10 February 1970 , St Louis, Missouri, USA
Heard this grab on Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary.
The Washington Post, which constantly urges us to lower our voices, said after the President's detailed address to the nation on his decision to clean out the Cambodian sanctuaries, and I quote, the Post said 'there is something so erratic and irrational, not to say incomprehensible about all this that you have to assume there is more to it than he is telling us.' Now, the Post might just well have come out and said that it thought the President had lost his sanity. Words like 'erratic', 'irrational', and 'incomprehensible' are not ordinarily used to describe the carefully studied military decision of the nation's commander in chief .
Ladies and gentlemen, you've heard a lot of wild, hot rhetoric tonight. None of it, mine. This goes on daily in the editorial pages of some very large, reputable newspapers in this country. Not all of them in the East by a long shot. And it pours out of the television set, and the radio in a daily torrent, assailing our ears so incessantly that we no longer register shock at the irresponsibility and the thoughtlessness behind the statements. 'But you are the vice president', they say to me, 'you should choose your language more carefully'. Nonsense. I swore that I would uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Those who would tear our country apart or try to bring down its government are enemies, whether here or abroad, whether destroying libraries and classrooms on a college campus, or firing at American troops from a rice paddy in Southeast Asia.
Indeed, as for these deserters, malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, the civil and the uncivil disobedience among our young, SDS, PLP, Weatherman I and Weathermen II, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Yippies, hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike — I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.