In this rather brave passage, Bundy takes responsibility for perpetuating the Vietnam War even after he, McNamara, and Johnson had left office. In The Kennedy Imprisonment, Garry Wills, who didn't know about the secret missile-trade deal any more than Johnson or Nixon did, wrote that the official lesson from the missile crisis (or at least what Sorensen, Bundy, and the others had previously said was the lesson)—stand firm, never negotiate—was what Johnson and Nixon disastrously "applied year after year in Vietnam."