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Our Cuba policy didn't make much sense during the Cold War and makes even less sense now.

Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.

Of course, the kind of support that Cuba could give us was very limited when it came to building up our army, since they didn't manufacture armaments in the quantities that we required. So we turned to Algeria and the Soviet Union for support.

From its inception, South Vietnam was only considered to be an outpost in the war against communism.

I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.

The truth is that the driver in policy is not the relationship between the United States and Cuba, but the relationship between Cubans, and that is far stronger than 50 years of intragovernment hostility.

I think a policy of isolationism toward Cuba is misplaced and hasn't worked.

One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.

John Kerry's service did not end in Vietnam. It began there.

As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.