Geoffrey C. Ward > Quotes

“In London, Henry Adams cheered the Union triumph, but also saw in it an ominous portent: About a week ago [the British] discovered that their whole wooden navy was useless.… These are great times.… Man has mounted science, and is now run away with.… Before many centuries more … science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. Even with the menace of the Merrimack now behind him, Lincoln’s blockade of southern ports was easier to declare than enforce. The Confederate coastline, broken by numberless inlets and 189 rivers, stretched from the Potomac to the Rio Grande—3,500 miles. When the war began, one-quarter of the navy’s regular officers had defected to the South, and Secretary of the Navy Welles was left with”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Civil War

“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

“JOHNSON: And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason. [The 1799 Logan Act forbids any American citizen from negotiating with a foreign government without authorization.] DIRKSEN: I know. JOHNSON: I know this, that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war. DIRKSEN: That’s a mistake. JOHNSON: And it’s a damn bad mistake. Now, I can identify them, because I know who is doing this. I don’t want to identify it. I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say “Vietnam muôn năm,” but, because he wasn’t aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like “The little duck, he wants to lie down.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“There never was any evidence of such a network”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“So I went to Canada,” he recalled. “I remember that last beautiful drive, from Seattle to Vancouver, all the towering Douglas firs along the road. It was January 4, 1970. After we crossed the border, it was a breeze, they just sort of waved us through and I remember just looking in the rearview mirror, thinking, ‘Man, there goes my country. I’ll never see it again.’ I get called a coward all the time. It took me a long time not to feel that what I had done was cowardly, because I still had that ingrained military feeling inside. Now I think that was the bravest thing I ever did.”
― 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

“Nixon became tense and agitated, had trouble sleeping, drank heavily in the evenings, and wrote himself notes to keep his courage up—“Need for Self-Discipline in all areas. Polls v. right decision. Dare to do it right—alone.” He repeatedly watched the film Patton, in which George C. Scott, playing the World War II hero and standing before a giant American flag, intoned lines he especially liked: “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war…because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“President Nixon’s first reaction when he heard the story was to investigate those who reported the killing. He demanded to know who was backing them: “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it,” he was sure of it. He instructed his aides to “discredit witnesses,” investigate Seymour Hersh and Mike Wallace, “get ring-wingers with us,” and “get out the facts about [communist] atrocities at Hue.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be “the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went,” he said. “I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists,” he said. “And then I want ’em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”
― 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

“The crowd began chanting, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
― 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

“My God, I would never do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean Saigon—not to come to the table because, basically, that was what you got out of your bombing pause, that, good God, we want them over in Paris. We’ve got to get them to Paris or you can’t have peace….I just want you to know, I’m not trying to interfere with your conduct of it. I mean I’ll only do what you and Rusk want me to do, but I’ll do anything…”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“Hanoi professed to be unimpressed by what it called “puppetization.” “It is nothing but hackneyed juggling,” said the North Vietnamese premier, Pham Van Dong. “To use Vietnamese to fight Vietnamese is indeed an attractive policy for the United States. When one has money and guns, can there be a better way to reach one’s aims than simply to distribute money and guns? Unfortunately, in the present epoch, such a paradoxical move is flatly impossible….Certainly there is no means, no magic way, to ‘ize’ the war into something other than the most atrocious and most abominable war in history.”
― 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

“cast down your bucket where you are”: to stay in the segregated South”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

“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

“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

“Five thousand people turned out to see him at Cheyenne”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

“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

“THAT SUMMER, before shipping out to Vietnam, Mogie Crocker came home for a visit. “We were at dinner one evening,” his mother recalled, “and just talking in generalities about the war. And he said, ‘Of course if I were Vietnamese I probably would be on the side of the Viet Cong.’ I puzzled over that. And my husband did, too. I suppose Mogie was relating it to our American Revolution, that he saw their need for their own freedom. But as an American citizen, he also saw the larger picture of trying to prevent communism.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History

“What had happened at My Lai may have shocked the American public. But it was not news to the Army. Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had tried to stop the massacre, reported what he had seen. So did at least five other pilots. The word went steadily up the chain of command—all the way to the division commander, Major General Samuel W. Koster. No one took any action. Instead, the brigade log was falsified to say that 128 Viet Cong had been killed by U.S. artillery. The slaughter was covered up. The Army Public Information Office released a widely disseminated story that described an operation that “went like clockwork” in which the “jungle warriors” of the Eleventh Brigade had killed 128 Viet Cong in a running “day-long battle,” chalking up the largest body count in the brigade’s history. On the strength of reports like these, General Westmoreland had sent his official congratulations.”
― 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

“Twenty months had now gone by since Nixon’s inauguration, and peace seemed no nearer. Thwarted in his desire to strike a bold blow against the North, frustrated at the continuing impasse in Paris, and angered by the antiwar demonstrations that had undermined his ultimatum, the president searched for another opportunity to make the kind of dramatic show of force he thought would force Hanoi to make the concessions that would lead to peace. Cambodia would provide it.”
― Geoffrey C. Ward, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History