American opposition to the Vietnam War, propelled largely by young adults and college students in small numbers in the mid-1960s, grew into a national phenomenon by the end of the decade and on into the 1970s. As the War pushed seemingly endlessly forward, so did the protests. The draft, first-time-ever television coverage of combat, the Kent State shootings, the My Lai massacre and relentlessly depressing news about the war effort in general contributed to a nationwide beating drum of anti-war sentiment.

The protests remain an important lesson in the power of organized opposition to effect change in public policy.

Below are some of the more memorable quotes from well-known figures about the War.

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian
boys ought to be doing for themselves.
Lyndon B. Johnson, Oct. 1964

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms
of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
General William C. Westmoreland

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
Richard M. Nixon

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is The Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our numbers have increased in Viet Nam because the aggression of others has increased in Viet Nam.
There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.
Lyndon B. Johnson

My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age.
General Curtis LeMay

If we were not in Vietnam all that part of the world would be enjoying the obscurity it so richly deserves.
John Kenneth Galbraith

I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.
Benjamin Spock

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.
Lyndon B. Johnson

We didn't lose Vietnam. We quit Vietnam.
Alexander Haig

By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?
General William C. Westmoreland

It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the
whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.
Ronald Reagan

I seriously doubt if we will ever have another war. This is probably the very last one.
Richard M. Nixon