The Obama administration's newly minted secretary of state was a young man of 28 when, as leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he famously challenged the nation to face the demons it had created in pursuit of an unattainable victory in Vietnam.
“We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?” he told the tired old men of the Senate in 1971 in remarks he had prepared only the night before. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?“