No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‚whiz kids‘ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what’s really happened.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

We Americans think, in every country in transition, there’s a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here’s what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it… Never.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison – they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.

I’m a lad of the ’60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.

There’s never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it’s mostly a fabrication.

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.