Hanoi Quotes
The United States was taxed with following a policy whose logic was "genocide" for helping South Vietnam deal with "a peasant-based insurrection led by Communists" while the genuinely genocidal practices of North Vietnam in liquidating whole categories of the population were not mentioned. On his visit to Hanoi, Chomsky publicly held North Vietnam up to the world as a model of social justice and freedom. Whenever Chomsky and those who repeated some of his absurd views were challenged, they often cited as their authority someone else who had uttered similar absurdities, as if this vindicated the point they were making.
Sidney Hook
Elements of the information media contributed to prolonging the war by their manner of reporting the news. It required only selective reporting, not deliberate fabrication, to create the impression that we Americans were the prime aggressors bent on expanding the war to avoid impending defeat, and that our alleged successes were really defeats which officials were trying to hide from the American public. Biased reporters found no good to say about our Vietnamese allies, whom they held up to scorn in a way which led the American people to believe that our allies were not worth the sacrifices we were making in their behalf. Such selective and slanted reporting spread defeatism among the tender-minded at home and provided enormous encouragement for Hanoi to hold fast and concede nothing.
Maxwell D. Taylor
Our adversaries have a determination which has existed since at least 1954 to absorb South Vietnam into a Communist state against the will of the vast majority of the people in the South and to rule that state from Hanoi. It is a simple, straightforward objective, no ifs or ands about it. They also have collateral objectives which in the long run may be equally as important to us, such as their desire to demonstrate the invincibility of the "War of Liberation" and in the end to evict the United States from Southeast Asia.
Maxwell D. Taylor
But for all our differences, for all the times we sparred, I never tried to hide, and I think John came to understand, the longstanding admiration that I had for him. By his own account, John was a rebellious young man. In his case, that's understandable – what faster way to distinguish yourself when you're the son and grandson of admirals than to mutiny? Eventually, though, he concluded that the only way to really make his mark on the world is to commit to something bigger than yourself. And for John, that meant answering the highest of callings – serving his country in a time of war. Others this week and this morning have spoken to the depths of his torment, and the depths of his courage, there in the cells of Hanoi, when day after day, year after year, that youthful iron was tempered into steel.
John McCain
