I have found it, over the period of the last eighteen months particularly, very difficult to talk about some of the matters without getting involved in personalities. When I criticized the war in Vietnam in a major speech back in February 1966, after the initial stories, it was placed purely…on the basis of a personality struggle between President Johnson and myself…that I would like to still have President Kennedy president of the United States, a resentment of Johnson as president of the United States. It has never really been analyzed on the basis of my criticism…I think that having it a personality struggle rather than an issue question has been damaging to the country as a whole and damaging, really, to the consideration of these matters. So I think that…if I ran for president…I would not strengthen the…dialogue that is taking place in connection with these issues, but in fact I would weaken it. It would immediately become a personality struggle between me, as an overly ambitious figure trying to trying to take the nomination away from President Johnson, who deserves it because of the fact that he is not only president but served the Democratic Party and the country as president for four or five years…I am going to continue to talk about these issues. But I am not talking about these issues as a competitor to anybody. I am talking about these issues as issues which I think are important to the American people…I think that what we are doing at the present time in Vietnam is a mistake. I think that the course that we are following is an error. But I am saying that as a United States senator, and I want to have what I say analyzed on that basis…

I do not think that to dissent here in the United States or those who disagree should be confined to those who are young. I think that when we sign up for the Democratic Party we don’t say that we are never going to disagree. I think that there is much to disagree about…

First we were making the effort there so that people would have their own right to decide their own future and could select their own form of government, and it wasn’t going to be imposed on them by the North Vietnamese, and we had the support of the people of South Vietnam. I think that is why we were involved in that struggle. That is certainly the way I looked at it when I was in President Kennedy’s administration and when I was with President Johnson. Now we turned, when we found that the South Vietnamese haven’t given the support, and are not making the effort; now we are saying we are going to fight there so that we don’t have to fight in Thailand, so that we don’t have to fight on the West Coast of the United States, so that they won’t move across the Rockies.

But do we—our whole moral position, it seems to me, changes tremendously. One, we’re in there, we’re helping people. We’re working with them. We’re fighting for their independence. Second, we’re—and we’re killing the enemy and we’re also killing many civilians, but we’re doing it because they want it. Now we’ve changed and switched. Maybe they don’t want it but we want it. So we’re going in there and we’re killing South Vietnamese; we’re killing children; we’re killing women; we’re killing innocent people because we don’t want to have the war fought on American soil, or because they’re twelve thousand miles away and they might get to be eleven thousand miles away.

Our whole moral position changes, it seems to me, tremendously. Do we have the right here in the United States to perform these acts because we want to protect ourselves, so that…it is not a greater problem for us here in the United States? I very seriously question whether we have that right…I think other people are fighting it, other people are carrying the burden…but this is also our way. Those of us who stay here in the United States, we must feel it when we use napalm, when a village is destroyed and civilians are killed. This is also our responsibility. This is a moral obligation and a moral responsibility for us here in the United States.

And I think we have forgotten about that. And when we switched from one point of view to another, I think that we have forgotten about it. And I think that it should be discussed and all of us should examine our own conscience of what we are doing in South Vietnam. It is not just the fact that we are killing North Vietnamese soldiers or Vietcong; we are also responsible for tens and tens of thousands of innocent civilian casualties, and I think we are going to have a difficult time explaining this to ourselves…

All acts of aggression, death, and destruction occur in war—sometimes wars are essential, are necessary, are going to occur. But we should also consider the price that we are paying. It is not just the Americans that are being killed, the Americans that are being wounded, and the price that we are paying so that we can’t do the kinds of things that we should, but we have a moral position around the world…We can’t lose that, as it appears to be that we are doing in Vietnam. Why can’t the president of the United States or the vice president of the United States travel freely around the world anymore? It is because of Vietnam. Why can’t they go through Latin America? Why can’t they travel through Europe? Why can’t they even travel freely throughout our own country?…

We should look at it in an objective way, at what we are doing, what we are trying to do, and what this country stands for, both…internally within the United States and what we have to stand for around the rest of the globe. If this country is going to mean anything…we love our country but we love our country for what it can be and for the justice it stands for and what we are going to mean to the next generation. It is not just the land, it is not just the mountains…And that is what I think is being seriously undermined in Vietnam, and the effect of it has to be felt by our people.