective of a free and independent South Vietnam.

South Vietnam is now undergoing an acute crisis of confidence. The United States must demonstrate by deeds—not merely words—the American commitment seriously to help save Vietnam. To be persuasive, this commitment must include the sending to Vietnam of some U. S. military forces.

The real invasion of South Vietnam which was directed largely against the rural society began directly in 1962 after many years of working through mercenaries and client groups. And that fact simply does not exist in official American history. There is no such event in American history as the attack on South Vietnam. That's gone. Of course, It is a part of real history. But it's not a part of official history.

When a country is invaded and attacked and people resist it's important to speak up and to say they have the right to resist and to defend their right to resist.

There's just no question that the United States was trying desperately to prevent the independence of South Vietnam and to prevent a political settlement inside South Vietnam. And in fact it went to war precisely to prevent that. It finally bombed the North in 1965 with the purpose of trying to get the North to use its influence to call off the insurgency in the South.

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

By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?

The Russians feared Ike [Eisenhower, in Korea]. They didn't fear me [in Vietnam].

[Vietnam was] the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We cannot lose Afghanistan

I don't recall anyone who was strongly against except one man, and that was the President [JFK]. The President just didn't want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do.... It was really the President's personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn't go in.

Curtis Le May wants to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong. You know how he likes to go around bombing.

Every book that comes out, every article that comes out, talks about how - while it may have been a "mistake" or an "unwise effort" - the United States was defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. And they portray those who opposed the war as apologists for North Vietnam. That's standard to say. The purpose is obvious: to obscure the fact that the United States did attack South Vietnam and the major war was fought against South Vietnam.

Avain attempt to subdue that unsubduable country.

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.

Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.

I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.