Tet Offensive Quotes

South Vietnam faces total defeat, and soon.

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

What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.

It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

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

Much of the conventional wisdom associated with Vietnam was highly inaccurate. Far from an inevitable result of the imperative to contain communism, the war was only made possible through lies and deceptions aimed at the American public, Congress, and members of Lyndon Johnson's own administration.

The French repulsed wave after wave of frontal attacks at Dien Bien Phu. The 1968 Tet offensive against the U.S. was a military disaster that effectively destroyed the Viet Cong. But Giap persisted and prevailed.

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

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

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.

Don't forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.

Today we have two Vietnams, side by side, north and south.

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?

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

When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.

Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective - taking over the South by force - could not be achieved.

I've made this statement many times: If I would have to do it over again, I would have made known the forthcoming Tet Offensive.

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

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

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.

Enough is enough. This is how we get started in Vietnam.

Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war.

This is the voice of Vietnam Broadcasting from Hanoi, capitol of the Democratic republic of Vietnam.

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

I have lost middle America.