If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.

If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.

Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.

One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.

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.

The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.

...but highly placed sources within the Kennedy Administration disagreed: "[T]he assumption that the strategic nuclear balance mattered in any way was wrong... As far as I am concerned, it made no difference... If my memory serves me correctly, we had some five thousand strategic nuclear warheads as against t heir three hundred. Can anyone seriously tell me that their having three hundred and forty would have made any difference? The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now..."