Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.

Well, I don't know whether it caused anguish in China, but it was not a wise way to proceed. But one has to remember that it was the first experience. And in a Republican administration, there is a conservative wing that looks at China as the last embodiment of communism, which therefore tends towards a more bellicose rhetoric anyway than I would. It's not the dominant element, but every once in a while they get a crack at public statement.

With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.

Well, on the American side, every new administration has to cut its teeth in a crisis, because before a crisis, you don't really know what your various subordinates are thinking under stress.

I was always convinced that decent people in the case of Vietnam, highly intelligent, decent people, got us involved because they had made, in part, a misjudgment about the nature of the communist system and the unity of the communist world and the degree to which the experience of Europe could be repeated in Vietnam.