Quotes from Geoffrey C. Ward

Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be "the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went," he said. "I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists," he said. "And then I want 'em to leave me alone, because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home.

McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say "Vietnam muôn n?m," but, because he wasn't aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like "The little duck, he wants to lie down.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE," Dean Rusk warned not long after the Gulf of Tonkin confrontation, "are already beginning to ask what are we supporting." President Johnson agreed. "The weakest link in our armor is public opinion," he said.

When Nixon won the nomination on the first ballot, James Reston of The New York Times called it "the greatest comeback since Lazarus." For his running mate Nixon picked Spiro Agnew, the once-moderate governor of Maryland, who had won conservative support for the hard and dismissive line he'd taken toward African American leaders after the Baltimore riots following the death of Dr. King.

The crowd began chanting, "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!

Twenty months had now gone by since Nixon's inauguration, and peace seemed no nearer. Thwarted in his desire to strike a bold blow against the North, frustrated at the continuing impasse in Paris, and angered by the antiwar demonstrations that had undermined his ultimatum, the president searched for another opportunity to make the kind of dramatic show of force he thought would force Hanoi to make the concessions that would lead to peace. Cambodia would provide it.

My God, I would never do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean Saigon—not to come to the table because, basically, that was what you got out of your bombing pause, that, good God, we want them over in Paris. We've got to get them to Paris or you can't have peace….I just want you to know, I'm not trying to interfere with your conduct of it. I mean I'll only do what you and Rusk want me to do, but I'll do anything…

President Nixon's first reaction when he heard the story was to investigate those who reported the killing. He demanded to know who was backing them: "It's those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it," he was sure of it. He instructed his aides to "discredit witnesses," investigate Seymour Hersh and Mike Wallace, "get ring-wingers with us," and "get out the facts about [communist] atrocities at Hue.

On election day, Nixon was elected president with 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey's 42.7 percent, a margin of just seven-tenths of 1 percent. Clandestine maneuvering may have helped him win that narrow victory—"Nixon probably would not be president if it were not for [President] Thieu," his speechwriter William Safire once admitted—but Nixon's fear that the maneuvering might someday be exposed would eventually help bring about his undoing.

Interviewed many years later about the impact upon him of Lenin's writings, Ho's stilted language could not disguise his initial excitement: "What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: 'Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to liberation.

During the 1930s, Ho remembered, his was "a voice crying in the wilderness." But through it all, one friend recalled, he remained "taut and quivering…with only one thought, his country, Vietnam.

AS A NATION-STATE, Vietnam is younger than the United States. The S-shaped region we now know as Vietnam—stretching more than a thousand miles from China's southern border to the Ca Mau Peninsula in the Gulf of Thailand—was not effectively united under a single ruler until 1802. In that year, a general who called himself Gia Long emerged from thirty years of civil war and established the Nguyen dynasty.

French mercenaries armed with up-to-date weaponry had helped Gia Long establish his empire, and he had granted trading concessions to them in exchange for their help. But neither he nor any of his successors was comfortable with their presence or with that of the European missionaries who had been at work converting Vietnamese to Roman Catholicism for more than a century.

In 1858, when the emperor had two missionaries executed, France sent a fleet to seize the port of Danang. French naval forces took Saigon the following year and then forced the emperor to cede the three surrounding provinces to them. Over the four decades that followed, French forces captured Hue and Hanoi and steadily extended their power and influence until the French colonial government could officially declare in 1900 that the "pacification of Indochina" was complete.

The great [Indochinese] possessions," wrote an early colonial administrator, "should be organized as true states…and made to possess all the characteristics that define states, except one: political independence.

WE APPARENTLY stand quite alone," Ho told a Western reporter in Hanoi that fall. No nation, not even the Soviet Union, was willing to recognize his government. Even the French Communist Party he had helped to found refused to support Indochinese independence. "We shall have to depend on ourselves.

On April 24, the CIA reported that Diem was about to ask that the number of American advisers be greatly reduced. "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam," President Kennedy privately told a friend that evening. "These people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the communists and then get the people to reelect me.

But privately, the ongoing struggle in Indochina filled him with dread. "I feel just like I grabbed a big juicy worm," he told an aide, "with a right sharp hook in the middle of it." The president had opposed the coup that overthrew and murdered Ngo Dinh Diem, fearing it would make a bad situation worse. It had.