Ken Burns’s ‘Vietnam War’ Is No Profile In Courage
Though Ken Burns’s 10-part PBS documentary The Vietnam War doesn’t try very hard, he can’t be blamed for failing as a filmmaker even if he had. It can’t be done. There are too many Vietnam Wars to accurately portray in a documentary, even one 18 hours long. So fair enough. But Burns’ real failure is not as a documentarian per se, it is one of courage.
Burns teases us at the beginning of the series that there will be courage here, a reckoning of sorts, riffing off the final pages of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, showing war footage in reverse, so bombs return to their mother ship’s belly, rockets are sucked out of the bush back onto helicopters, and, in case the point wasn’t clear yet, the 1st Cav walks backwards onto their Hueys and departs the rice paddy. See, it’s an antiwar movie.
Well, not really, or maybe not also. Burns quickly moves on to the next test, getting all the greatest hits in. There’s the iconic image of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head, and Nick Ut’s photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm raid, alongside that footage of bombs dropping, exploding Kodachrome orange against greener-than-green foliage. If the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” hadn’t been written during Vietnam, it would be necessary to invent time travel to place it alongside the war. And yep, there’s Dylan, a hippie chick with flowers, grunts in the jungle, Marlboro hard packs and M-16s at the ready. Check, check, check—Oh, Suzy Q!
No, wait, it’s one of those balanced documentaries. Burns treats us to the trope-ish story of Ho Chi Minh foolishly writing fan letters to American presidents over the years, starting way back with Woodrow Wilson at the end of WWI, thinking the American love of freedom, ye olde tale of democracy, the experience as fellow colonialists—all of which should have bonded the United States to his side over the imperialist French. That didn’t happen, you see, so it’s ironic. There’s also a bunch of actual Vietnamese interviewed in Burns’ movie, albeit disproportionately far too many identified as formerly of the “South Vietnamese Army.” The ties to the CIA of several of those interviewed are also left obscured.
For the Americans in the audience, there’s also a dollop of “Vietnam as a test of manhood/the test of manhood is actually a metaphor for broken American dreams of the 20th century.” Burns had no choice with this one, as it is required as much as the shots of Saigon prostitutes in their tight ao dai’s. America loves the manhood story; it’s the version of Vietnam that allows us to revere a crusty old war monger like John McCain (Episode Four of Burns’ film even includes a shot of George W. Bush in the Air National Guard), and leaves people who took deferments like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton forever in shame.
Burns does the manhood theme proud, though, slipping us both the noble grunt version via gritty personal anecdotes from guys you don’t know (though rough-and-tumble Marine guyKarl Marlantes pops up), and the Oliver Stone subreddit, where manhood is proved only after it is broken down (forget Platoon, his real telling was in Born on the Fourth of July). Stone and his subject Ron Kovic don’t appear for Burns’ camera, but a non-celebrity grunt named John Musgrave is on camera to illustrate the journey from gungho killer to “it was all a lie, man.”
Okay, fair enough, this is Ken Burns for heck’s sake. He does jazz, he does Americana, he gets baseball in a way that sends George Will in to euphoric spasms—of course he’s going to go folksy. That’s why we donate and get the PBS tote bag each year. At least he filmed this one in color, all 79 individual interviews.
But where Burns lets us down is where nearly everything that has or maybe will be written about Vietnam lets us down. He is too easy on the politicians who cynically manipulated the public, he is too easy on the bulk of the media who gleefully participated in the manipulation (everything short of proclaiming WMDs in Hanoi), too easy on individual soldiers who took advantage of lax leadership to, in historian Nick Turse’swords, Kill Anything That Moves (My Lai was one, far from the only.)
Burns drinks too deeply from the cup of “hate the war, not the warrior.” Deaths were committed because of a policy that demanded body counts—the number of “enemy” killed—as the borderless war’s only metric of accomplishment. As Turse writes and Burns omits, “U.S. commanders wasted ammunition like millionaires and hoarded American lives like misers, and often treated Vietnamese lives as if they were worth nothing at all.” In 2017 America, where the military is fetishized, personal responsibility is lost.
Burns indeed lets all of us off too easy: Us, the American people, the voters, the spectators, the ones who bought the epic story that Vietnam was a struggle between two great forces for the soul of civilization, Communism versus Freedom. The American people in 1962 (or 1965 or 1968 or 1945 or 1954) were not yet cynical. They were easily convinced that what was little more than a continuation of colonialism was instead a firewall of the Cold War. We had come out of WWII winners, with anything that would have made that less than the Good War hidden for another couple of generations. Vietnam was then our bad childhood, and should have left us with no such excuse for Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, etc.
Burns lets us off too easy because he does not demand we not let it happen again, and that is his sin: omission.
“With knowledge comes healing,” the filmmaker told Vanity Fair about his goal. But that is not the film he made.
We should know better but we were the ones who bought the epic story that Iraq, et al, like Vietnam, was a struggle between two greats forces for the soul of civilization, Terrorism versus Freedom—feel free to substitute in Islam and Christianity. We had to fight them over there (the beach at Danang instead of the beach at San Diego), or we’d fight them over here, the smoking gun a mushroom cloud over Cincinnati. We let Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon lie to us about the war, then let five successive modern presidents, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner (Kissinger also won the Peace Prize for ending the war he first helped prolong) lie to us about Iraq in a spin of our illusion of invincibility and moral rightness.
Burns tips his hand in the first minutes of his series when the narrator intones the war was “begun in good faith.” Who could have known Vietnam was a war for independence, not a civil war as sold to the American people? That Pakistan supported the Taliban with U.S. aid money? That there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq? Burns doesn’t tell us that Vietnam was not an exception, it was a template.
Burns tried to be all things to all people, while failing at the most important task, making history valuable to the present. He does not seem in search of lessons, only in creating a catalog of Vietnam stuff and leaving it on the table for us to poke at, like historical amuse bouche. By eschewing experts from his interviews to focus on “real people” and their anecdotes, Burns by default puts himself into the expert role. He then chooses not to responsibly occupy it.
There is no reckoning in The Vietnam War, and it is doubtful there ever will be. You can’t close the book on Vietnam if you want to keep it open for Syria, or Iran, or wherever America makes war on an industrial scale against nations far less advanced, and commits torture, assassinations, and mass killings all the while trying to hide its dirty hands from the American public with the media’s financially-comfortable cooperation.
Each of these wars is not the equivalent of stepping on a Lego in a darkened bedroom. It’s the same story, the same war. It has the same ending. It serves the same purpose. It’s Vietnam. We just slog through 18 hours of Vietnam documentary because it lasts 18 hours. After the 25th similar shot of helicopters landing, you may not even be sure why you’re still watching. You want to finish Burns’ documentary with the feeling the American people will rise up and shout “we won’t be fooled again,” but instead shut off the TV knowing we have, and will.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author ofWe Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan. Views expressed here do not represent those of the Department of State. Follow Peter on Twitter: @WeMeantWell
Ken Burns Vietnam
Re: Ken Burns Vietnam
The Vietnam War, a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, written by Geoffrey Ward, narrated by Peter Coyote
A 10-part, 18-hour film series directed by veteran documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War contains footage, photographs, interviews and tape recordings whose cumulative impact is immensely powerful. It evokes in the viewer a sense of horror. The film provides evidence that the war resulted in more than 3 million dead, the vast majority of them Vietnamese civilians slaughtered by American bombs, artillery shells, napalm and other weaponry.
The documentary is a major project, which was undertaken with vast corporate sponsorship. The involvement of Ken Burns, and its broadcast on Public Television, endows the documentary with a semi-official character. It reflects, in objective terms, where a significant section of official American liberal “public opinion” stands in relation to the Vietnam War more than 40 years after its end. Based on this documentary, one is compelled to conclude that this layer of opinion makers has never come to grips with the reality of Vietnam, that is still lying to the world and to itself, and attempting to relativize and justify policies and actions that rank among the most criminal in the 20th century.
By rights, the war should have been followed by the American equivalent of the Nuremberg Tribunal, at which all those responsible for planning and supervising the US intervention would have been publicly indicted for their crimes, prosecuted and sent to prison. That never happened, and American public life—and American culture more broadly—have suffered ever since from this colossal moral failure.
What followed the war, instead of such a fundamental examination of how such crimes came to be committed, was a persistent attempt to salvage something from the catastrophe, to disguise its criminal character, to legitimize it, and to gradually erode what came to be known as the “Vietnam syndrome”—the pervasive and entirely justified distrust and resistance of the American people toward new foreign military interventions.
One of the major techniques employed by the US ruling elite to overcome the legacy of Vietnam was to hide behind the soldiers, the two and a half million Americans who fought in the war, many of them unwilling draftees. Appeals for sympathy for the veterans were employed, in a sort of moral blackmail, to cover up the central issue of the criminality of the enterprise in which those soldiers were ordered to take part. Anyone who rejects the claim that the Vietnam War was merely a “mistake” and demands a more penetrating and critical approach is smeared as denying the suffering and sacrifice of the soldiers.
The Vietnam War, broadcast over PBS over 10 nights out of 12 (September 17-28), and now being rebroadcast one night a week, is an example of this technique, although it is done with relative subtlety, and avoids the heavy-handed approach first voiced by President Ronald Reagan (who pronounced the war a “noble failure”) and now regularly employed to block critical analysis of the ongoing US wars of intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc.
Moral “equivalency” of the invaders and the invaded
The fatal contradiction of the Burns and Novick program is that they show crime after crime—mass slaughters, breaches of international law, government lying, cover-ups of war crimes—but these exposures are embedded in an overall narrative which asserts the essential moral equivalency of US imperialism and the Vietnamese resistance. Both sides are shown engaging in ruthless military operations, massacres, assassinations, targeting of innocents, as well as gross misjudgments and systematic lying.
The film does interview Vietnamese who played significant roles in the war, both in the National Liberation Front (NLF or “Viet Cong”) and in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). It humanizes the “enemy” in a way that has not been done previously in American television. But this does not alter the basic framework of equivalency, in which the American soldiers are presented as victims of the war, and the bulk of the interviews are conducted with American veterans who discuss the impact of the war on themselves and the comrades they lost in battle.
It is true that American soldiers suffered greatly during the war, and deserve sympathy. But that does not justify the American invasion of Vietnam, any more than the sacrifices of Confederate soldiers justified the slaveholders’ rebellion in the American Civil War, or the suffering of German soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War II justified Nazism.
The American soldiers suffered in Vietnam because the United States invaded that country in order to block its reunification under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. No Vietnamese were killed invading the United States. No American cities or towns were bombed, no American farms were burned, no American civilians died because of the actions of the NLF or NVA.
The Burns and Novick film examines the war through the lens of 79 eyewitnesses, the majority of them Americans, most of these soldiers who fought in Vietnam. They discuss their experiences of the war and their return to the United States, when some became activists against the war, and they reflect on the impact of the war on their lives. Almost without exception, the rank-and-file soldiers interviewed appear serious, thoughtful, regretful and fundamentally humane.
But the intense focus on the experience of a comparative handful of individual soldiers has damaging consequences. Their personal experiences cannot serve as a substitute for historical and political analysis of the war or provide a politically coherent narrative. Instead, the very attractiveness and decency of the former soldiers is used to buttress a narrative that essentially exonerates the US government of deliberate criminality and mass murder.
The film footage of the era is selected and edited with the skill we have come to expect from Burns and Novick, with one additional feature: they make use of the contemporaneous tape-recordings of White House telephone conversations and internal discussions, which show the cynical double-dealing of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, in a very powerful way.
It is a truism that “they all lie.” But to hear the president and his top aides discussing their real intentions and plans for the war, and then saying the direct opposite to the press and the public, adds a new dimension. No one who watches this film will listen to a presidential speech or press conference in the same way again.
The first—and last—“television war”
The film and photographic record of the period is remarkable. The Vietnam War incorporates iconic images like the summary execution of a National Liberation Front fighter during the Tet offensive, the massacre at My Lai, the agony of a young girl burned by napalm, and the shooting of students of Kent State, each placed in a sequence of film footage and still photos that add to the devastating impact.
It has been said that Vietnam was “the first television war,” but it was also the last. The Pentagon learned its lesson, and every American war since Vietnam has been conducted on the basis of strict military censorship imposed by “embedding” reporters with military units and denying them the ability to move freely in the war zone. The American corporate media has responded obediently, tailoring its coverage to the dictates of the military-intelligence apparatus.
For the raw material alone, The Vietnam War deserves the widest possible audience. The interviews, the film footage, the still photos and the tape-recordings have a cumulative effect. The contemporary viewer can hardly avoid concluding, even though Burns and Novick bend over backwards to avoid drawing this conclusion explicitly, that the Vietnam War delivered a shock to American society from which it has never really recovered.
That said, the analysis provided by the narrative never goes beyond the conventional framework of liberal anti-communism—the very same ideology that guided those who instigated and escalated the American intervention in Vietnam, who were for the most part liberal Democrats in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The tone is set in the opening remarks of the first episode, when narrator Peter Coyote says the Vietnam War was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.”
The effort to equate the actions of the two sides in the war necessitates a gross distortion of the historical record, as some antiwar commentators have noted. The violence perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam was of a genocidal character. Eight million tons of bombs were dropped on North and South Vietnam alone, far more than in all theaters of World War II combined. In addition, US warplanes dropped 370,000 tons of napalm and sprayed 21 million gallons of toxic defoliant chemicals like Agent Orange.
Approximately 58,000 Americans died in the war, compared to 3 million Vietnamese. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC displays those 58,000 names on a granite wall that at its highest point is 10 feet tall. A similar display of the names of the Vietnamese dead would be a granite wall the height of the Washington Monument.
A war of national liberation
A central issue, largely avoided by Burns and Novick, is the revolutionary nature of the war being fought by the Vietnamese, a national liberation struggle directed first against French colonialism and then against its semi-colonial successor, the United States, but also directed against the class of landlords and capitalists within Vietnam itself, who acted as the domestic collaborators of the foreign occupier.
Take, for example, the beginning of guerrilla war in South Vietnam in 1959-60. Burns and Novick attribute this to popular opposition to the dictatorial character of the US-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. But the formation of the National Liberation Front had a powerful social component. As one critical analyst of the Vietnam War noted:
“Beginning in 1960, Vietcong began to appear in villages to renew the struggle against landlords. Large landowners were threatened; small landowners were told to reduce their rents below 25 percent; and tenants were told not to leave their villages to pay rent, but instead to make landlords come into the countryside and thus face the Vietcong.”
As the struggle developed, landlords subcontracted the collection of rents to provincial and district government officials and military officers: “Vietnamese peasants were confronted with both the civil administration and the army acting as direct agents of landlords” [James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) pp. 74-75].
There is not a hint of such a social analysis in the Burns-Novick documentary series. But without this, it is impossible to understand why successive US administrations intervened in Vietnam. It was not simply a matter of the simplistic anti-communism of the “domino theory,” but a genuine fear of the global repercussions of a revolutionary victory over imperialism by the workers and peasants of Vietnam.
Despite the crimes committed by the Stalinist leadership in Hanoi, which murdered the Vietnamese Trotskyists and sought to suppress any independent struggle by the working class, and the backstabbing treachery of the Stalinist bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing, which used the Vietnamese struggle as a bargaining chip for their maneuvers with imperialism, the driving force of events in Vietnam was a mass revolutionary movement from below.
There is a glimpse of this reality in the interviews with the National Liberation Front and NVA fighters, whose demeanor contrasts sharply with that of the American soldiers who fought against them. The Vietnamese speak with great confidence and energy; despite the awful sacrifices of the war, they are rightfully proud of their contribution to the struggle against imperialism.
The Americans are deeply conflicted, regarding the war as a tragic waste of life and limb. This disillusionment goes so far that, in a remarkable statement, the former pilot Merrill McPeak, who went on to become Air Force chief of staff during the first Persian Gulf War, expresses admiration for the discipline and courage of the soldiers, truck drivers and porters he was bombing on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When they are compared to the corrupt and cowardly Saigon officer clique, he says, “We were fighting on the wrong side.”
Exposures and apologetics
Nearly every episode combines both revelatory moments and segments that outrage an informed viewer. Episode Seven, “The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968–May 1969)” is a good example of this contradictory combination. There is footage of CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite describing the attacks on protesters by police in Chicago as the Democratic National Convention assembles. “The Democratic National Convention is taking place within a police state,” he says. “There seems to be no other way to say it.” One cannot imagine such a statement from a television anchorman today.
The episode also examines Nixon’s secret maneuvering with South Vietnam to block peace talks to aid his campaign in the 1968 presidential election. Johnson learned of this through CIA surveillance but kept silent to avoid exposing the illegal wiretaps. We hear a White House tape of Nixon lying to Johnson directly in a phone conversation, assuring the president of his full support for the peace negotiations in Paris.
But the episode also discusses the CIA-directed Phoenix Program, indicating that it killed 20,000 people and no one knows how many of them were “innocent,” that is, not Viet Cong. Presumably the assassination of Viet Cong leaders was morally legitimate, and only the killing of the unaffiliated should provoke resentment. The narrator continues, stating as an apparent contradiction that despite the success of the Phoenix Program in “degrading” the Viet Cong infrastructure, the Thieu government remained massively unpopular. A program of mass assassination was carried out, but the government that perpetrated it remained unpopular. Why should we be surprised?
This section ends with perhaps the film’s most blunt assertion of the case for defending Saigon against Hanoi, quoting one American intelligence operative to the effect that, while North Vietnam was a repressive communist state, the Saigon regime was “filthy but free.” This section includes still photos of the so-called “tiger cages,” where tens of thousands of NLF prisoners were held in barbaric underground cells, where many died, but it does not identify the photos or explain their meaning. “Free” indeed.
A corporate-financed production
The uneven character of the film is almost inevitable, given the political limitations of the co-directors, Burns and Novick, and the constraints imposed by the necessity to raise $30 million, mainly from corporate sponsors and foundations, to finance its production.
Watching the long list of such sponsors during the first minute of each episode, including the Ford, Rockefeller and Mellon foundations, billionaire David H. Koch (one of the infamous right-wing Koch brothers), Bank of America, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (an arm of the US government), it is no wonder that there is no discussion in the 18-hour program of the role of corporate profit in the Vietnam War.
Only one US corporation, Dow Chemical, is even mentioned in the series, and it would have been difficult to avoid naming the manufacturer of napalm, frequently targeted by antiwar protesters. Shamefully, the filmmakers are silent on this critical aspect of the war. However horrific for the Vietnamese people and the Americans conscripted to fight, the conflict in Vietnam was a gold mine for a select band of war profiteers.
Even without the self-censorship required to raise funds from corporate America, Burns and Novick wear their own blinders, methodological and political. They have produced a long list of documentaries, painstaking, serious, sometimes brilliant (the 1990 series The Civil War, which made their reputation), but never questioning the existing social order.
Burns and Novick decided to base The Vietnam War mainly on eyewitness testimony, interspersed within a narrative written by historian Geoffrey Ward and read by actor Peter Coyote. In contrast to The Civil War, they interview no historians to provide explanations for the illustrations and context for the eyewitness accounts.
The result is post-modernism carried to an extreme: a work of history that dispenses with coherent narrative, beyond the most elementary chronology. The Vietnam War is effectively reduced to the experience of individuals—in this case the 79 individuals selected by Burns and Novick, out of many hundreds they interviewed, themselves a tiny subset of the tens of millions of potential eyewitnesses.
Smearing the antiwar movement
This arbitrary selection finds its most perverse expression in the comparatively little time given to non-military participants in the antiwar movement in the United States. Only two individuals are interviewed who participated in the antiwar movement without first fighting in Vietnam, and both represent an upper-middle-class, pro-Democratic Party layer.
Bill Zimmerman, interviewed extensively, is now co-owner of a lucrative political consulting firm in Los Angeles. He worked on the Harold Washington campaign in Chicago, backed Tom Hayden’s campaigns for state legislature in California, and managed Moveon.org’s failed $23 million campaign to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. He is a financial supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Nancy Biberman, a Barnard College student who participated in the Columbia University protests in 1968, went on to become a Legal Services Corporation lawyer and to found the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, which promotes low-cost housing in the South Bronx, and green, environmentally friendly, housing using solar energy, as well as a charter school sponsored by Bard College. She is married to Roger Evans, Director of Public Policy and Law at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Only two excerpts of her interview are included in the film, and the second is particularly foul. She apologizes for antiwar protesters calling US soldiers “baby-killers”—an event which probably never happened, according to most serious historical accounts. The final statement of a participant in the antiwar movement, placed towards the end of the concluding episode, is a tearful “I’m sorry,” addressed to supposedly maligned American soldiers. To say that this leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth is an understatement.
Through these two individuals, Burns and Novick misrepresent and smear the entire antiwar movement, which involved millions of young people, many workers, some of the most important intellectuals, academics, scientists and entertainers, and even athletes like Muhammad Ali. The antiwar movement reached out tirelessly to soldiers, through institutions like GI coffee houses set up near every significant US military base, and organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Winter Soldier project, which gathered testimony from veterans about US war crimes in Vietnam.
For the vast majority of those who joined the antiwar movement, their participation in such protests was not something to apologize for, but one of the high points of their lives, a moment when they truly did “make a difference.” They helped to end a war and ultimately bring down a president, Richard Nixon, whose resignation under the threat of impeachment was a byproduct of the debacle in Vietnam and the mass opposition it triggered at home.
The sour attitude of the Burns and Novick film towards the antiwar movement is perhaps the clearest way in which they have adapted to the reactionary requirements of official American politics in 2017, which forbids any questioning of the military operations of American imperialism.
The United States has been engaged for more than 25 years in nearly continuous warfare, repeating all the crimes of the Vietnam intervention, with the addition of new and more technologically sophisticated means of mass murder—drone-fired missiles, “smart” bombs, and the “mother of all bombs,” recently dropped on Afghanistan, the largest explosive detonated since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In that context, the building of an antiwar movement, based on the independent mobilization of the working class, is the most urgent political task. Whatever the intentions of Burns and Novick, the evidence of imperialist atrocities and lies assembled in their film can help politically educate a new generation.
A 10-part, 18-hour film series directed by veteran documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War contains footage, photographs, interviews and tape recordings whose cumulative impact is immensely powerful. It evokes in the viewer a sense of horror. The film provides evidence that the war resulted in more than 3 million dead, the vast majority of them Vietnamese civilians slaughtered by American bombs, artillery shells, napalm and other weaponry.
The documentary is a major project, which was undertaken with vast corporate sponsorship. The involvement of Ken Burns, and its broadcast on Public Television, endows the documentary with a semi-official character. It reflects, in objective terms, where a significant section of official American liberal “public opinion” stands in relation to the Vietnam War more than 40 years after its end. Based on this documentary, one is compelled to conclude that this layer of opinion makers has never come to grips with the reality of Vietnam, that is still lying to the world and to itself, and attempting to relativize and justify policies and actions that rank among the most criminal in the 20th century.
By rights, the war should have been followed by the American equivalent of the Nuremberg Tribunal, at which all those responsible for planning and supervising the US intervention would have been publicly indicted for their crimes, prosecuted and sent to prison. That never happened, and American public life—and American culture more broadly—have suffered ever since from this colossal moral failure.
What followed the war, instead of such a fundamental examination of how such crimes came to be committed, was a persistent attempt to salvage something from the catastrophe, to disguise its criminal character, to legitimize it, and to gradually erode what came to be known as the “Vietnam syndrome”—the pervasive and entirely justified distrust and resistance of the American people toward new foreign military interventions.
One of the major techniques employed by the US ruling elite to overcome the legacy of Vietnam was to hide behind the soldiers, the two and a half million Americans who fought in the war, many of them unwilling draftees. Appeals for sympathy for the veterans were employed, in a sort of moral blackmail, to cover up the central issue of the criminality of the enterprise in which those soldiers were ordered to take part. Anyone who rejects the claim that the Vietnam War was merely a “mistake” and demands a more penetrating and critical approach is smeared as denying the suffering and sacrifice of the soldiers.
The Vietnam War, broadcast over PBS over 10 nights out of 12 (September 17-28), and now being rebroadcast one night a week, is an example of this technique, although it is done with relative subtlety, and avoids the heavy-handed approach first voiced by President Ronald Reagan (who pronounced the war a “noble failure”) and now regularly employed to block critical analysis of the ongoing US wars of intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc.
Moral “equivalency” of the invaders and the invaded
The fatal contradiction of the Burns and Novick program is that they show crime after crime—mass slaughters, breaches of international law, government lying, cover-ups of war crimes—but these exposures are embedded in an overall narrative which asserts the essential moral equivalency of US imperialism and the Vietnamese resistance. Both sides are shown engaging in ruthless military operations, massacres, assassinations, targeting of innocents, as well as gross misjudgments and systematic lying.
The film does interview Vietnamese who played significant roles in the war, both in the National Liberation Front (NLF or “Viet Cong”) and in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). It humanizes the “enemy” in a way that has not been done previously in American television. But this does not alter the basic framework of equivalency, in which the American soldiers are presented as victims of the war, and the bulk of the interviews are conducted with American veterans who discuss the impact of the war on themselves and the comrades they lost in battle.
It is true that American soldiers suffered greatly during the war, and deserve sympathy. But that does not justify the American invasion of Vietnam, any more than the sacrifices of Confederate soldiers justified the slaveholders’ rebellion in the American Civil War, or the suffering of German soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War II justified Nazism.
The American soldiers suffered in Vietnam because the United States invaded that country in order to block its reunification under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. No Vietnamese were killed invading the United States. No American cities or towns were bombed, no American farms were burned, no American civilians died because of the actions of the NLF or NVA.
The Burns and Novick film examines the war through the lens of 79 eyewitnesses, the majority of them Americans, most of these soldiers who fought in Vietnam. They discuss their experiences of the war and their return to the United States, when some became activists against the war, and they reflect on the impact of the war on their lives. Almost without exception, the rank-and-file soldiers interviewed appear serious, thoughtful, regretful and fundamentally humane.
But the intense focus on the experience of a comparative handful of individual soldiers has damaging consequences. Their personal experiences cannot serve as a substitute for historical and political analysis of the war or provide a politically coherent narrative. Instead, the very attractiveness and decency of the former soldiers is used to buttress a narrative that essentially exonerates the US government of deliberate criminality and mass murder.
The film footage of the era is selected and edited with the skill we have come to expect from Burns and Novick, with one additional feature: they make use of the contemporaneous tape-recordings of White House telephone conversations and internal discussions, which show the cynical double-dealing of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, in a very powerful way.
It is a truism that “they all lie.” But to hear the president and his top aides discussing their real intentions and plans for the war, and then saying the direct opposite to the press and the public, adds a new dimension. No one who watches this film will listen to a presidential speech or press conference in the same way again.
The first—and last—“television war”
The film and photographic record of the period is remarkable. The Vietnam War incorporates iconic images like the summary execution of a National Liberation Front fighter during the Tet offensive, the massacre at My Lai, the agony of a young girl burned by napalm, and the shooting of students of Kent State, each placed in a sequence of film footage and still photos that add to the devastating impact.
It has been said that Vietnam was “the first television war,” but it was also the last. The Pentagon learned its lesson, and every American war since Vietnam has been conducted on the basis of strict military censorship imposed by “embedding” reporters with military units and denying them the ability to move freely in the war zone. The American corporate media has responded obediently, tailoring its coverage to the dictates of the military-intelligence apparatus.
For the raw material alone, The Vietnam War deserves the widest possible audience. The interviews, the film footage, the still photos and the tape-recordings have a cumulative effect. The contemporary viewer can hardly avoid concluding, even though Burns and Novick bend over backwards to avoid drawing this conclusion explicitly, that the Vietnam War delivered a shock to American society from which it has never really recovered.
That said, the analysis provided by the narrative never goes beyond the conventional framework of liberal anti-communism—the very same ideology that guided those who instigated and escalated the American intervention in Vietnam, who were for the most part liberal Democrats in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The tone is set in the opening remarks of the first episode, when narrator Peter Coyote says the Vietnam War was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.”
The effort to equate the actions of the two sides in the war necessitates a gross distortion of the historical record, as some antiwar commentators have noted. The violence perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam was of a genocidal character. Eight million tons of bombs were dropped on North and South Vietnam alone, far more than in all theaters of World War II combined. In addition, US warplanes dropped 370,000 tons of napalm and sprayed 21 million gallons of toxic defoliant chemicals like Agent Orange.
Approximately 58,000 Americans died in the war, compared to 3 million Vietnamese. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC displays those 58,000 names on a granite wall that at its highest point is 10 feet tall. A similar display of the names of the Vietnamese dead would be a granite wall the height of the Washington Monument.
A war of national liberation
A central issue, largely avoided by Burns and Novick, is the revolutionary nature of the war being fought by the Vietnamese, a national liberation struggle directed first against French colonialism and then against its semi-colonial successor, the United States, but also directed against the class of landlords and capitalists within Vietnam itself, who acted as the domestic collaborators of the foreign occupier.
Take, for example, the beginning of guerrilla war in South Vietnam in 1959-60. Burns and Novick attribute this to popular opposition to the dictatorial character of the US-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. But the formation of the National Liberation Front had a powerful social component. As one critical analyst of the Vietnam War noted:
“Beginning in 1960, Vietcong began to appear in villages to renew the struggle against landlords. Large landowners were threatened; small landowners were told to reduce their rents below 25 percent; and tenants were told not to leave their villages to pay rent, but instead to make landlords come into the countryside and thus face the Vietcong.”
As the struggle developed, landlords subcontracted the collection of rents to provincial and district government officials and military officers: “Vietnamese peasants were confronted with both the civil administration and the army acting as direct agents of landlords” [James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) pp. 74-75].
There is not a hint of such a social analysis in the Burns-Novick documentary series. But without this, it is impossible to understand why successive US administrations intervened in Vietnam. It was not simply a matter of the simplistic anti-communism of the “domino theory,” but a genuine fear of the global repercussions of a revolutionary victory over imperialism by the workers and peasants of Vietnam.
Despite the crimes committed by the Stalinist leadership in Hanoi, which murdered the Vietnamese Trotskyists and sought to suppress any independent struggle by the working class, and the backstabbing treachery of the Stalinist bureaucracies in Moscow and Beijing, which used the Vietnamese struggle as a bargaining chip for their maneuvers with imperialism, the driving force of events in Vietnam was a mass revolutionary movement from below.
There is a glimpse of this reality in the interviews with the National Liberation Front and NVA fighters, whose demeanor contrasts sharply with that of the American soldiers who fought against them. The Vietnamese speak with great confidence and energy; despite the awful sacrifices of the war, they are rightfully proud of their contribution to the struggle against imperialism.
The Americans are deeply conflicted, regarding the war as a tragic waste of life and limb. This disillusionment goes so far that, in a remarkable statement, the former pilot Merrill McPeak, who went on to become Air Force chief of staff during the first Persian Gulf War, expresses admiration for the discipline and courage of the soldiers, truck drivers and porters he was bombing on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When they are compared to the corrupt and cowardly Saigon officer clique, he says, “We were fighting on the wrong side.”
Exposures and apologetics
Nearly every episode combines both revelatory moments and segments that outrage an informed viewer. Episode Seven, “The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968–May 1969)” is a good example of this contradictory combination. There is footage of CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite describing the attacks on protesters by police in Chicago as the Democratic National Convention assembles. “The Democratic National Convention is taking place within a police state,” he says. “There seems to be no other way to say it.” One cannot imagine such a statement from a television anchorman today.
The episode also examines Nixon’s secret maneuvering with South Vietnam to block peace talks to aid his campaign in the 1968 presidential election. Johnson learned of this through CIA surveillance but kept silent to avoid exposing the illegal wiretaps. We hear a White House tape of Nixon lying to Johnson directly in a phone conversation, assuring the president of his full support for the peace negotiations in Paris.
But the episode also discusses the CIA-directed Phoenix Program, indicating that it killed 20,000 people and no one knows how many of them were “innocent,” that is, not Viet Cong. Presumably the assassination of Viet Cong leaders was morally legitimate, and only the killing of the unaffiliated should provoke resentment. The narrator continues, stating as an apparent contradiction that despite the success of the Phoenix Program in “degrading” the Viet Cong infrastructure, the Thieu government remained massively unpopular. A program of mass assassination was carried out, but the government that perpetrated it remained unpopular. Why should we be surprised?
This section ends with perhaps the film’s most blunt assertion of the case for defending Saigon against Hanoi, quoting one American intelligence operative to the effect that, while North Vietnam was a repressive communist state, the Saigon regime was “filthy but free.” This section includes still photos of the so-called “tiger cages,” where tens of thousands of NLF prisoners were held in barbaric underground cells, where many died, but it does not identify the photos or explain their meaning. “Free” indeed.
A corporate-financed production
The uneven character of the film is almost inevitable, given the political limitations of the co-directors, Burns and Novick, and the constraints imposed by the necessity to raise $30 million, mainly from corporate sponsors and foundations, to finance its production.
Watching the long list of such sponsors during the first minute of each episode, including the Ford, Rockefeller and Mellon foundations, billionaire David H. Koch (one of the infamous right-wing Koch brothers), Bank of America, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (an arm of the US government), it is no wonder that there is no discussion in the 18-hour program of the role of corporate profit in the Vietnam War.
Only one US corporation, Dow Chemical, is even mentioned in the series, and it would have been difficult to avoid naming the manufacturer of napalm, frequently targeted by antiwar protesters. Shamefully, the filmmakers are silent on this critical aspect of the war. However horrific for the Vietnamese people and the Americans conscripted to fight, the conflict in Vietnam was a gold mine for a select band of war profiteers.
Even without the self-censorship required to raise funds from corporate America, Burns and Novick wear their own blinders, methodological and political. They have produced a long list of documentaries, painstaking, serious, sometimes brilliant (the 1990 series The Civil War, which made their reputation), but never questioning the existing social order.
Burns and Novick decided to base The Vietnam War mainly on eyewitness testimony, interspersed within a narrative written by historian Geoffrey Ward and read by actor Peter Coyote. In contrast to The Civil War, they interview no historians to provide explanations for the illustrations and context for the eyewitness accounts.
The result is post-modernism carried to an extreme: a work of history that dispenses with coherent narrative, beyond the most elementary chronology. The Vietnam War is effectively reduced to the experience of individuals—in this case the 79 individuals selected by Burns and Novick, out of many hundreds they interviewed, themselves a tiny subset of the tens of millions of potential eyewitnesses.
Smearing the antiwar movement
This arbitrary selection finds its most perverse expression in the comparatively little time given to non-military participants in the antiwar movement in the United States. Only two individuals are interviewed who participated in the antiwar movement without first fighting in Vietnam, and both represent an upper-middle-class, pro-Democratic Party layer.
Bill Zimmerman, interviewed extensively, is now co-owner of a lucrative political consulting firm in Los Angeles. He worked on the Harold Washington campaign in Chicago, backed Tom Hayden’s campaigns for state legislature in California, and managed Moveon.org’s failed $23 million campaign to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. He is a financial supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Nancy Biberman, a Barnard College student who participated in the Columbia University protests in 1968, went on to become a Legal Services Corporation lawyer and to found the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, which promotes low-cost housing in the South Bronx, and green, environmentally friendly, housing using solar energy, as well as a charter school sponsored by Bard College. She is married to Roger Evans, Director of Public Policy and Law at Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Only two excerpts of her interview are included in the film, and the second is particularly foul. She apologizes for antiwar protesters calling US soldiers “baby-killers”—an event which probably never happened, according to most serious historical accounts. The final statement of a participant in the antiwar movement, placed towards the end of the concluding episode, is a tearful “I’m sorry,” addressed to supposedly maligned American soldiers. To say that this leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth is an understatement.
Through these two individuals, Burns and Novick misrepresent and smear the entire antiwar movement, which involved millions of young people, many workers, some of the most important intellectuals, academics, scientists and entertainers, and even athletes like Muhammad Ali. The antiwar movement reached out tirelessly to soldiers, through institutions like GI coffee houses set up near every significant US military base, and organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Winter Soldier project, which gathered testimony from veterans about US war crimes in Vietnam.
For the vast majority of those who joined the antiwar movement, their participation in such protests was not something to apologize for, but one of the high points of their lives, a moment when they truly did “make a difference.” They helped to end a war and ultimately bring down a president, Richard Nixon, whose resignation under the threat of impeachment was a byproduct of the debacle in Vietnam and the mass opposition it triggered at home.
The sour attitude of the Burns and Novick film towards the antiwar movement is perhaps the clearest way in which they have adapted to the reactionary requirements of official American politics in 2017, which forbids any questioning of the military operations of American imperialism.
The United States has been engaged for more than 25 years in nearly continuous warfare, repeating all the crimes of the Vietnam intervention, with the addition of new and more technologically sophisticated means of mass murder—drone-fired missiles, “smart” bombs, and the “mother of all bombs,” recently dropped on Afghanistan, the largest explosive detonated since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In that context, the building of an antiwar movement, based on the independent mobilization of the working class, is the most urgent political task. Whatever the intentions of Burns and Novick, the evidence of imperialist atrocities and lies assembled in their film can help politically educate a new generation.
Re: Ken Burns Vietnam
Liberal anti-communism? how many years did the reviewer live in postwar East Germany or China under Mao? Do you really think that the motives of the Chinese or Soviet regimes were to defend indigenous people against American imperialism? the Vietnam War was a total disaster, but to imply that Chinese or Soviet communism was what 'the people' of Vietnam wanted is as deluded as anything American right-wingers can produce.
*
I am curious if the really unsavory aspects of the 'Nam were ever mentioned. Those being the CIA taking over the opium trade and the funneling of heroin to various world drug illegal distributors. And the pervasive rapes of Vietnamese women by the soldiers as they razed the peasant's villages with complicity or outright encouragement of the command structure of the military. The sexual assault of women in the military is still an ongoing major issue and hence carried into combat situations. These are just two of the uncomfortable truths to surface from the aftermath of an illegal imperialist undertaking.
Patrick is to be commended for his analysis of the civil war aspects in the region and the repression of uprising peasants against their landlords. This is the first time that I've heard that mentioned. Thank you.
*
Without these types of commentary the working class is truly blind to the propaganda from the bourgeoisie.
*
The Burns and Novick film does not deserve a wide audience, unless that audience is met by experienced Marxists who know that capitalism, imperialism and racism were born almost simultneously.
The wars on Vietnam were all imperialist adventures, from the French, to the Japanese and Chinese fascist Kuomintang, to the French again, to the US. It was a battle for empire: cheap labor, raw material (tin, rubber, rice, etc.), markets, and regional control (the importance today of the South China Sea).
The NVA, or NLF, and the VC, were peasant nationalists who mixed in a bit of Marx and Lenin, but the deciding factor was nationalism, as we see today.
Clearly, nationalism motivated people in the US, but also the governments of the USSR and China.
Anti-communism was a useful tool for the Americans, but as early as the mid-sixties, CIA assets like Chalmers Johnson recognized the dominance of nationalism in the North Vietnamese party (see his “Peasand Nationalism”). Walter Laquer also wrote in precisely the same vein.
Hence, Vietnam as a low-wage state today, with plenty of very poor people.
Neither the USSR nor China ever achieved communism, but the anti-communist poison continues today---in Burns and Novick among others. For them, “Communists” are everywhere.
There is a great deal left out:
What amounted to a GI mass strike (see “Sir No Sir” online)
***The Long Binh Prison rebellion.
***Cointelpro
***There is no mention of the thousands of "bad conduct" discharges the US services handed out, effectively destroying the lives of, mostly, draftees -- most of them suffering from PTSD. It was not until 2014 that the US government began to re-think that policy and offer some of those living a re-examination.
***Following the end of the American war, the Vietnamese did, as per Burns, invade Cambodia in the late seventies. They did so to stop the Khmer Rouge, authors of the "Killing Fields," that is, the murder of about 2 million Cambodians, from continuing their deadly policies.
***That the Khmer Rouge came into existence because of the US bombing of Cambodia, and the fact that the US paid for and supported the Khmer Rouge as they later conducted a guerrilla war against Vietnam for more than 20 years, is wiped out.
***The fact that tens of thousands of young people were radicalized in theory and practice--reading Marx, Lenin, etc., and demonstrating in the streets using a variety of tactics, and learning new ones. Perhaos one in fifty remained radical, still enough to preserve the notion of class war.
-- The focus on US' MIA's, which leaves the matter up in the air--is without any basis. The US long ago admitted there are none, and further, that Vietnam had made every effort to locate bodies of US soldiers. Everyone who knows anything about any war knows that there will always be "MIAs" - as bodies can be obliterated (by artillery for example) or simply disappear quickly in a hot jungle. The false narrative about retrieving all "MIAs" was part of the Big Lie followup to the Vietnam War promulgated by Reaganites and draft dodgers like Sylverster Stallone.
-- Highlighting US senators John Kerry (cold warrior, hot warrior, political war criminal), John McCain (bomber pilot--see above) and especially Bob Kerry who wrote that as a leader of Navy Seals, he found killing Vietnamese civilians like "drowning cats". https://www.counterpunch.or...
***Witless patriotism, particularly in regard to the Vietnam Wall fetish, is written all over every aspect of Burns' work, on both sides.
-- The conclusion, a rendering of the billionaire Beatles song, "Let it Be," is exactly what should not happen in a nation writhing in color coded inequality and promising endless war, led by political, economic, and military classes who are simply not fit to lead anything.
Reconciliation with what is now a fascist state? Hell No. The Vietnamese proved people could win.
*
An excellent contribution pointing to many of the flaws and deliberate misrepresentations in the documentary series, Rich, especially regarding the reason Vietnam invaded Cambodia a few years after the war which is completely falsified in the Burns film.
One trifling quibble: "capitalism, imperialism and racism were born almost simultneously". Actually imperialism and racism have been around at least since the first slave states around 10,000 years ago while what we call capitalism only arouse in the Middle Ages as Venetian and Florentine merchants became wealthy enough to start financing - supplying capital to - business ventures; first financing trading voyages, and later production facilities, gradually supplanting the landed aristocracy in wealth and power until they were able to seize control of the state in countries like France in 1789 and the US in 1776. Although you could probably make a good argument that capitalism existed to some extent in China and India long before that within the overall context of feudalism.
*
Another myth that should be laid to rest is that of returning soldiers being spat upon...I can't imagine any principled war protesters ever doing that...except maybe for the one time ultra-leftist David Horowitz turned renegade ultra- Libertarian and Zionist.
*
Patrick Martin's review of 'The Vietnam War' is for the most part informative and well-written. An elephant in the room throughout that television series is its failure to define the terms "capitalism" and "communism": "capitalism" was rarely used (surely a corporate-imposed omission) whilst "communism" was used ad nauseam and largely inappropriately.
During the early 1970's I was an active member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW); and I heard the "baby killers" insult on several occasions, Mr. Martin's historians' lack of knowledge to the contrary notwithstanding. Our VVAW chapter at Eugene in Oregon appreciated the nationwide university-based "anti-war movement" (in reality a middle-class "send some working-class kid to the war instead of me" movement) only up to a point: the "radical leaders" of that era, both locally and nationally, manifested an extreme dislike of military veterans--as if the war was something we veterans had created--and for the most part they've stuck to their ignorant, misinformed point of view ever since. I believe the "anti-war movement" got an even break in this documentary series.
As Mr. Martin observed, "It [the series] humanizes the 'enemy' in a way that has not been done previously in American television." I, too, wish more could have been done on that score; and at the same time I wish critics would stop denigrating the testimony of U.S. military veterans of the war. But old habits die hard.
*
Veterans are not heroes. In fact veterans are partly responsible for all the death. They chose to continue fighting and killing.
Skip, I agree we use "hero" way too much, and for things that it should not apply to, like transgenders, virtue signalling actors/actresses, and "grass-roots" communist movements.
Obviously you're not in the top 50% of intelligence.
*
I got called a baby killer when I got back. I have read in four different articles that this never happened, but I know it did. I don't feel like I can let it pass. Why this revisionist push to gas light our experience?
My stepfather had it tossed at him, too, in Australia. The tendency for the public to blame the soldiers for the jobs politicians send them to do is still alive and well. My son's had his service in Afghanistan thrown in his face and his mates have had their service in Iraq thrown in theirs.
*
Maybe you didn't personally deserve this epithet. But Lt. William Calley and those he commanded to carry out the My Lai massacre did kill babies, and many others as well. The blame should be principally directed at the president, the politicians, and the generals who conceived, supported, and undertook the massive destruction of a society. It was both a tragedy and a crime that ordinary men were forced to carry it out.
*
the political line of equivalence and thus apology was very clear from the outset.
there may have been a large element of national self-defence but the north vietnamese regime threw millions into the front line in the name of an ideology, an ideology that has nothing to do with Vietnam but which was promoted from Moscow and Beijing. For how many decades did you actually live in the GDR or communist Poland by the way?.
*
Telling some of the truths (though not fully or accurately) for a decades old war is one thing but the question is can such a series be made today by mainstream media about the currents war in Iraq and Syria? Now that would be real journalism and that would be impossible for mainstream media. Actually those getting the truth out about the criminal wars in progress today (such as the WSWS) are being censored.
Not to mention Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
*
The documentary showed the French colonial power in Vietnam twisting the US government's arm to give it military support in 1945-46 to maintain its colony, failing which it was ready to ally with Moscow. The French were not the only ones appealing to American imperialism. A letter from Hô Chi Minh the Vietnamese Communis Party leader to US President Truman revealed the stalinist nationalist perspective, requesting American help for Vietnamese independance against the French.
*
The OSS provided a lot of support to Vietnamese guerrillas fighting the Japanese, including Hi Chi Minh. Somewhat naively they seem to have believed the propaganda about the allies fighting for freedom without realising that didn't extend to colonial subjects. So Ho Chi Minh did hope for and lobbied for US support against French rule.
It is somewhat ironic that the whole war could have been avoided if the Americans had supported independence from the French as soon as the war was over. Though of course they most likely valued French support more highly.
*
Glaringly missing from the series is any reporting of the impact of the war on Laos and Cambodia. There is no mention of the U.S. support for the rise of the murderous Pol Pot regime.
*
Good point, Ken. I've added a paragraph on that to my own comment regarding Burns' deliberate misrepresentation of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia a few years later which was carried out to stop the Pol Pot/Khumer Rouge genocide and attacks on Vietnamese border towns.
*
The so called secret bombing in Cambodia by the US (though not a secret for the peasants whose villages were carpet bombed) was one of the reasons for the rise of the Khmer Rouge along with support from the Chinese and Americans. Kissinger ended up with a Nobel prize for his efforts.
*
Writing as a Vietnam vet and a student of the war (beginning before I was an advisor 3/68-3/69), I thought that the series touched (key word) on nearly everything important about the war. Burns and Novick did, I think, a pretty good job of an impossible task.
The Vietnam War is onion-like, as the deeper one goes the dirtier it gets.
I participated in the Phoenix Program, and I wondered at the number "20,000" enemy eliminated when studies have shown the number was close to 50,000. Burns gave no source for that low number---David Koch?
Also, once again, everyone in the series talks about bombs dropped, but no one talked much about artillery. Where I was at night (near Cambodia)artillery (105's to 175's) banged away all night at random intervals and times with no particular target. It was called H&I fire, Harassment & Interdiction, and I must have heard a billion dollars worth of that murderous nonsense. We are still paying for it.
I think this review of Patrick Martin's is thoughtful and correct.
*
Have not seen Burns' and Novick's documentary. One quick question however. In Karnow's "Vietnam; A History" he asserts and provides strong evidence that LBJ fought the American War in Vietnam for domestic political purposes not foreign policy purposes. Specifically Johnson's formative years in national politics encompassed the "Red scare" and McCarthyism of the late 1940s and early 1950s. A central component of this anti-communist hysteria stemmed from the absurd "who lost China" debate. Johnson was afraid if he "lost " Vietnam a similar political convulsion would shake domestic U.S. politics; destroy the "Great Society" civil rights and anti-poverty initiatives and shift America to the reactionary right (awakening "the Great Beast" as Johnson called it). Did the documentary deal with this?
*
No. But you do raise a good point, Peter. There were many reasons why Johnson pushed into the war, and the fear of being branded with a "Johnson lost Vietnam" label was certainly high on the list. He was much more concerned about his political career than how many millions of people he killed in Indochina to try to boost his poll ratings. He chose not to run again in 1968 only when it became obvious he would either suffer a humiliating defeat in the Democratic primary, or lose the election to Nixon. Better to retire "honourably" and go out on a "noble" note of "sacrificing my career for my country".
*
*
I am curious if the really unsavory aspects of the 'Nam were ever mentioned. Those being the CIA taking over the opium trade and the funneling of heroin to various world drug illegal distributors. And the pervasive rapes of Vietnamese women by the soldiers as they razed the peasant's villages with complicity or outright encouragement of the command structure of the military. The sexual assault of women in the military is still an ongoing major issue and hence carried into combat situations. These are just two of the uncomfortable truths to surface from the aftermath of an illegal imperialist undertaking.
Patrick is to be commended for his analysis of the civil war aspects in the region and the repression of uprising peasants against their landlords. This is the first time that I've heard that mentioned. Thank you.
*
Without these types of commentary the working class is truly blind to the propaganda from the bourgeoisie.
*
The Burns and Novick film does not deserve a wide audience, unless that audience is met by experienced Marxists who know that capitalism, imperialism and racism were born almost simultneously.
The wars on Vietnam were all imperialist adventures, from the French, to the Japanese and Chinese fascist Kuomintang, to the French again, to the US. It was a battle for empire: cheap labor, raw material (tin, rubber, rice, etc.), markets, and regional control (the importance today of the South China Sea).
The NVA, or NLF, and the VC, were peasant nationalists who mixed in a bit of Marx and Lenin, but the deciding factor was nationalism, as we see today.
Clearly, nationalism motivated people in the US, but also the governments of the USSR and China.
Anti-communism was a useful tool for the Americans, but as early as the mid-sixties, CIA assets like Chalmers Johnson recognized the dominance of nationalism in the North Vietnamese party (see his “Peasand Nationalism”). Walter Laquer also wrote in precisely the same vein.
Hence, Vietnam as a low-wage state today, with plenty of very poor people.
Neither the USSR nor China ever achieved communism, but the anti-communist poison continues today---in Burns and Novick among others. For them, “Communists” are everywhere.
There is a great deal left out:
What amounted to a GI mass strike (see “Sir No Sir” online)
***The Long Binh Prison rebellion.
***Cointelpro
***There is no mention of the thousands of "bad conduct" discharges the US services handed out, effectively destroying the lives of, mostly, draftees -- most of them suffering from PTSD. It was not until 2014 that the US government began to re-think that policy and offer some of those living a re-examination.
***Following the end of the American war, the Vietnamese did, as per Burns, invade Cambodia in the late seventies. They did so to stop the Khmer Rouge, authors of the "Killing Fields," that is, the murder of about 2 million Cambodians, from continuing their deadly policies.
***That the Khmer Rouge came into existence because of the US bombing of Cambodia, and the fact that the US paid for and supported the Khmer Rouge as they later conducted a guerrilla war against Vietnam for more than 20 years, is wiped out.
***The fact that tens of thousands of young people were radicalized in theory and practice--reading Marx, Lenin, etc., and demonstrating in the streets using a variety of tactics, and learning new ones. Perhaos one in fifty remained radical, still enough to preserve the notion of class war.
-- The focus on US' MIA's, which leaves the matter up in the air--is without any basis. The US long ago admitted there are none, and further, that Vietnam had made every effort to locate bodies of US soldiers. Everyone who knows anything about any war knows that there will always be "MIAs" - as bodies can be obliterated (by artillery for example) or simply disappear quickly in a hot jungle. The false narrative about retrieving all "MIAs" was part of the Big Lie followup to the Vietnam War promulgated by Reaganites and draft dodgers like Sylverster Stallone.
-- Highlighting US senators John Kerry (cold warrior, hot warrior, political war criminal), John McCain (bomber pilot--see above) and especially Bob Kerry who wrote that as a leader of Navy Seals, he found killing Vietnamese civilians like "drowning cats". https://www.counterpunch.or...
***Witless patriotism, particularly in regard to the Vietnam Wall fetish, is written all over every aspect of Burns' work, on both sides.
-- The conclusion, a rendering of the billionaire Beatles song, "Let it Be," is exactly what should not happen in a nation writhing in color coded inequality and promising endless war, led by political, economic, and military classes who are simply not fit to lead anything.
Reconciliation with what is now a fascist state? Hell No. The Vietnamese proved people could win.
*
An excellent contribution pointing to many of the flaws and deliberate misrepresentations in the documentary series, Rich, especially regarding the reason Vietnam invaded Cambodia a few years after the war which is completely falsified in the Burns film.
One trifling quibble: "capitalism, imperialism and racism were born almost simultneously". Actually imperialism and racism have been around at least since the first slave states around 10,000 years ago while what we call capitalism only arouse in the Middle Ages as Venetian and Florentine merchants became wealthy enough to start financing - supplying capital to - business ventures; first financing trading voyages, and later production facilities, gradually supplanting the landed aristocracy in wealth and power until they were able to seize control of the state in countries like France in 1789 and the US in 1776. Although you could probably make a good argument that capitalism existed to some extent in China and India long before that within the overall context of feudalism.
*
Another myth that should be laid to rest is that of returning soldiers being spat upon...I can't imagine any principled war protesters ever doing that...except maybe for the one time ultra-leftist David Horowitz turned renegade ultra- Libertarian and Zionist.
*
Patrick Martin's review of 'The Vietnam War' is for the most part informative and well-written. An elephant in the room throughout that television series is its failure to define the terms "capitalism" and "communism": "capitalism" was rarely used (surely a corporate-imposed omission) whilst "communism" was used ad nauseam and largely inappropriately.
During the early 1970's I was an active member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW); and I heard the "baby killers" insult on several occasions, Mr. Martin's historians' lack of knowledge to the contrary notwithstanding. Our VVAW chapter at Eugene in Oregon appreciated the nationwide university-based "anti-war movement" (in reality a middle-class "send some working-class kid to the war instead of me" movement) only up to a point: the "radical leaders" of that era, both locally and nationally, manifested an extreme dislike of military veterans--as if the war was something we veterans had created--and for the most part they've stuck to their ignorant, misinformed point of view ever since. I believe the "anti-war movement" got an even break in this documentary series.
As Mr. Martin observed, "It [the series] humanizes the 'enemy' in a way that has not been done previously in American television." I, too, wish more could have been done on that score; and at the same time I wish critics would stop denigrating the testimony of U.S. military veterans of the war. But old habits die hard.
*
Veterans are not heroes. In fact veterans are partly responsible for all the death. They chose to continue fighting and killing.
Skip, I agree we use "hero" way too much, and for things that it should not apply to, like transgenders, virtue signalling actors/actresses, and "grass-roots" communist movements.
Obviously you're not in the top 50% of intelligence.
*
I got called a baby killer when I got back. I have read in four different articles that this never happened, but I know it did. I don't feel like I can let it pass. Why this revisionist push to gas light our experience?
My stepfather had it tossed at him, too, in Australia. The tendency for the public to blame the soldiers for the jobs politicians send them to do is still alive and well. My son's had his service in Afghanistan thrown in his face and his mates have had their service in Iraq thrown in theirs.
*
Maybe you didn't personally deserve this epithet. But Lt. William Calley and those he commanded to carry out the My Lai massacre did kill babies, and many others as well. The blame should be principally directed at the president, the politicians, and the generals who conceived, supported, and undertook the massive destruction of a society. It was both a tragedy and a crime that ordinary men were forced to carry it out.
*
the political line of equivalence and thus apology was very clear from the outset.
there may have been a large element of national self-defence but the north vietnamese regime threw millions into the front line in the name of an ideology, an ideology that has nothing to do with Vietnam but which was promoted from Moscow and Beijing. For how many decades did you actually live in the GDR or communist Poland by the way?.
*
Telling some of the truths (though not fully or accurately) for a decades old war is one thing but the question is can such a series be made today by mainstream media about the currents war in Iraq and Syria? Now that would be real journalism and that would be impossible for mainstream media. Actually those getting the truth out about the criminal wars in progress today (such as the WSWS) are being censored.
Not to mention Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
*
The documentary showed the French colonial power in Vietnam twisting the US government's arm to give it military support in 1945-46 to maintain its colony, failing which it was ready to ally with Moscow. The French were not the only ones appealing to American imperialism. A letter from Hô Chi Minh the Vietnamese Communis Party leader to US President Truman revealed the stalinist nationalist perspective, requesting American help for Vietnamese independance against the French.
*
The OSS provided a lot of support to Vietnamese guerrillas fighting the Japanese, including Hi Chi Minh. Somewhat naively they seem to have believed the propaganda about the allies fighting for freedom without realising that didn't extend to colonial subjects. So Ho Chi Minh did hope for and lobbied for US support against French rule.
It is somewhat ironic that the whole war could have been avoided if the Americans had supported independence from the French as soon as the war was over. Though of course they most likely valued French support more highly.
*
Glaringly missing from the series is any reporting of the impact of the war on Laos and Cambodia. There is no mention of the U.S. support for the rise of the murderous Pol Pot regime.
*
Good point, Ken. I've added a paragraph on that to my own comment regarding Burns' deliberate misrepresentation of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia a few years later which was carried out to stop the Pol Pot/Khumer Rouge genocide and attacks on Vietnamese border towns.
*
The so called secret bombing in Cambodia by the US (though not a secret for the peasants whose villages were carpet bombed) was one of the reasons for the rise of the Khmer Rouge along with support from the Chinese and Americans. Kissinger ended up with a Nobel prize for his efforts.
*
Writing as a Vietnam vet and a student of the war (beginning before I was an advisor 3/68-3/69), I thought that the series touched (key word) on nearly everything important about the war. Burns and Novick did, I think, a pretty good job of an impossible task.
The Vietnam War is onion-like, as the deeper one goes the dirtier it gets.
I participated in the Phoenix Program, and I wondered at the number "20,000" enemy eliminated when studies have shown the number was close to 50,000. Burns gave no source for that low number---David Koch?
Also, once again, everyone in the series talks about bombs dropped, but no one talked much about artillery. Where I was at night (near Cambodia)artillery (105's to 175's) banged away all night at random intervals and times with no particular target. It was called H&I fire, Harassment & Interdiction, and I must have heard a billion dollars worth of that murderous nonsense. We are still paying for it.
I think this review of Patrick Martin's is thoughtful and correct.
*
Have not seen Burns' and Novick's documentary. One quick question however. In Karnow's "Vietnam; A History" he asserts and provides strong evidence that LBJ fought the American War in Vietnam for domestic political purposes not foreign policy purposes. Specifically Johnson's formative years in national politics encompassed the "Red scare" and McCarthyism of the late 1940s and early 1950s. A central component of this anti-communist hysteria stemmed from the absurd "who lost China" debate. Johnson was afraid if he "lost " Vietnam a similar political convulsion would shake domestic U.S. politics; destroy the "Great Society" civil rights and anti-poverty initiatives and shift America to the reactionary right (awakening "the Great Beast" as Johnson called it). Did the documentary deal with this?
*
No. But you do raise a good point, Peter. There were many reasons why Johnson pushed into the war, and the fear of being branded with a "Johnson lost Vietnam" label was certainly high on the list. He was much more concerned about his political career than how many millions of people he killed in Indochina to try to boost his poll ratings. He chose not to run again in 1968 only when it became obvious he would either suffer a humiliating defeat in the Democratic primary, or lose the election to Nixon. Better to retire "honourably" and go out on a "noble" note of "sacrificing my career for my country".
*
Re: Ken Burns Vietnam
Excellent in depth review, Patrick.
I completely agree that everyone should watch it; especially anyone under 50 who didn't live through it. The footage helps give them a more realistic picture than the standard diet of Rambo type movies where the invincible US "heroes" blow away the "Gooks".
A couple of things that struck me were, as you mention, the corporate sponsorships needed to fund such a massive undertaking necessarily meant that whatever Burns' personal views he was on a short leash - "He who pays the piper calls the tune". The Bank of America isn't interested in exposing the role of corporate imperialism in promoting war. He was further restrained by his need for co-operation with the Pentagon and TV news networks for film footage. So I assumed from the start this would be a self-censored version of events.
I noticed that throughout the series the National Liberation Front was almost always referred to as the "Viet Cong" although of course, no such entity as the "Viet Cong" ever existed except in US propaganda. Also throughout the series the NLF and North Vietnamese were always called "the enemy" by the narrator, leaving no doubt this was a heavily partisan production in spite of having a few interviews with North Vietnamese and NLF combatants sprinkled through it.
I recall watching innumerable nightly TV newscasts - mostly Walter Cronkite on CBS and Canadian CBC News - where the US troops regularly referred to the Vietnamese as "the Gooks", their racist term for any non-Americans in Southeast Asia. However, in 18 hours or so of the documentary, I never heard that term used even once. Apparently the racist terminology used by the US military to dehumanize the people they were slaughtering was "airbrushed out" of the footage.
Another huge omission was the Air War over North Vietnam. Few Americans know that the US lost approximately 10,000 aircraft (including helicopters) in the Vietnam War, and this documentary does nothing to enlighten them. The tiny and heroic Vietnamese air force, flying mostly outdated Mig 17s and 19s with only a handful of contemporary Mig 21s and outnumbered at least ten to one on any given day, not only held its own against the overwhelming US bombing onslaught but shot them down at a rate most Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots would envy. Yet there is not a single interview with a North Vietnamese pilot, or any film footage of US aircraft being shot down by them. Got to preserve that "US pilots are invincible" propaganda line pushed by the many History Channel and Hollywood movies showing US pilots always victorious over the perfidious Japs, Huns, Gooks, A-rabs, or Serbs. Talking about losing 10,000 aircraft to the Vietnamese would kind of cut across that narrative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
On the other hand, and to the credit of Burns and Novick, they did work in some powerful footage touching on the slaughter in the "free fire zones" and pointed out how the only US serviceman actually convicted of a war crime, Lt Calley, served only three days of his "life in prison" sentence before being retired to house arrest and then pardoned. The testimony of John Kerry before Congress was also a powerful and articulate statement against the crimes of the US military. He's changed a bit since, becoming the front man for US aggression in the Middle East under Obomber. (Probably had something to do with marrying a billionaire heiress and joining the One Percent.)
The final chapter of the film talks about the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam and implies it was a proxy war between the Soviet Union (Vietnam) and the Chinese supported Maoist Cambodian regime of Pol Pot although they never mention Pol Pot. That is a flat out lie. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was partially to stop the Pol Pot regime's genocidal slaughter of non-Khymer ethnic minorities as well as hundreds of thousands of Cambodians (The Killing Fields), and partially because the fanatical ultra-left Maoist Khymer Rouge regime was attacking Vietnamese towns and villages along the border with Cambodia. Vietnam ended the slaughter and restored a peaceful life to Cambodia. It is worth noting, and not mentioned in the film, of course, that the US continued to arm and finance the Khymer Rouge from it's bases in Thailand for at least another decade as they continued raids into Cambodia, forcing the Vietnamese to maintain a strong force in Cambodia to protect the civilian population. Very similar to what they did in Cuba when they rearmed and financed Batista's army that had mostly fled to south Florida to carry out ongoing terrorist raids on Cuba for decades from their safe bases in Florida.
So, a sanitized war with a lot of missing parts, but still well worth watching, especially for anyone under 60 who only know the war from Hollywood movies. As Patrick points out, the US Deep State learned its lesson and now makes sure there is no nightly TV news coverage of its ongoing war crimes, so unless you follow a news source like South Front, Russia Insider, FARS News, or The Saker you wouldn't know that pretty much the same thing is going on in the Middle East where the US has killed tens of thousands of people in Mosul and Racca recently unreported in the western media, out of sight, out of mind. Incidentally, those are not socialist websites, but they do have accurate coverage of the many US wars in the Middle East and South Front in particular is all videos, very well put together and informative with lots of maps and front line footage. https://southfront.org
*
Another stereotype was, especially in the last few episodes, the use of "the communists"as a gross generalization of why the Vietnamese were fighting so valiantly. The continual use of "the communists" to describe the North Vietnamese as they invaded the South to end the colonial split of their country was the central propaganda method of U.S. imperialism and the Burns documentary perpetuates it.
*
The Moral equivalency of the film is monstrous and RELENTLESS. In a separate interview shown after one of the installments, Burns makes this claim " on one side there is 'a My Lai' on the other side the communists implement a land reform that kills millions".......aside from being one of the most common of all anticommunist accusations/tropes, that burns casually make the claim and finds some ideologically hallucinogenic equivalency here is telling. Burns, "the brilliant documentarian", makes no effort at all to document this alleged communist atrocity, though we all know "on the one side" , what My Lai was. A friend repeated that claim to me while we were arguing over the film on the last night.."the communists starved millions after the war" he said....I had to say : "so after all that, the great danger to the Vietnamese people was "communism"..Not the 7 million tons worth of B-52 craters from one end of the country to the other ?Not the millions of live mines and cluster bombs laying in the paddy's and Fields ? Not the massive chemical poisoning of the water and soil from the US military operations, including (but not limited to) the dioxin contained in Agent Orange ? , Not the TOTAL economic, social and physical DEVASTATION of Vietnam,? OR the sanctions and embargo of capital and material that the US placed and enforced after they retreated out of the country" ?
*
Very good points, Solerso. Yes, Burns finds some Vietnamese to claim that mismanagement was the cause of economic difficulties after the war, as though the new government had inherited an intact and flourishing country and gratuitously ruined it, instead of trying to cope with reconstructing their cratered and burned to the ground moonscape while under a US economic blockade.
No doubt there was some mismanagement - as a Cuban once said to me, "Just because someone was a heroic fighter in the Sierra doesn't necessarily mean he is qualified to run the Post Office." - but finding competent people to manage all the different aspects of the economy when the original managers fled to the US was the least of their problems.
*
The problem with memoir instead of history is that one can find an "eyewitness" to say or support just about any a-historical drek. I have a story too. I would rather learn to construct an argument.
*
This is an excellent review of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War. Thank you, Patrick Martin! Each night, after viewing a new episode of the documentary, I would look for principled critique on the Internet, and while I did find some excellent, partial critiques (such as John Pilger's "The Killing of History"), these were few and far between and most did not undertake a comprehensive review of the entire series.
Patrick Martin states from the beginning quite accurately that the footage, photographs, interviews and tape recordings provided by Burns and Novick have an "immensely powerful" impact on the viewer and give some idea of the magnitude of the crimes committed there, but then he explains how the documentary simultaneously suppresses or glosses over the crucial element of responsibility for this massive crime against humanity, by disproportionately foregrounding the experience of U.S. military personnel who fought and suffered in Vietnam.
No architect of the war was ever indicted for their crimes. Henry Kissinger, one of the biggest mass murderers of the post World War II era, is still alive today, but in our culture not only is Kissinger free from any hint of indictment, he remains a respected and revered, senior statesmen! The same goes for that hideous monster John Negroponte who appears prominently in this documentary. Since Vietnam he has left a trail of civilian corpses from Central America to the Middle East. So how can Burns and Novick have any truck whatsoever with such a figure!
No reparations were ever paid to Vietnam, and little if any resources were provided by the U.S. government to mitigate the effects of the devastation they caused to the country through extensive chemical warfare (which continues to show up in birth defects and deformities to this day), the most intense aerial and artillery bombardment in history (which not only left devastation but unexploded ordinance) and the extensive use of landmines (which continue to maim and kill innocents).
Quite the contrary, when the war ended the U.S. imposed a harsh embargo and continued to torture the Vietnamese population in the decades that followed the war, until finally by the mid-1990s it became another third world sweat shop for predatory Western corporations.
So what does the American viewer of this documentary learn after 18 hours?: that we, Americans, suffered a lot trying to "prevent the spread of Communism", that in the end Vietnam was a big "mistake" because of the suffering it caused to us, that the destruction was mutual, and that events were so complex that we can't draw any historical conclusions about U.S. empire, past or present.
*
The Burns/Novick film ended (yes I finished it after all) asking the same two wrong questions that have been floating around for 45 years - "was it worth it" ? and "what was it for" ..The peak of arrogance + ignorance. ....The only question an American has any right to ask is , by what right am I doing this ? Quite unexpectedly I was hit with some extremely powerful emotions -ones which I though such a film ,with its pedestrian, network TV dialectic , and knee jerk ,yellow ribbon America-as- victim narrative, could no longer provoke in me. The old cliche, cant see the forest for the trees hit me, and I was bowled over with this late coming total realization : No matter how obliquely American political leaders were drawn into it , no matter how hesitatingly it was escalated , the American war on Vietnam with its rolling "carpet bombing" of the country ( its millions of tons bombs surpassing ww2) with its 'Tiger battalions' with its SOG group , its Phoenix program (which Burns chose to ignore mainly) with its "free fire zones" , and above all with its barbaric anti-communist political imperative and the open war on civilians that must follow such an imperative , the American war was morally and materially equivalent to the Nazi German invasion of the Ukraine......chew on that, Ken Burns
*
Simultaneously an even bigger systematic US sponsored mass murder was occurring in Indonesia.
*
It is usual for the imperialist apologists to falsely "balance" the oppressor and the oppressed. On the other hand, this work at least shows some Vietnamese suffering. In the Zionist propaganda piece "Waltz with Bashir" , for ex, only the poor little Zionist colonialist soldiers are victims.
*
Tony:
A very critical and comprehensive view in the best standards of wsws.org. On N(auseating) P(ropaganda) Radio ten days ago , the co-producers appeared on "Stale Air" and the Gross presenter typically left unquestioned the following statements. Novick declared that the North's desire to reunite Vietnam was their version of "Manifest Destiny" while Burns described War (all wars?) as "testosterone on steroids"! The OSS contacting Ho Chi Minh in 1945 emerges as an an example of American altruism rather than political manipulation. This series has already been criticized by so many people such as John Pilger that further comment is unnecessary. However, in terms of the reliance on veteran testimony rather than historians, please remember that James Jones ends his WW2 (1975) with mentioning that veterans usually tend to forget the reality and lapse into nostalgic familiar ideological narrative reminiscences, a warning he earlier mentions in his conclusion to VIET JOURNAL (1974). Also The Civil war series is far from "brilliant" since it has been subjected to serious criticisms such as Burns' emphasis on "The Lost Cause" Confederate ideology emphasizing Southern apologist Shelby Foote in the series as well as virtually ignoring alternative histories such as "The Free State of Jones" later examined in revisionist class-conscious studies by Victoria Bynum and David Williams. As one article written about Burns's Vietnam War travesty mentions, this is really ideology masquerading as history.
*
"The Civil War" has been the standard Burns formula ever since.Burns chooses "healing" over laying open the wounds -which WONT "heal" until that's done..Burns never comes out and says that the mistywatercolormeeeeemor-ies - of the way we weeeeree
style he present as "healing" came as the result of the nationwide re imposition of white supremacy after the abandonment of reconstruction ...Burns actually rips off - directly and un-apologetically - the journalist and historical author and Civil War reminiscer Bruce Catton, for his entire idealistic approach.. Catton (who I read eagerly when I was a teenager) at least had the excuse of writing before ww2, and before the civil rights movement . Not a good excuse but Burns has no excuse at all.
*
I was drafted and served in Vietnam in 1868-1969. If Johnson had replaced McNamara with Clifford and Westmorland with Abrams much earlier, he might have had a very slim chance. I remember the very slim change for peace near the end of LBJ's term. Nixon may, or may not, have ruined it. But, the small bit of hope was all we had, so I strongly disagree with the anti-Johnson tone of this article..
*
My feelings now are that re-arranging the furniture in the Johnson administration could not have prevented it
I completely agree that everyone should watch it; especially anyone under 50 who didn't live through it. The footage helps give them a more realistic picture than the standard diet of Rambo type movies where the invincible US "heroes" blow away the "Gooks".
A couple of things that struck me were, as you mention, the corporate sponsorships needed to fund such a massive undertaking necessarily meant that whatever Burns' personal views he was on a short leash - "He who pays the piper calls the tune". The Bank of America isn't interested in exposing the role of corporate imperialism in promoting war. He was further restrained by his need for co-operation with the Pentagon and TV news networks for film footage. So I assumed from the start this would be a self-censored version of events.
I noticed that throughout the series the National Liberation Front was almost always referred to as the "Viet Cong" although of course, no such entity as the "Viet Cong" ever existed except in US propaganda. Also throughout the series the NLF and North Vietnamese were always called "the enemy" by the narrator, leaving no doubt this was a heavily partisan production in spite of having a few interviews with North Vietnamese and NLF combatants sprinkled through it.
I recall watching innumerable nightly TV newscasts - mostly Walter Cronkite on CBS and Canadian CBC News - where the US troops regularly referred to the Vietnamese as "the Gooks", their racist term for any non-Americans in Southeast Asia. However, in 18 hours or so of the documentary, I never heard that term used even once. Apparently the racist terminology used by the US military to dehumanize the people they were slaughtering was "airbrushed out" of the footage.
Another huge omission was the Air War over North Vietnam. Few Americans know that the US lost approximately 10,000 aircraft (including helicopters) in the Vietnam War, and this documentary does nothing to enlighten them. The tiny and heroic Vietnamese air force, flying mostly outdated Mig 17s and 19s with only a handful of contemporary Mig 21s and outnumbered at least ten to one on any given day, not only held its own against the overwhelming US bombing onslaught but shot them down at a rate most Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots would envy. Yet there is not a single interview with a North Vietnamese pilot, or any film footage of US aircraft being shot down by them. Got to preserve that "US pilots are invincible" propaganda line pushed by the many History Channel and Hollywood movies showing US pilots always victorious over the perfidious Japs, Huns, Gooks, A-rabs, or Serbs. Talking about losing 10,000 aircraft to the Vietnamese would kind of cut across that narrative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
On the other hand, and to the credit of Burns and Novick, they did work in some powerful footage touching on the slaughter in the "free fire zones" and pointed out how the only US serviceman actually convicted of a war crime, Lt Calley, served only three days of his "life in prison" sentence before being retired to house arrest and then pardoned. The testimony of John Kerry before Congress was also a powerful and articulate statement against the crimes of the US military. He's changed a bit since, becoming the front man for US aggression in the Middle East under Obomber. (Probably had something to do with marrying a billionaire heiress and joining the One Percent.)
The final chapter of the film talks about the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam and implies it was a proxy war between the Soviet Union (Vietnam) and the Chinese supported Maoist Cambodian regime of Pol Pot although they never mention Pol Pot. That is a flat out lie. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was partially to stop the Pol Pot regime's genocidal slaughter of non-Khymer ethnic minorities as well as hundreds of thousands of Cambodians (The Killing Fields), and partially because the fanatical ultra-left Maoist Khymer Rouge regime was attacking Vietnamese towns and villages along the border with Cambodia. Vietnam ended the slaughter and restored a peaceful life to Cambodia. It is worth noting, and not mentioned in the film, of course, that the US continued to arm and finance the Khymer Rouge from it's bases in Thailand for at least another decade as they continued raids into Cambodia, forcing the Vietnamese to maintain a strong force in Cambodia to protect the civilian population. Very similar to what they did in Cuba when they rearmed and financed Batista's army that had mostly fled to south Florida to carry out ongoing terrorist raids on Cuba for decades from their safe bases in Florida.
So, a sanitized war with a lot of missing parts, but still well worth watching, especially for anyone under 60 who only know the war from Hollywood movies. As Patrick points out, the US Deep State learned its lesson and now makes sure there is no nightly TV news coverage of its ongoing war crimes, so unless you follow a news source like South Front, Russia Insider, FARS News, or The Saker you wouldn't know that pretty much the same thing is going on in the Middle East where the US has killed tens of thousands of people in Mosul and Racca recently unreported in the western media, out of sight, out of mind. Incidentally, those are not socialist websites, but they do have accurate coverage of the many US wars in the Middle East and South Front in particular is all videos, very well put together and informative with lots of maps and front line footage. https://southfront.org
*
Another stereotype was, especially in the last few episodes, the use of "the communists"as a gross generalization of why the Vietnamese were fighting so valiantly. The continual use of "the communists" to describe the North Vietnamese as they invaded the South to end the colonial split of their country was the central propaganda method of U.S. imperialism and the Burns documentary perpetuates it.
*
The Moral equivalency of the film is monstrous and RELENTLESS. In a separate interview shown after one of the installments, Burns makes this claim " on one side there is 'a My Lai' on the other side the communists implement a land reform that kills millions".......aside from being one of the most common of all anticommunist accusations/tropes, that burns casually make the claim and finds some ideologically hallucinogenic equivalency here is telling. Burns, "the brilliant documentarian", makes no effort at all to document this alleged communist atrocity, though we all know "on the one side" , what My Lai was. A friend repeated that claim to me while we were arguing over the film on the last night.."the communists starved millions after the war" he said....I had to say : "so after all that, the great danger to the Vietnamese people was "communism"..Not the 7 million tons worth of B-52 craters from one end of the country to the other ?Not the millions of live mines and cluster bombs laying in the paddy's and Fields ? Not the massive chemical poisoning of the water and soil from the US military operations, including (but not limited to) the dioxin contained in Agent Orange ? , Not the TOTAL economic, social and physical DEVASTATION of Vietnam,? OR the sanctions and embargo of capital and material that the US placed and enforced after they retreated out of the country" ?
*
Very good points, Solerso. Yes, Burns finds some Vietnamese to claim that mismanagement was the cause of economic difficulties after the war, as though the new government had inherited an intact and flourishing country and gratuitously ruined it, instead of trying to cope with reconstructing their cratered and burned to the ground moonscape while under a US economic blockade.
No doubt there was some mismanagement - as a Cuban once said to me, "Just because someone was a heroic fighter in the Sierra doesn't necessarily mean he is qualified to run the Post Office." - but finding competent people to manage all the different aspects of the economy when the original managers fled to the US was the least of their problems.
*
The problem with memoir instead of history is that one can find an "eyewitness" to say or support just about any a-historical drek. I have a story too. I would rather learn to construct an argument.
*
This is an excellent review of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War. Thank you, Patrick Martin! Each night, after viewing a new episode of the documentary, I would look for principled critique on the Internet, and while I did find some excellent, partial critiques (such as John Pilger's "The Killing of History"), these were few and far between and most did not undertake a comprehensive review of the entire series.
Patrick Martin states from the beginning quite accurately that the footage, photographs, interviews and tape recordings provided by Burns and Novick have an "immensely powerful" impact on the viewer and give some idea of the magnitude of the crimes committed there, but then he explains how the documentary simultaneously suppresses or glosses over the crucial element of responsibility for this massive crime against humanity, by disproportionately foregrounding the experience of U.S. military personnel who fought and suffered in Vietnam.
No architect of the war was ever indicted for their crimes. Henry Kissinger, one of the biggest mass murderers of the post World War II era, is still alive today, but in our culture not only is Kissinger free from any hint of indictment, he remains a respected and revered, senior statesmen! The same goes for that hideous monster John Negroponte who appears prominently in this documentary. Since Vietnam he has left a trail of civilian corpses from Central America to the Middle East. So how can Burns and Novick have any truck whatsoever with such a figure!
No reparations were ever paid to Vietnam, and little if any resources were provided by the U.S. government to mitigate the effects of the devastation they caused to the country through extensive chemical warfare (which continues to show up in birth defects and deformities to this day), the most intense aerial and artillery bombardment in history (which not only left devastation but unexploded ordinance) and the extensive use of landmines (which continue to maim and kill innocents).
Quite the contrary, when the war ended the U.S. imposed a harsh embargo and continued to torture the Vietnamese population in the decades that followed the war, until finally by the mid-1990s it became another third world sweat shop for predatory Western corporations.
So what does the American viewer of this documentary learn after 18 hours?: that we, Americans, suffered a lot trying to "prevent the spread of Communism", that in the end Vietnam was a big "mistake" because of the suffering it caused to us, that the destruction was mutual, and that events were so complex that we can't draw any historical conclusions about U.S. empire, past or present.
*
The Burns/Novick film ended (yes I finished it after all) asking the same two wrong questions that have been floating around for 45 years - "was it worth it" ? and "what was it for" ..The peak of arrogance + ignorance. ....The only question an American has any right to ask is , by what right am I doing this ? Quite unexpectedly I was hit with some extremely powerful emotions -ones which I though such a film ,with its pedestrian, network TV dialectic , and knee jerk ,yellow ribbon America-as- victim narrative, could no longer provoke in me. The old cliche, cant see the forest for the trees hit me, and I was bowled over with this late coming total realization : No matter how obliquely American political leaders were drawn into it , no matter how hesitatingly it was escalated , the American war on Vietnam with its rolling "carpet bombing" of the country ( its millions of tons bombs surpassing ww2) with its 'Tiger battalions' with its SOG group , its Phoenix program (which Burns chose to ignore mainly) with its "free fire zones" , and above all with its barbaric anti-communist political imperative and the open war on civilians that must follow such an imperative , the American war was morally and materially equivalent to the Nazi German invasion of the Ukraine......chew on that, Ken Burns
*
Simultaneously an even bigger systematic US sponsored mass murder was occurring in Indonesia.
*
It is usual for the imperialist apologists to falsely "balance" the oppressor and the oppressed. On the other hand, this work at least shows some Vietnamese suffering. In the Zionist propaganda piece "Waltz with Bashir" , for ex, only the poor little Zionist colonialist soldiers are victims.
*
Tony:
A very critical and comprehensive view in the best standards of wsws.org. On N(auseating) P(ropaganda) Radio ten days ago , the co-producers appeared on "Stale Air" and the Gross presenter typically left unquestioned the following statements. Novick declared that the North's desire to reunite Vietnam was their version of "Manifest Destiny" while Burns described War (all wars?) as "testosterone on steroids"! The OSS contacting Ho Chi Minh in 1945 emerges as an an example of American altruism rather than political manipulation. This series has already been criticized by so many people such as John Pilger that further comment is unnecessary. However, in terms of the reliance on veteran testimony rather than historians, please remember that James Jones ends his WW2 (1975) with mentioning that veterans usually tend to forget the reality and lapse into nostalgic familiar ideological narrative reminiscences, a warning he earlier mentions in his conclusion to VIET JOURNAL (1974). Also The Civil war series is far from "brilliant" since it has been subjected to serious criticisms such as Burns' emphasis on "The Lost Cause" Confederate ideology emphasizing Southern apologist Shelby Foote in the series as well as virtually ignoring alternative histories such as "The Free State of Jones" later examined in revisionist class-conscious studies by Victoria Bynum and David Williams. As one article written about Burns's Vietnam War travesty mentions, this is really ideology masquerading as history.
*
"The Civil War" has been the standard Burns formula ever since.Burns chooses "healing" over laying open the wounds -which WONT "heal" until that's done..Burns never comes out and says that the mistywatercolormeeeeemor-ies - of the way we weeeeree
style he present as "healing" came as the result of the nationwide re imposition of white supremacy after the abandonment of reconstruction ...Burns actually rips off - directly and un-apologetically - the journalist and historical author and Civil War reminiscer Bruce Catton, for his entire idealistic approach.. Catton (who I read eagerly when I was a teenager) at least had the excuse of writing before ww2, and before the civil rights movement . Not a good excuse but Burns has no excuse at all.
*
I was drafted and served in Vietnam in 1868-1969. If Johnson had replaced McNamara with Clifford and Westmorland with Abrams much earlier, he might have had a very slim chance. I remember the very slim change for peace near the end of LBJ's term. Nixon may, or may not, have ruined it. But, the small bit of hope was all we had, so I strongly disagree with the anti-Johnson tone of this article..
*
My feelings now are that re-arranging the furniture in the Johnson administration could not have prevented it
Re: Ken Burns Vietnam
Joseph McBride Regarding NSAM263, there seems to be some question on whether that timetable was contingent on some kind of military success in bolstering the South Vietnamese government.Noam Chomsky, for example, says there's no way Kennedy would have withdrawn the US military without some kind of face-saving success.
Burns Vietnam 2
Viet Cong = Vietnam Communist.
By so branding the broad nationalist insurgent forces in South Vietnam as communists, these Orthodox scholars argue, Washington was guilty of transforming a local colonial conflict into a Cold War battlefield. For Revisionists, Viet Cong is a fitting term that illustrates Russia, China, and North Vietnam’s control of the insurgency.
https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/the-tru ... viet-cong/
Wiki: The decision to invade Vietnam was made by Napoleon III in July 1857. It was the result not only of missionary propaganda but also, after 1850, of the upsurge of French capitalism, which generated the need for overseas markets and the desire for a larger French share of the Asian territories conquered by the West.
Re: Burns Vietnam 2
Mike Teal
Netflix has been a real godsend during this stay-at-home quarantine period. I plowed quickly through all 18-hours of this 2017 Ken Burns documentary series and found it compelling and very illuminating. Born in 1960, I was a kid while this was all happening, and I knew many of the major events from it, but it's something else to see it explained from beginning to end, to show how these events fit into the larger context of the war, and to see it from the enemy's point of view as well. It was also interesting to cross-reference these events with the memory of what was going in my own life at that time too.
In reading some reviews of the series online, I see that it got mostly praise, but it also got plenty of criticism from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum, a pretty good sign that Burns and his producer achieved an objective balance and came pretty close to the truth.
Tony Williams
Like his pro-Lost Cause Civil War documentary, Burns again shows himself as a consummate liar in this phony history. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... t-o02.html
Mike Teal
Thanks for the link, Tony. Given that the U.S. objective in Vietnam was to "stop Communism", I wouldn't expect an article from a socialist website to be very objective, but it is relatively fair, and there is some good info there, and some good opinions in the comments section, including yours.
Joseph McBride
Mike Teal News just in: Communism and socialism are not the same thing.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride "Communism is a branch of socialism." - Dictionary.com
Joseph McBride
I think the wsws critique is good but doesn't go far enough. For example, neither it nor the series mentions or explains that LBJ on November 24, 1963, secretly reversed Kennedy's order issued that fall to withdraw from the war. Instead Kennedy is blamed in the series, and his withdrawal plans (which actually began to be implemented in December out of bureaucratic inertia, but the thousand men pulled out were soon replaced) are given no credit. The list of other historical distortions, lies, and omissions in the series is long; some are cited in the review. And s the review puts it, the warning flag on the series was up from the beginning with this absurd statement: "The tone is set in the opening remarks of the first episode, when narrator Peter Coyote says the Vietnam War was 'begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.'”
Tony Williams
Mike Teal Sure, but the US got it drastically wrong. Have you ever read Bernard Fall's HELL IN A VERY SMALL PLACE? The same holds for Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN (1955).If the politicians had bothered they would not have embarked on that disastrous undertaking which many believe the JFK assassination was instrumental in jump-starting.
Tony Williams
Joseph McBride I hoped you would enter into this conversation with your typical detailed historical knowledge.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride Well, as one guy put it online, the fact that the series had a $30 million budget from many corporate sponsors probably meant that Burns was given a limited amount of slack to express his views. It would be interesting to hear him address the issue of NSAM 263 and its omission from the series. If the case for Kennedy's plans for withdrawal are as clear and irrefutable as you say, it should have been in there. Given that, I think the series still does a pretty compelling and comprehensive job of explaining the historical context of what happened and why, and how the war became such a genocidal mess. I will check out the late 1963 section again. That's the nice thing about Netflix.
Joseph McBride
Listen to LBJ's phone conversations with Sen. Richard Russell in 1964 in which Russell warns him the war can't be won, will take ten years, and result in 50,000 American deaths, all of which came true. LBJ admits to Russell he knows it can't be won but says he is powerless to stop it. The Burns series doesn't address that, which would change its entire perspective.
Tony Williams
Mike Teal Was this also true for his Civil War series in which he promoted Confederate sympathizer Shelby Foote and all but ignored the Free state of Jones and other documented Southern working-class dissent to that noble "Lost Cause"?
Mike Teal
Tony Williams Yes. He used Shelby Foote as the voice of the South in order to present the South's viewpoint, so we could better understand where they were coming from, and why it took so long to defeat them. The same reason I presume why he interviewed North Vietnamese soldiers for the Vietnam series.
Joseph McBride
I think Foote is worth listening to, but the series overall falls into the "Lost Cause" sentimental trap by dwelling on Southern suffering and hardship more than on the causes of the war they brought on themselves.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride The LBJ/Russell talk is fascinating to listen to, although the southern accents are a bit difficult to understand at times. If I understand correctly, Johnson seems bound by a treaty with Vietnam that was signed by 14 other countries, all of which bailed on it except the U.S.. I can't seem to find much info about that online, unless they're referring to the 1955 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. If so, here's Wiki on that: 'NATO was the model for the new organization...(however) Unlike the NATO alliance...SEATO's response protocol in the event of communism presenting a "common danger" to the member nations was vague and ineffective, though membership in the SEATO alliance did provide a rationale for a large-scale U.S. military intervention in the region during the Vietnam War.' One British diplomat described the pact as "a zoo of paper tigers...a fig leaf for the nakedness of American policy."
Mike Teal
Also interesting is the LBJ/Russell talk of Nov. 29th, 1963, six days after the assassination. LBJ states firmly that "Khrushchev had nothing to do with it." How would he know, so soon after the fact?
Scott Walters
Wow. Great cover image.
Debbie Hiltner
I watched most of it when it was on PBS .. I felt the same as you. As kids, we had no idea!
So tragic 
Mike Teal
I Remember when we were coming home from Florida in 1968 during the Democratic Convention, and we were told to go around Chicago instead of through it because the 'evil hippies' were throwing baseballs with nails pounded through them at the police. That detail of spiked baseballs always stuck in my mind for some reason.
Debbie Hiltner
Funny the things we remember. Hippies and yippies. lol
Joseph McBride
I was among the protesters at the 1968 Chicago convention. The trouble started when we were peacefully gathered in a park and the police started teargassing people at 11 pm rather than letting them sleep in the park. The crowd scattered, with police chasing them. I heard gunfire about a block away and saw an abandoned car in a lot, so I ran to it and jumped into the back seat. I landed on a young woman who was also from Madison. That was a good "meet-cute," in film terms, but for some reason I didn't ask for her phone number. My point is that this was a police riot started by the police. Your "evil hippies" rumor is not worth crediting.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride I have no idea whether any spiked baseballs happened or not, but that's what we were told at the time, probably by my Florida grandparents who were very conservative and undoubtedly hated hippies and anyone else on the left. Thanks for the amusing story.
Tony Williams
Joseph McBride Yes, it also falls into the category of the "spitting" on veterans myth that Robert Lembke exposed in his book SPITTING IMAGES that had no basis in fact. He wrote a similar book about the demonization of Jane Fonda that still continues today.Another bad example of "Print the Legend"!
Mike Teal
Tony Williams Here's a 2009 article on a Police reunion that talks about spiked rubber balls left behind police cars and sometimes thrown at them. Maybe they're lying, maybe not. I don't know: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sd ... t-police...
Joseph McBride
Tony Williams Another legend from that era is that feminist protesters burned their bras in public. An historian who writes about the history of women's rights told me she investigated that story but found no evidence it ever happened.
Joseph McBride
The AP article on the reunion of thuggish Chicago cops who rioted in 1968 and generally behaved in a lawless fashion (I saw it; I was there) is laughable, so I wouldn't take anything in it at face value, such as "And they dismissed any talk of a 'police riot,' as a commission famously called the scene, speaking with pride about how they conducted themselves.
“'We were doing what we were supposed to do,' said John Murray, a 62-year-old retired detective. 'No regrets.'
"It was absolute chaos, they said, but they did not lose control even when faced with situations they never thought they’d ever see."
Debbie Hiltner
Joseph McBride Oh no, I remember seeing pictures and videos of women (including Gloria Steinem) burning their bras in public, it made quite an impression on me (Mandela effect? lol)
Netflix has been a real godsend during this stay-at-home quarantine period. I plowed quickly through all 18-hours of this 2017 Ken Burns documentary series and found it compelling and very illuminating. Born in 1960, I was a kid while this was all happening, and I knew many of the major events from it, but it's something else to see it explained from beginning to end, to show how these events fit into the larger context of the war, and to see it from the enemy's point of view as well. It was also interesting to cross-reference these events with the memory of what was going in my own life at that time too.
In reading some reviews of the series online, I see that it got mostly praise, but it also got plenty of criticism from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum, a pretty good sign that Burns and his producer achieved an objective balance and came pretty close to the truth.
Tony Williams
Like his pro-Lost Cause Civil War documentary, Burns again shows himself as a consummate liar in this phony history. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... t-o02.html
Mike Teal
Thanks for the link, Tony. Given that the U.S. objective in Vietnam was to "stop Communism", I wouldn't expect an article from a socialist website to be very objective, but it is relatively fair, and there is some good info there, and some good opinions in the comments section, including yours.
Joseph McBride
Mike Teal News just in: Communism and socialism are not the same thing.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride "Communism is a branch of socialism." - Dictionary.com
Joseph McBride
I think the wsws critique is good but doesn't go far enough. For example, neither it nor the series mentions or explains that LBJ on November 24, 1963, secretly reversed Kennedy's order issued that fall to withdraw from the war. Instead Kennedy is blamed in the series, and his withdrawal plans (which actually began to be implemented in December out of bureaucratic inertia, but the thousand men pulled out were soon replaced) are given no credit. The list of other historical distortions, lies, and omissions in the series is long; some are cited in the review. And s the review puts it, the warning flag on the series was up from the beginning with this absurd statement: "The tone is set in the opening remarks of the first episode, when narrator Peter Coyote says the Vietnam War was 'begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.'”
Tony Williams
Mike Teal Sure, but the US got it drastically wrong. Have you ever read Bernard Fall's HELL IN A VERY SMALL PLACE? The same holds for Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN (1955).If the politicians had bothered they would not have embarked on that disastrous undertaking which many believe the JFK assassination was instrumental in jump-starting.
Tony Williams
Joseph McBride I hoped you would enter into this conversation with your typical detailed historical knowledge.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride Well, as one guy put it online, the fact that the series had a $30 million budget from many corporate sponsors probably meant that Burns was given a limited amount of slack to express his views. It would be interesting to hear him address the issue of NSAM 263 and its omission from the series. If the case for Kennedy's plans for withdrawal are as clear and irrefutable as you say, it should have been in there. Given that, I think the series still does a pretty compelling and comprehensive job of explaining the historical context of what happened and why, and how the war became such a genocidal mess. I will check out the late 1963 section again. That's the nice thing about Netflix.
Joseph McBride
Listen to LBJ's phone conversations with Sen. Richard Russell in 1964 in which Russell warns him the war can't be won, will take ten years, and result in 50,000 American deaths, all of which came true. LBJ admits to Russell he knows it can't be won but says he is powerless to stop it. The Burns series doesn't address that, which would change its entire perspective.
Tony Williams
Mike Teal Was this also true for his Civil War series in which he promoted Confederate sympathizer Shelby Foote and all but ignored the Free state of Jones and other documented Southern working-class dissent to that noble "Lost Cause"?
Mike Teal
Tony Williams Yes. He used Shelby Foote as the voice of the South in order to present the South's viewpoint, so we could better understand where they were coming from, and why it took so long to defeat them. The same reason I presume why he interviewed North Vietnamese soldiers for the Vietnam series.
Joseph McBride
I think Foote is worth listening to, but the series overall falls into the "Lost Cause" sentimental trap by dwelling on Southern suffering and hardship more than on the causes of the war they brought on themselves.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride The LBJ/Russell talk is fascinating to listen to, although the southern accents are a bit difficult to understand at times. If I understand correctly, Johnson seems bound by a treaty with Vietnam that was signed by 14 other countries, all of which bailed on it except the U.S.. I can't seem to find much info about that online, unless they're referring to the 1955 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. If so, here's Wiki on that: 'NATO was the model for the new organization...(however) Unlike the NATO alliance...SEATO's response protocol in the event of communism presenting a "common danger" to the member nations was vague and ineffective, though membership in the SEATO alliance did provide a rationale for a large-scale U.S. military intervention in the region during the Vietnam War.' One British diplomat described the pact as "a zoo of paper tigers...a fig leaf for the nakedness of American policy."
Mike Teal
Also interesting is the LBJ/Russell talk of Nov. 29th, 1963, six days after the assassination. LBJ states firmly that "Khrushchev had nothing to do with it." How would he know, so soon after the fact?
Scott Walters
Wow. Great cover image.
Debbie Hiltner
I watched most of it when it was on PBS .. I felt the same as you. As kids, we had no idea!
So tragic Mike Teal
I Remember when we were coming home from Florida in 1968 during the Democratic Convention, and we were told to go around Chicago instead of through it because the 'evil hippies' were throwing baseballs with nails pounded through them at the police. That detail of spiked baseballs always stuck in my mind for some reason.
Debbie Hiltner
Funny the things we remember. Hippies and yippies. lol
Joseph McBride
I was among the protesters at the 1968 Chicago convention. The trouble started when we were peacefully gathered in a park and the police started teargassing people at 11 pm rather than letting them sleep in the park. The crowd scattered, with police chasing them. I heard gunfire about a block away and saw an abandoned car in a lot, so I ran to it and jumped into the back seat. I landed on a young woman who was also from Madison. That was a good "meet-cute," in film terms, but for some reason I didn't ask for her phone number. My point is that this was a police riot started by the police. Your "evil hippies" rumor is not worth crediting.
Mike Teal
Joseph McBride I have no idea whether any spiked baseballs happened or not, but that's what we were told at the time, probably by my Florida grandparents who were very conservative and undoubtedly hated hippies and anyone else on the left. Thanks for the amusing story.
Tony Williams
Joseph McBride Yes, it also falls into the category of the "spitting" on veterans myth that Robert Lembke exposed in his book SPITTING IMAGES that had no basis in fact. He wrote a similar book about the demonization of Jane Fonda that still continues today.Another bad example of "Print the Legend"!
Mike Teal
Tony Williams Here's a 2009 article on a Police reunion that talks about spiked rubber balls left behind police cars and sometimes thrown at them. Maybe they're lying, maybe not. I don't know: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sd ... t-police...
Joseph McBride
Tony Williams Another legend from that era is that feminist protesters burned their bras in public. An historian who writes about the history of women's rights told me she investigated that story but found no evidence it ever happened.
Joseph McBride
The AP article on the reunion of thuggish Chicago cops who rioted in 1968 and generally behaved in a lawless fashion (I saw it; I was there) is laughable, so I wouldn't take anything in it at face value, such as "And they dismissed any talk of a 'police riot,' as a commission famously called the scene, speaking with pride about how they conducted themselves.
“'We were doing what we were supposed to do,' said John Murray, a 62-year-old retired detective. 'No regrets.'
"It was absolute chaos, they said, but they did not lose control even when faced with situations they never thought they’d ever see."
Debbie Hiltner
Joseph McBride Oh no, I remember seeing pictures and videos of women (including Gloria Steinem) burning their bras in public, it made quite an impression on me (Mandela effect? lol)
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest