That one's hard to trace.

More time than I would have expected was devoted to tracing, or trying to trace, quotes for this column. Sometimes the tracing paid off, through finding the precise source. This time it didn't.

When I tried to find out who said that "it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it" I was quite sure that it was a toss-up between Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. But I couldn't find any exact references to either of them saying it. Others, it seemed, had been there as well. One page, on the Tet Offensive of January, 1968, read in part:

Tet produced a famous quote from a still-unnamed (and perhaps non-existent) U.S. officer: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

So even if I think that assigning the quote to Rusk or McNamara makes a poetic justice sort of sense, I'll have to leave the jury out on this particular statement.

Go to: The Return of the PC.