It was a perfectly beautiful night, as fall nights are in Washington. I walked out of the president’s Oval Office, and as I walked out, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night.
I don’t object to its being called “McNamara’s war.” I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.
We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo – men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
We see what we want to believe.
I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?
The greatest contribution Vietnam is making-right or wrong is beside the point-is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.
Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not.
Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.
Let’s go in, let’s totally destroy Cuba.
They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.
General, you don’t have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!
Rationality will not save us.
There is no more important task in a democracy than resolving the differences among people and finding a course of action that will be supported by a sufficient number to permit the nation to achieve a better life for all.
The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don’t put enough time, don’t give enough emphasis, to contemplation.
Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.
I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.
I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous.
One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.
I like to run down to the beach and have a little swim in the nude in the morning.