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Who really said it

It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal

Kissinger — but it is half of a sentence Henry Kissinger 1923–2023 · US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State
Attributed In copyright

He really did say it, in November 1968, in the weeks between Nixon’s election and his inauguration — but not as a standalone judgment. It is the closing clause of a conditional: if the South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu were deposed as Ngo Dinh Diem had been in 1963, then the world would conclude this. The record is William F. Buckley Jr., who set the remark down in United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey (Putnam, 1974), pp. 56–57. That is a named witness publishing six years later, not a transcript — which is why we file it as attributed rather than verified.

Last verified 21 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal” The full sentence, from November 1968, is a conditional: "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." —Henry Kissinger, quoted in William F. Buckley Jr., United Nations Journal (Putnam, 1974), pp. 56–57.

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Still under copyright. A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Document
Buckley, United Nations Journal
Published
Putnam, New York, 1974, pp. 56–57
Remark dated
November 1968, after Nixon’s election
Record type
Named witness, not a transcript

Nixon should be told that it is probably an objective of Clifford to depose Thieu before Nixon is inaugurated. Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal. November 1968, via Buckley, 1974

The full passage as Buckley records it. Everything before the last twenty words is what the truncation removes: a named policy (Clifford's), a named person (Thieu), a named precedent (Diem) and an 'if'. What survives sounds like a permanent truth about American friendship. What he actually said was a forecast about one coup that had not happened yet.

Barry Popik — the citation trail to Buckley, 1974

How we traced it

  • The setting is the interregnum of November 1968. Nixon had won; Lyndon Johnson was still president; the Paris talks were stuck on whether Saigon would come to the table. Kissinger, not yet in office, was talking to people around the incoming administration.
  • Buckley records the remark as a message meant to be passed on — Nixon should be told… word should be gotten to Nixon. Read that way, the famous line is not Kissinger’s view of America. It is his prediction of what other governments would conclude if Washington let a second allied leader be overthrown the citation trail ↗.
  • The two names carry the whole argument. Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, was overthrown and killed in a 1963 coup that the United States had encouraged. Nguyen Van Thieu was his eventual successor, and Clark Clifford was Johnson’s Defense Secretary. Kissinger’s point was that doing it twice would be noticed.
  • The earliest print appearance anyone has located is Buckley’s 1974 book. English Wikiquote files the line under Attributed for exactly that reason: the source is a reputable eyewitness account, not a document from Kissinger’s own hand Wikiquote ↗.
  • We have found no instance of Kissinger confirming or repeating the sentence himself in the fifty-five years he lived afterwards, and no contemporaneous memo of the conversation. If one exists, we have not seen it — and we are not going to invent a citation to close the gap.
In copyright

Both layers of this are in copyright. Henry Kissinger died in 2023, so his own words are protected in the UK and EU until 2093 and, as an unpublished-then-published remark, are covered in the US as well. The passage as you read it is also Buckley’s 1974 book text, which is separately in copyright to his estate and publisher. Quote the sentence for comment, criticism or reporting with attribution — that is ordinary fair dealing and fair use — but do not treat it as free stock text, and do not reproduce Buckley’s surrounding pages. This is not legal advice.

Fact-check

What goes wrong here

The authorship is not in doubt. What goes wrong is everything around it — where the sentence starts, what year it is given, and what kind of statement it is taken to be.

The main problem conditional turned into verdict

The line is the ‘then’ of an if-then. He said the world would conclude this if Thieu were deposed as Diem had been. Quoted alone it reads as his settled opinion that American friendship kills — a much larger claim, and not the one he made the full passage ↗.

Paraphrases in circulation drift

You will see ‘to be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal’, and George F. Will’s 2002 version, ‘although it is dangerous to be America’s enemy, it can be lethal to be America’s friend.’ Buckley’s text is the one to quote.

A witness, not a document why not ‘verified’

Everything descends from one named source publishing six years after the fact. Buckley was well placed and specific, and nobody has ever contested it — but there is no transcript, no memo and no confirmation from Kissinger. That is strong attribution, not documentary proof.

Often given loosely 1968, not the Ford years

It is regularly quoted as something Secretary of State Kissinger said. In November 1968 he held no office at all — he was two months from being named National Security Adviser.

Genuinely Kissinger, November 1968, recorded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1974 — but as the closing clause of a conditional about Nguyen Van Thieu, not as a general verdict on American friendship the sourcing ↗.

Context

Why it resonates

It gets quoted every time an American ally is left exposed — Saigon, Kabul, the Kurds, Kyiv — because it says the quiet part with a shrug, and because it comes from the man who ran the policy rather than from someone protesting it. A confession beats an accusation every time.

The irony is that the full sentence is an argument against abandoning an ally. Kissinger was warning what it would cost the United States if Thieu went the way of Diem. The line survives as an indictment of American loyalty; he offered it as a reason to keep faith.

He was not saying American friendship kills. He was saying: do not let the world start believing that.

The two names in the sentence

Ngo Dinh Diem: president of South Vietnam, overthrown and killed in a November 1963 coup that Washington had encouraged. The precedent Kissinger is pointing at.

Nguyen Van Thieu: his eventual successor, in office 1967-1975, and in November 1968 refusing to join the Paris talks.

Clark Clifford: Johnson's Secretary of Defense, whose objective Kissinger takes to be removing Thieu before Nixon was sworn in.

The whole remark is a message for the incoming administration, not a public statement — which is part of why the only record of it is a friend's memoir six years later.

Thieu did survive until 1975. Saigon fell anyway, and the line has been quoted about it ever since.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Power Friendship

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Barry Popik — the full quotation and its variantsbarrypopik.com

The citation trail to Buckley’s 1974 book, page 57, plus the paraphrases that have circulated since.
Henry Kissinger — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Files the line under ‘Attributed’, sourced to Buckley, United Nations Journal (1974), pp. 56–57.
Snopes on the Kissinger friendship quotesnopes.com

A 2025 fact-check prompted by the line’s revival in arguments about American allies.
The quote shared without its contextmythdetector.com

A fact-checking write-up focused on the truncation rather than the authorship.

The true author

About Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger

1923–2023 · US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) was born in Bavaria, fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, and became the most quoted — and most argued-about — American diplomat of the twentieth century, running foreign policy for Nixon and Ford and sharing the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He spoke in exactly this register: cold, conditional, structured as a prediction about how other capitals would read a move. That style is what makes him so easy to misquote. Strip the ‘if’ from a Kissinger sentence and you are left with something that sounds like a law of history, which is rarely what he meant and always what travels.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Kissinger, Henry. Remark of November 1968, quoted in William F. Buckley Jr., United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey (New York: Putnam, 1974), pp. 56–57.

MLA (9th ed.)

Kissinger, Henry. Qtd. in William F. Buckley Jr., United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey. Putnam, 1974, pp. 56–57.

APA (7th ed.)

Kissinger, H. (1968). Remark quoted in W. F. Buckley Jr., United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey (pp. 56–57). Putnam, 1974.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy’?” Last verified 21 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-may-be-dangerous-to-be-americas-enemy

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