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It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.

What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.

I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

We also can't try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That's not leadership; that's a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It's the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq - and we should have learned it by now.

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

The World War II generation believed the United States could do anything - anything... And Vietnam was a shattering experience for everyone.

In the past, people worked together only when some great disaster threatened.