I am…glad to come to the home state of a…Kansan who wrote, “If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better for tomorrow.”…

For 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 policies out of old illusions, we ensure for ourselves nothing but crises for the future, and we bequeath to our children the bitter harvest of those crises.

For with all we have done, with all our immense power and richness, our problems seem to grow not less, but greater. We are in a time of unprecedented turbulence, of danger and questioning. It is at its root a question of the national soul. The president calls it restlessness, while cabinet officers and commentators tell us that America is deep in a malaise of the spirit—discouraging initiative, paralyzing will and action, dividing Americans from one another by their age, their views, and the color of their skins.

There are many causes. Some are in the failed promise of America itself…Another cause is in our inaction in the face of danger. We seem equally unable to control the violent disorder within our cities, or the pollution and destruction of the country, of the water and land that we use and our children inherit. And third great cause of discontent is the course we are following in Vietnam, in a war which has divided Americans as they have not been divided since your state was called Bloody Kansas.

All this—questioning and uncertainty at home, divisive war abroad—had led us to a deep crisis of confidence: in our leadership, in each other, and in our very self as a nation.

Today I would speak to you of the third of those great crises: of the war in Vietnam. I come here, to this serious forum in the heart of the nation, to discuss this war with you; not on the basis of emotion, but fact; not, I hope, in cliches, but with a clear and discriminating sense of where the national interest lies.

I do not want—as I believe most Americans do not want—to sell out Americans 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 do believe most Americans are concerned—that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong…

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 bitterness 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.”…

Let us begin this discussion with a note both personal and public. I was involved in many of the early decisions of Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path. It may be that 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 may be, 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, and a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evils. The only sin is pride…

If the government’s troops will not or cannot carry the fight for their cities, we cannot ourselves 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 ourselves: 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 refugees wandering in a desert of our own creation? If it is true that we have a commitment to the South Vietnamese people, we must ask: Are they being consulted?…

Let us have no misunderstanding. The Vietcong 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…

We set out to prove our willingness to keep commitments everywhere in the world. What we are ensuring, instead, is that it is most unlikely that the American people would ever be willing to again engage in this kind of struggle. Meanwhile, our oldest and strongest allies pull back to their own shores, leaving us alone to police all of Asia…

Higher yet is the price we pay in our own innermost lives, and in the spirit of our country…

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.

It may be asked: Is not such degradation the cost of all wars? Of course it is. That is why war is not an enterprise lightly to be undertaken, nor prolonged one moment past its absolute necessity. All this—the destruction of Vietnam, the cost to ourselves, the danger to the world—all this we would stand, willingly, if it seemed to serve some worthwhile end. But the costs of the war’s present course far outweigh 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 for 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.