Word: viets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Eisenhower and I were once talking in 1967; Eisenhower felt we should declare war. He said, "You can declare war, then you can handle all these debaters and the bomb throwers." But the problem with declaring war was that the Russians and the Chinese both had treaties with North Viet...
...declaration of war didn't appeal. But I was also thinking of what we could do after Viet Nam. It was essential to have a new relationship with the Russians, have a new relationship with the Chinese, and I felt that at that time, early on, it would have made it difficult, almost impossible, to develop that new relationship had we declared war. It would have broken it off. In retrospect, I don't think so. In retrospect, I think we could have done it. And it may have been a mistake of judgment, but at the time, that...
...That in 1969 you could have gotten just about what you got in the end -- a kind of a decent interval, the North Viet Nam army's forces in place in the South, POWs -- and that therefore the price in American lives was way too high...
...know, there were two aspects of the agreement. One has been totally forgotten. The two aspects were: one, that the U.S. would continue to support South Viet Nam, just as the Soviets would be expected to be supporting North Viet Nam. The other was that the U.S., in the event that the North Vietnamese complied with the terms, would also support them economically. In other words, there was the economic package...
Naturally, this is self-serving, but everything I say is self-serving. But had I survived, I think that it would have been possible to have implemented $ the agreement. South Viet Nam would still be a viable non-Communist enclave or whatever you want to call it. But because I think that I had enormous credibility with the North -- because of what I'd done on May 8 ((ordering the mining of North Vietnamese ports)), because of what I'd done in December ((ordering the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong)) -- they thought, Well, this unpredictable...