. . . This is a year of choice－a year when we choose not simply who will lead us, but where we wish to be led; the country we want for ourselves－and the kind we want for our children. If in this year of choice we fashion new politics out of old illusions, we insure for our- selves nothing but crisis for the future－and we bequeath to our children the bitter harvest of those crises. . . .

Today I would speak to you . . . of the war in Vietnam. I come here . . . to discuss with you why I regard our policy here as bankrupt. . .

I do not want－as I believe most Americans do not want－to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned－as I believe most Americans are concerned－that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned－as I believe most Americans are concerned－that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned－as I believe most Americans are concerned－that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world.

I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitter-ness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: "They made a desert, and called it peace."

And I do not think that is what the American spirit is really all about.

Let me begin this discussion with a note both personal and public. I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path. It may be that the effort was doomed from the start; that it was never really possible to bring all the people of South Vietnam under the rule of the successive governments we supported－governments, one after another, riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and greed; governments which did not and could not successfully capture and energize the national feeling of their people. If that is the case, as it well maybe, then I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility, before history and before my fellow-citizens. But past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live, Now as ever, we do ourselves best justice when we measure ourselves against ancient tests, as in the Antigone of Sophocles: "All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride."

The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for 206,000 more troops. This weekend, it was announced that some of them－a "moderate" increase, it was said－would soon be sent. But isn't this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time－at every crisis－we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder.

But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before. Rather, as the scale of the fighting has increased, South Vietnamese society has become less and less capable of organizing or defending itself, and we have more and more assumed the whole burden of the war.

And once again, the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that "we are going to win;" "victory" is coming.

But what are the true facts? What is our present situation?...

The point of our pacification operations was always described as "winning the hearts and minds" of the people. We recognized that giving the countryside military security against the Viet Cong would be futile－indeed that it would be impossible－unless the people of the countryside themselves came to identify their interests with ours, and to assist not the Viet Cong, but the Saigon government. For this we recognized that their minds would have to be changed－that .their natural inclination would be to support the Viet Cong, or at best remain passive, rather than sacrifice for foreign white men, or the remote Saigon government.

It is this effort that has been most gravely setback in the last month. We cannot change the minds of the people in villages controlled by the enemy. . . . If, in the years those villages and hamlets were controlled by Saigon, the government had brought honesty, social reform, land－if that had happened, if the many promises of a new and better life for the people had been fulfilled－then, in the process of reconquest, we might appear as liberators: just as we did in Europe, despite the devastation of war, in 1944－45. But the promises of reform were not kept. Corruption and abuse of administrative power have continued to this day. Land reform has never been more than an empty promise. Viewing the performance of the Saigon government over the last three years, there is no reason for the South Vietnamese peasant to fight for the extension of its authority or to view the further devastation that effort will bring as anything but a calamity. . . .

The second evident fact of the last two months is that the Saigon government is no more or better an ally than it was before; that it may even be less; and that the war inexorably is growing more, not less, an American effort. . . .The facts are that thousands of young South Vietnamese buy their deferments from military service while American Marines die at Khe Sanh.

The facts are that the government has arrested monks and labor leaders, former Presidential candidates and government officials－including prominent members of the Committee for the Preservation of the Nation, in which American officials placed such high hopes just a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the government's enormous corruption continues, debilitating South Vietnam and crippling our effort to help its people. . . .

Third, it is becoming more evident with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the cost of destruction for the nation we once hoped to help. . . .

An American commander said of the town of Ben Tre, "it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it." It is difficult to quarrel with the decision of American commanders to use air power and artillery to save the lives of their men; if American troops are to fight for Vietnamese cities, they deserve protection. What I cannot understand is why the responsibility for the recapture and attendant destruction of Hue, and Ben Tre and the others, should fall to American troops in the first place.

If Communist insurgents or invaders held New York or Washington or San Francisco, we would not leave it to foreigners to take them back, and destroy them and their people in the process....

If the government's troops will not or cannot carry the fight for their cities, we cannot our-selves destroy them. That kind of salvation is not an act we can presume to perform for them. For we must ask our government－we must ask our-selves: where does such logic end? If it becomes "necessary" to destroy all of South Vietnam in order to "save" it, will we do that too? And if we care so little about South Vietnam that we are willing to see the land destroyed and its people dead, then why are we there in the first place?

Can we ordain to ourselves the awful majesty of God－to decide what cities and villages are to be destroyed, who will live and who will die, and who will join the refugees wandering in a desert of our own creation? . . .

Let us have no misunderstanding. The Viet Cong are a brutal enemy indeed. Time and time again, they have shown their willingness to sacrifice innocent civilians, to engage in torture and murder and despicable terror to achieve their ends. This is a war almost without rules or quarter. There can be no easy moral answer to this war, no one-sided condemnation of American actions. What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence we do not have. What they want is peace, not dominated by any out-side forces. And that is what we are really committed to help bring them, not in some indefinite future, but while some scraps of life remain still to be saved from the holocaust.

The fourth fact that is now more clear than ever is that the war in Vietnam, far from being the last critical test for the United States is in fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the structure of international cooperation which has directly supported our security for the past three decades. . . . We set out to prove our willingness to keep our commitments everywhere in the world. What we are ensuring instead is that it is most unlikely that the American people would ever again be willing to . . . engage in this kind of struggle. Meanwhile our oldest and strongest allies pullback to their own shores, leaving us alone to police all of Asia. . . .

We are entitled to ask－we are required to ask－how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams?    But this question the Administration does not and cannot answer. It has no answer－none but the ever-expanding use of military force and the lives of our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything in the past. . . .

It is long past time to ask: what is this war doing to us? Of course it is costing us money－fully one-fourth of our federal budget－but that is the smallest price we pay. The cost is in our young men, the tens of thousands of their lives cut off forever. The cost is in our world position－in neutrals and allies alike, every day more baffled by and estranged from a policy they can-not understand.

Higher yet is the price we pay in our inner-most lives, and in the spirit of our country. For the first time in a century, we have open resistance to service in the cause of the nation. For the first time perhaps in our history, we have desertions from our army on political and moral grounds. The front pages of our newspapers show photographs of American soldiers torturing prisoners. Every night we watch horror on the evening news. Violence spreads inexorably across the nation, filling our streets and crippling our lives. And whatever the costs to us, let us think of the young men we have sent there: not just the killed, but those who have to kill; not just the maimed, but also those who must look upon the results of what they do. . . .

The costs of the wear's present course far out-weigh anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the people of Vietnam. It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing that he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop.

And the fact is that much can be done. We can－as I have urged for two years, but as we have never done－negotiate with the National Liberation Front. We can－as we have never done－assure the Front a genuine place in the political life of South Vietnam. We can－as we are refusing to do today－begin to deescalate the war, concentrate on protecting populated areas, and thus save American lives and slowdown the destruction of the countryside. We can－as we have never done－insist that the Government of South Vietnam broaden its base, institute real reforms, and seek an honorable settlement with their fellow countrymen. . . .

Even this modest and reasonable program is impossible while our present leadership, under the illusion that military victory is just ahead, plunges deeper into the swamp that is our present course....