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.

General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!

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

I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.

Brains are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated.

At my age, 85, I'm at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on.

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.