Quotes About History

At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.

Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.

I'd like President Bush to think maybe there's another way to think, that maybe Kissinger was wrong when he says we had to go in there because he was wrong about Vietnam.

Being in Vietnam and being around a major story of the time was always a great shot of adrenaline.

My mind-set is Munich. Most of my generation's is Vietnam.

If the war has faded into history, democracy's defeat in Vietnam has left deep marks in the consciousness of both nations.

Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.

My father had gone to Vietnam.

I was too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam.

It is a fact that the Left routinely resists, then as now: Americans fought and died in Vietnam for freedom, just as they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Whatever mistakes generals and policymakers have made along the way cannot detract from that essential truth - which should be a part of any reliable history.

Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

A country that has been through as much as Vietnam has to have some crazy music somewhere.

Experience helped Richard Nixon, but it didn't save him, and it certainly wasn't a blanket endorsement. He blundered terribly in dealing with Vietnam.

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

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

I've always been interested in Vietnam, feel it's a seminal event in our nation's history, and have explored it over the years - but I hadn't been interested in doing a documentary about it. I felt there had been a lot done about Vietnam, and didn't know if I could add anything new to the discussion.

For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling.

Vietnam ended a failure: repeatedly, to me, Kissinger described it as his greatest, and most persistent regret. But Congress was more to blame than Kissinger.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

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