George McGovern Quotes

The Vietnam War was a tragedy waiting to happen, but one made much worse by countless errors along the way, in many of which I had a part.

We seem bent on saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it.

We’ve got to get out of Vietnam or else we have to educate the people as to why we are in there.

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.

America lost its face with the debacle of the Vietnam War.

Those of us who finally saw through the Vietnam war saw through this war, and all the actions that were necessary to end the Vietnam war will be necessary here. I think the American people will get us out of this war.

The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted.

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.

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 was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

We must win in Iraq. If we withdraw, there will be chaos; there will be genocide; and they will follow us home.

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

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.

It [the Vietnam War] is worse than immoral. It's a mistake.

I think you are going to have to send troops to Vietnam and if you do, I will come up from Gettysburg to support you.

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

Vietnam was not a war for us to be in …. It was a useless war.

It looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea …. What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is it worth to this country?

[There are] some Nervous Nellies ... who will ... break ranks under the strain [of the Vietnam war]. And some will turn on their own leaders and their own country, and on our own fighting men.

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.

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.

We we’re wrong, terribly wrong [about the Vietnam war.]

The United States will stand by South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem until we win.

Vietnam was God’s instrument for bringing the American empire to its knees.

The U.S. cannot be the policeman of the world. When we tried that in Vietnam, they beat us up.