Slow To Forgive, Slow To Forget

"However one may try to justify it, it was a tragic defeat for America. Not in the military terms of the battlefield, but a defeat for our political authority and moral influence abroad and for our sense of mission and cohesion at home. A defeat not because our initial purposes were unworthy or our intentions anything less than honorable, but because - in frustration and false pride and our innocence of the art of extrication - we were forced to the employment of excessively brutal means to achieve an equivocal objective against a poor, small, backward country. That is something the world will be slow to forgive, and we should be slow to forget."

George Ball, Under Secretary of State, 1961-1966