Mansfield's Reflections on the War
Cover of Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat, 2003
Mike Mansfield considered his inability to stop the Vietnam War his greatest failure in the Senate. He told his biographer Don Oberdorfer, “I received kind of heavy criticism for not doing more, but I didn’t know what more I could do. I felt kind of helpless. But I wanted my position to be known. That position never changed from the beginning to the end. I was never in any doubt that we were in the wrong.” (Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great Statesman and Diplomat, 2003)
His administrative assistant Peggy DeMichele noted how much the responsibility of the war weighed on Mansfield: "…he was always opposed to our being there, and that started way back long before we even had any military men there...Of course, he was very concerned about the mail. We used to get volumes, a lot out of state, and there for a while he kept a sheet in his pocket every day of the casualties. Every day he checked out how many casualties we had." (Interview with Peggy DeMichele, 1989, OH 458-002)