The Vietnam War Quotes

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but human nature remains the same.”
― Ken Burns, The Vietnam War

“It's difficult to dispel arrogance if you retain ignorance.”
― Ken Burns, The Vietnam War

“FOR SIX MONTHS in the winter, spring, and summer of 1919, Paris was the center of the world. The Great War had ended. The victorious Great Powers—Britain, France, Italy, and the United States—were redrawing much of the world’s map, “as if they were dividing cake,” one diplomat noted in his diary. The city’s streets teemed with petitioners from nearly everywhere on earth, eager to enhance their own position in the final settlement: Africans, Armenians, Bessarabians, Irishmen, Koreans, Kurds, Poles, Ukrainians, Palestinians, Zionists, and desert Arabs in flowing white robes all elbowed their way past French war widows dressed in black. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson compared the colorful scene to “a riot in a parrot house.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“There is no evidence that Wilson ever saw the petition, but it was understandable that colonized peoples looked to him for help. His Fourteen Points, the wartime statement of Allied principles intended to guarantee fairness in the peace negotiations, had pledged that during “the free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” the interests of the colonized should be given “equal weight” with those of the colonizers. That was precisely what the Vietnamese petitioners wanted. As a subject people, they declared, Wilson’s advocacy of self-determination had filled them “with hope…that an era of rights and justice [was opening] to them.” They did not demand independence from France, but they did call for “a permanent delegation of native people elected to attend the French parliament” as well as freedom of speech and association and foreign travel, technical and professional schools in every province, and equal treatment under the law.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“The French Ministry of Colonies and the secret police demanded to know just who this agitator was. Three undercover agents were assigned to report on his every move. He called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc—“Nguyen the Patriot”—but his real name was Nguyen Tat Thanh. During his long, shadowy career he would assume some seventy different identities, finally settling on “Ho the Most Enlightened”—Ho Chi Minh—the name by which he remains best known (and by which he will be known in these pages).”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“But the roots of Vietnamese civilization stretch back much farther, to the centuries before the Christian era when Chinese chroniclers wrote of the “hundred Viets”—an assortment of non-Chinese peoples scattered across the Red River Delta in the North. (“Viet” in Chinese meant “those from beyond”—foreigners.) Off and on for a thousand years, Chinese rulers sought to conquer these groups, and Vietnamese folklore is filled with the stories of heroes and heroines who led resistance against them.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“The Vietnamese may have often resented their powerful neighbor to the north, but their daily lives came to be profoundly influenced by Chinese culture—from the chopsticks they wielded to the way in which they were governed. The education and civil service systems followed strict Confucian lines; to serve the emperor, mandarins, or scholar-officials, had to pass rigorous tests in subjects that included classical Chinese history, literature, and calligraphy. Court business was conducted in Chinese by courtiers wearing Chinese dress. Even the formidable citadel the Nguyen emperors built for themselves at Hue was modeled after the imperial Forbidden City in Beijing; only the ruler and his household were allowed inside its innermost enclosure.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“France divided Vietnam into three parts: the French colony of Cochinchina, which encompassed the sprawling, sparsely peopled Mekong Delta in the South; and two “protectorates”—Annam, the poorest and most mountainous part of the country, just thirty miles wide at its narrowest point, and Tonkin, the densely populated Red River Delta. These protectorates were nominally overseen by a compliant descendant of the Nguyen emperors, but actually ruled—along with Laos and Cambodia—as part of the Indochinese Union by a French governor-general from his palace in Hanoi.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“The French claimed they had begun to amass their Indochinese empire simply to protect the Christian faithful and professed always to be undertaking a “civilizing mission,” meant to bring material and cultural benefits to an allegedly benighted people. But their initial motives were less lofty. French Indochina was meant to provide a path for penetrating the Chinese market and create a buffer against the British and Dutch, who had already carved empires of their own from India, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“important, it provided the bright prospect of fortunes to be made through exploitation of the land and its people. To that end, the French would transform much of the Vietnamese landscape. In Cochinchina, they carved out a complex network of canals that turned tens of thousands of acres of marshy wilderness into some of the most productive rice-growing country on earth. They developed modern ports at Haiphong and Danang and Saigon, too, so that Vietnamese raw material could more efficiently be shipped abroad and French-manufactured goods could more easily be unloaded. They also built a railroad to move French products north from Saigon all the way to China; one out of three of the more than 100,000 Vietnamese conscripted to lay its tracks is thought to have died along the way. The French hacked down highland forests as well, displacing tribal people who depended on them for their livelihood, and planted millions of rubber trees in their place; the miserably paid contract workers who tapped the trees were ravaged by malaria and “treated like human cattle,” one colonist admitted, and “terrorized by the overseers….On the rubber plantations the people had a habit of saying that children did not have a chance to know their fathers, nor dogs their masters.” In the North, tens of thousands of contract laborers risked their lives beneath the earth, mining coal, tin, tungsten, and zinc for the benefit of investors in France. They worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and those who tried to get away were often beaten before being forced back to work.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“The French…wave flags for me,” Ho told an American reporter, “but it is a masquerade. We will have to fight.” It would be a war between the French elephant and the Vietnamese tiger, he said. If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges by night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. That will be the war of Indochina.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Now that South Vietnam was free of France, he said, it “represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike….If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents…this is our offspring. We cannot abandon it; we cannot ignore its needs.” If Vietnam fell—to chaos or poverty or communism—the United States would be “held responsible; and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Diem listened to them all, accepted almost $2 billion in aid between 1955 and 1960, and again and again went his own way. Americans urged him to make sweeping land reforms; he expropriated vast tracts of land from wealthy French and Vietnamese landlords but then failed to redistribute most of them among the landless. They suggested he encourage democracy on the local level; instead, he replaced elected village chiefs and village councils with outsiders, hand-picked by bureaucrats loyal to him. Urged to adopt principles of small-scale community development that had been adopted in India and elsewhere, he tried forcibly resettling thousands of people into new communities instead, and then required them to perform weeks of compulsory and uncompensated labor. “Coercion,” he explained, “has had a vital role in most change.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Mai was thirteen years old in 1954, when fear forced her and the rest of her family to flee the North and begin new lives in Saigon. “Saigon was like a foreign country to us at the time,” she recalled. Some hated us for having abandoned the Viet Minh and clung to the French; others saw us as carpetbaggers who were going to steal their jobs and their rice bowls, or who were going to drive up the price of everything and make life difficult for everyone….Instead of seeing us as compatriots, many people thought of us as aliens: they called themselves “Vietnamese,” while calling us “Northerners.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Like most Americans,” McNamara remembered many years later, “I saw communism as monolithic. I believed the Soviets and the Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony.” To him—and to Kennedy and most of the men closest to him—it seemed clear that the “Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines….We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements—as they largely appear in hindsight—but as signs of a unified communist drive for hegemony in Asia.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“This is another type of warfare,” Kennedy said, “new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“But for all of Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric, for all the talent he gathered around him, the first months of his administration went badly: the president failed to call off a CIA-inspired invasion of Cuba that ended in disaster; he was unable to keep Khrushchev from building the Berlin Wall; and he was harshly criticized when, rather than commit U.S. forces to fight communist guerrillas in the jungles of Laos, as ex-President Eisenhower had urged him to do, he had instead agreed to enter negotiations aimed at “neutralizing” that kingdom. “There are just so many concessions that we can make in one year and survive politically,” he told a friend in the spring of 1961. “We just can’t have another defeat this year in Vietnam.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Defense Secretary McNamara agreed with Taylor and Rostow that their report should be fully implemented. But Secretary of State Rusk thought such a small force was unlikely to alter the outcome in Vietnam and worried that Diem might prove in the end to be a “losing horse.” Assistant Secretary of State George Ball was more blunt. “Taylor is wrong,” he warned the president. “Within five years we’ll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again. That was the French experience.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“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.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Tension between Catholics and Buddhists was not new. Many Buddhists identified Catholicism with France and foreignness, and saw the Ngo brothers’ doctrine of “personalism” as equally alien. (Communism, too, was seen as foreign and therefore unsuited to Vietnam.)”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“President Kennedy was not so sure. He was appalled that Diem and Nhu had been killed. Three days later, he dictated his own rueful account of the coup and his concerns for the future. Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon….I feel that we [at the White House] must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of…August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined. I was shocked by the deaths of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem…many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether…public opinion in Saigon—the intellectuals, students, etc.—will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“In foreign affairs, Johnson was admittedly less self-assured. “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to,” he once said. To deal with them, he retained in office all of his predecessor’s top advisers—Dean Rusk at State, Robert McNamara at Defense, McGeorge Bundy as his National Security Advisor. “You’re the men I trust the most,” he told them. “You’re the ablest men I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that you’re President Kennedy’s friends, but you are the best anywhere and you must stay. I want you to stand by me.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History