In Ken Burns’ introduction to The Vietnam War, bombs fly back into airplanes and flames leap off of houses into flamethrowers.
If journalism resigns itself to being a “first draft of history,” Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentaries, many co-directed by Lynn Novick, have increasingly aspired to—and achieved—a coveted status as popular historical canon. This has, in part, been accomplished by Burns’ choice of cozily American subject matter—jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge—as well as the calming effect that time and distance provide when it comes to more difficult, inflammatory topics like the Civil War. His success is a rare, fraught feat.
But how would Burns’ earnest, middlebrow glosses on American history, forever panning slowly across sepia-tinted photos, treat a more contemporaneous, contentious event like the Vietnam War? The answer can be found in a 10-part, 18-hour opus that for the first time ventures outside Burns’ previous editorial and narrative comfort zones. The Cold War lead-up, decade-plus of intense air and ground combat, and subsequent years of national shame/guilt over the war affected the second half of our 20th century like nothing else.
Teasing out a coherent, honest through-line of such a momentous, highly charged topic is ambitious, to say the least, and Burns and Novick rise to the challenge in many ways. Most notable among them: a dedicated effort to include the voices and experiences of the Vietnamese who suffered and/or fought Americans, to create a much more complete, insightful portrait of the war. But in the striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, the documentarians nonetheless pulls their punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war. As a result, they have produced a sometimes daring, sometimes schmaltzy, richly detailed yet ultimately flawed film about the tragedy and horrors that the United States brought upon itself and inflicted upon Southeast Asia.
As a Washington Post article (9/18/17) on all the behind-the-scenes detective work that went into the film makes clear, Burns and Novick did an incredible amount of research and original reporting. However, the narrative shortcomings of the documentary mirror many of the same journalistic sins one finds in the corporate media’s coverage of the far-off wars of today. Much like the mainstream press, Burns suffers from inherent biases about objectivity that affect his storytelling.
The New Yorker (9/4/17) reports that rather than “advocacy,” Ken Burns sees his documentaries as a kind of “emotional archeology” that “can bring every viewer in.”
In an insightful New Yorker profile (9/4/17) of Burns by Ian Parker, one can see the tendrils of the filmmaker’s can’t-we-find-a-consensus editorial viewpoint that longs for inviolable truths sure to exist somewhere in between the ideological extremes:
Burns frequently—almost hourly—says, “Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time,” paraphrasing a remark made by Wynton Marsalis, in Jazz. Burns uses the line less to acknowledge historical uncertainty than to advertise inclusiveness: a desire to guide all but the most sectarian or jaded viewers through an obstacle course of their own biases. He is not disengaged from his material, but his sense of a subject, and his sense of an audience’s reaction to that subject, seem to be fused. He once said, “I want to bring everybody in.”
Later in that story, Burns betrays more of this tendency for false equivalence when he makes a prediction about the bifurcated political reaction his documentary would receive. Sounding very much like a put-upon, but archly centrist editorial page editor, he makes clear that he sees angering both the right and the left simultaneously as an occupational hazard, if not a proxy for having arrived closest to the truth:
After The Vietnam War, I’ll have to lie low. A lot of people will think I’m a Commie pinko, and a lot of people will think I’m a right-wing nutcase, and that’s sort of the way it goes.
While this suggests little capacity on the part of Burns to engage in past criticisms of his work—chief among them, his tendency to overindulge in hokey American splendor-ism—that’s not to say there aren’t stark departures from his oeuvre in The Vietnam War. In just the first few minutes of the first episode, “Deja Vu,” over a squawling original Trent Reznor score, the show literally pushes the audience backwards by spooling iconic footage of the war—and protests of it—in reverse. It’s a disorienting, but shrewd gambit; a recognition of all the baggage the Vietnam War still carries in the American psyche.
Max Cleland interviewed in The Vietnam War: “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”
Right after this jarring sequence, though, the old Burns reappears. We see languid, gauzy shots of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, overlaid with Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and former US senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland talking philosophically about the tragedy of suffering and surviving war. As presented, Cleland’s connection to the war is inexplicably vague—he’s only identified on-screen by his name and “Army”—and, though he is a triple amputee because of wounds suffered from a grenade blast in Vietnam, he is filmed only in close up, as if Burns still wants to ease his audience into the full violence wrought by the war. (This ambiguous decontextualization of interview subjects is repeated throughout the documentary.) Then, the film’s narration, once again voiced by longtime actor Peter Coyote, offers up what journalism would call the “nut graf,” the defining leitmotif of the 17 hours and 55 minutes yet to come.
America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions made by five American presidents belonging to both political parties.
There is a lot to unpack in this short passage, but it is accurate in its summation of Burns’ narrative focus throughout his film: that is, long on personal perspectives and documentary evidence of the chronological evolution, but short on broader conclusions about American foreign policy, or any real condemnation of the indescribable cruelty and dishonesty among policymakers who orchestrated it. In one telling anecdote, Burns confided to the New Yorker that his team debated saying “ended in defeat” in this section, but nevertheless chose “failure” instead.
Likewise, the film’s “begun in good faith by decent people” line doesn’t merely land like a false note, it deafens like a discordant symphony. As Veterans for Peace pointed out, Burns’ own documentary refutes this claim. Nearly every episode in the film offers up myriad examples of our elected officials, the military, or CIA willfully lying to the public (or each other) about the US’s involvement in Vietnam, often for personal or political gain.
Nor can you overlook the passive construction of the language, which helps to strip agency from the war’s cheerleaders. Burns’ equivocations here represent stunning intellectual cop-outs, pure and simple, and throw doubt on all that follows.
The right-wing billionaire is listed as funder of Burns’ series.
Relevant to such a compromised take is how Burns and Novick get funding for their projects. Less than a quarter of their money is provided by government sources; the rest comes from charities and the private sector. So perhaps it’s foolish to believe any Ken Burns documentary—partly paid for by the likes of David Koch and Bank of America, among other sponsors—would offer up a polemicized indictment of US politicians and war policy.
By all accounts, Burns and Novick maintain full editorial independence, but their funding pipeline for future projects also greatly depends upon the continued generosity of those same nonprofit and corporate benefactors, who don’t ordinarily court highly controversial filmmakers. As a result of this ongoing relationship, there’s an unseen, but unmistakable gravitational pull that serves to keeps the pair from wandering too far afield from conventional wisdom. Just like Bank of America, in other words, Ken Burns has a brand to protect.
To stay safely within the bounds of convention, Burns and Novick spend a great deal of their time “in-country,” so to speak, on a simple, universal theme: War is hell. And their ability to convey the visceral fear and pathos of battle at the human level is remarkable and poignant: “In war, nobody wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won or lost,” says Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese soldier the film interviews. (Bao is no random grunt—he is also the author of The Sorrow of War, a novel of a soldier’s anguish—but, again, Burns and Novick identify him only as “North Vietnamese Army.”)
When paired with the blunt, chilling lessons that combat taught US Marine Karl Marlantes, the combination has a powerful effect. “One of the things I learned in the war is that we’re not the top species on the planet because we’re nice,” recounts Marlantes about a firefight from 1969. “People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff, and I’ll always argue that it’s just finishing school.”
Feeding this seething killing machine on the American side was a wide-open, virulent streak of racism, which Burns, to his credit, delves into (finally) in the fifth episode. (A Washington Post podcast interview with Burns—9/22/17—delves further into this aspect of the war.) Still, the film can never quite make the leap between the countless tragedies on the tactical level and strategic policies that enabled them and then quickly metastasized.
Civilians murdered by US troops at My Lai (photo: Ronald L. Haeberle/US Army)
The most famous battlefield atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre, which was mostly covered up and pinned on one Lt. William Calley, again shows Burns putting his directorial thumb on the scale. Rather than call the massacre “murder,” as it was originally described in the script (written by Geoffrey C. Ward), Burns switched it to read that “the killing of civilians has happened in every war.” While true, this statement is so banal that it is meaningless, and serves to inoculate My Lai and all the other atrocities committed in the war of their conscience-shocking power. In effect, the film’s stance is normalizing war crimes. And Burns all but confesses to this in a bizarre admission to the New Yorker: “‘Killing’ was the better word, [Burns] said, ‘even though My Lai is murder.’”
These distinctions without differences betray a corrupted objectivity, one that can’t really reckon with the fact that the wanton destruction and unceasing, lawless violence seen at My Lai was more the rule than the exception. Perpetrating atrocities was, in fact, standard operating procedure for entire units on the US and Vietnamese sides throughout the war, not merely the work of a few deranged individuals. One academic who studies democide (murder by government) conservatively estimates North Vietnam killed 216,000 non-combatants between 1954 and 1975. (The Vietnamese government had been silent about the film until this week, when it issued a boilerplate response. But Vietnamese citizens have been able to watch a version of the documentary with Vietnamese subtitles on PBS online.)
Chase Madar in the American Conservative (7/30/13): “The main reason we don’t want to know about Vietnam is that it gave so much to not want to know about.”
To cite but one specific example of this lawless killing by the US military, the “Tiger Force” recon platoon of the 1/327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, committed a “wave of terror” in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1967. This bloodthirsty campaign was detailed in a 2003 series by the Toledo Blade (10/19/03). But for a more exhaustively comprehensive look at the tsunami of illegal killing by the US across the entire theater, you’re better off reading Nick Turse’s damning account: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. As an American Conservative (7/30/13) book review of Turse’s book makes clear:
The relentless violence against civilians was more than the activity of a few sociopaths: It was policy. This was a war fought along Fordist principles—Robert McNamara had gone to the Department of Defense straight from the helm of the auto giant—and the slaughter was industrial in scale. Victory over the Viet Cong was to be achieved by quantifiable “kill ratios,” to reach that elusive tipping point where the insurgency could no longer replenish its troops. This approach hard-wired incentives to secure a high “body count” down the chain of command, with the result that US soldiers often shot civilians dead to pad their tallies and thereby move up the ranks.
Turse sent copies of his book to Burns and Novick’s team, and it is listed as a source in the show’s online bibliography. But while episodes two and three of The Vietnam War do take time to cite McNamara’s chilling preference for quantifying enemy deaths as success (i.e., the infamous “body counts”), the film still fails to connect all the dots as to how this high-level political and military mindset—also propelled by racism—set the conditions for consistent, everyday atrocities, versus mere military operations, by combat units. (Thomas Bass’s highly critical essay covering the entire 18-hour documentary—Mekong Review, 8–10/17—discusses this.)
Ironically, Burns and Novick’s compromised framing also echoes much of the jingoistic reporting of the war as it was happening, which the film does an admirable job of debunking. Most TV media coverage of the early years of ever-expanding war, Burns notes, was almost willfully obtuse, invoking World War II newsreels that portrayed the war in terms that were “enthusiastic, unquestioning, good guys fighting and defeating bad guys.” At one point, The Vietnam War features a Marine, Roger Harris, telling his mother in 1967 that “she shouldn’t believe what she sees in the newspaper, what she sees on television, because we’re losing the war.”
There were a few, notable exceptions, however. While Vietnam was still fighting French colonial rule, on-the-ground reporters like Seymour Topping, the local Associated Press correspondent in Saigon, were warning that Western imperialist intentions in the country were doomed to fail. In 1951, Topping said as much to a young congressmember from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was visiting the nation for the first time.
Once the US began sending advisers, and then combat troops, in the early 1960s, Burns and Novick point to a handful of reporters—Neil Sheehan (who was an adviser to the documentary), the New York Times’ David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne of the AP—who dared to buck the party line. After spending time in the field, the film notes, they “were beginning to see that from the Vietnamese countryside, things looked very different than they did from the press offices in Washington or Saigon.”
“You can’t be a neutral witness to something like war,” UPI‘s Joe Galloway tells Ken Burns–a warning Burns seems to ignore.
But even intrepid reporters committed to telling the truth about the war were susceptible to creeping American bias. Sheehan, who had fought in Korea, acknowledges that he found riding along in US helicopters on an South Vietnamese Army air assault raid “absolutely thrilling.” Similarly, Joe Galloway, a UPI reporter who filed countless battlefield reports during the war, says in the film:
You can’t just be a neutral witness to something like war.… It’s not something you can stand back and be neutral and objective, and all of those things that we try to be as reporters, journalists and photographers. It doesn’t work that way.
Not coincidentally, when Galloway recounts a landmark 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley, where the Air Cavalry unit he was with faced a massive, frontal attack by the Viet Cong, he notably lapses into the first-person plural: “We had two things going for us. We had a great commander and great soldiers and we had air and artillery support out the yin-yang.” That Galloway later co-authored a New York Times bestselling book about the battle with its US commander, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, and was later awarded a Bronze Star by the US Army for helping rescue a wounded soldier during that battle, goes unmentioned by Burns and Novick.
It’s this blindspot—the failure to see that one is adopting the point of view of one’s subjects—that ultimately dooms the film’s potential. Which is a tragedy, since the US is currently failing to learn the the same painful, sunk-costs lessons of Vietnam with its bipartisan, Groundhog Day war policy in Afghanistan. As Drake University political science professor, David Skidmore, noted in his review of the film (Military Times, 9/17/17):
Now Trump has also reneged from previous pledges to disengage from Afghanistan…the histories of US military involvements in Vietnam and Afghanistan should serve as warnings to future presidents who might be tempted to again jump onto the treadmill of perpetual war.
Burns has said he wants the film to act at as “some sort of vaccination” to war, to “get you immune to the disunion that it has sponsored.” But by denying the role and agency of the people who lied us into the Vietnam War, and then kept lying to keep us from leaving, his film misdiagnoses the real problem.
Looking for an invading sickness or outside cause for the mayhem and destruction our country unleashed upon Vietnam, and itself, is a dodge. In the end, the answer to the fundamental question about the Vietnam War, “Why?,” cannot be found in any clinical or objective analysis—no matter how many hours of documentary footage you have—that stubbornly avoids placing blame where it is so richly due.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Lynn Novick’s role in The Vietnam War. With Ken Burns, she is the co-creator and co-director of the series.
Acknowledging the obvious
To obscure the abominable
RR, I appreciate your assessment of the impressive but frustrating documentary. You have helped to bring some focus to why the film has annoyed me so much. One aspect that I found sorely lacking in the film was questioning the (allegedly) central motivation for the US efforts, namely the fight against communism and the domino theory. There are so many interviews with Vietnamese participants, yet they are never asked to comment on what communism actually meant to them personally. We get fairly strong indications that NV fighters were motivated to *unify* the country, but virtually nothing on the question about what communism had to do with anything. The lack of probing this question leaves the impression SV was 100% anti-communist and NV was pro-communist, yet the facts don’t support either implication. In the film NV remains a one-dimensional entity led by implacable communists, so they are depicted rather like a stock villain. That works to not only partially excuse the colossal stupidity and stubbornness in Washington, but also to justify the support for the war from the “silent majority” of Americans. The film would have been much stronger if it had probed questions regarding the real extent to which ideologies were driving the players, because its value as a teaching for future generations depends on understanding how ideology leads to simplistic mentality, distorted rationality, and manipulative propaganda. Sadly, the main take-home message of the story is to see how far the ignorant and arrogant decision makers in Washington would go to lie to themselves and to the public, and justify it all as (merely) a defense of ideology.
The film focused a lot on the North’s treatment of American prisoners but not a thing was said about the fact that ALL Viet Cong and NVA prisoners were immediately handed over to the ARVN and many of them ended up tortured and killed in CIA supervised facilities.
Overall, I was very disappointed in Burns’ approach, especially since he spent ten years making the film. And his use of Negroponte was telling – Negroponte never met a torturer he didn’t want to fellate.
Terrific analysis.
I have similar criticisms of Bigelow’s last two films.
No point of view IS a point of view.
The best part of this TV series is the sound track
One only need see the long list of corporate and foundation donors at the beginning of the series to know Burns would be pulling punches. It wouldn’t be on PBS otherwise.
I’m sure your a bright guy and all, but the following excerpt from your writing renders anything you write suspect. I was there as an intelligence officer, with access to reports you will never see. Your assertion is pure shit. That it appears on a site named ‘ fair.org is no end of irony.
“the fact that the wanton destruction and unceasing, lawless violence seen at My Lai was more the rule than the exception. Perpetrating atrocities was, in fact, standard operating procedure for entire units on the US and Vietnamese sides”.
I give this documentary thumbs up. I found it to be draining emotionally, as it should be. I was born in 1950 and the film brought memories rushing back. I joined the Air Force, in large measure, to avoid the draft.
I thought there could have been more revealed about the war criminal, Henry Kissinger, who was responsible for dragging on the war and causing more people to be killed. Burns took it too easy on him.
I agree, in general, with the criticism, but as someone from that time, still fascinating to watch. However, it was draining (like the whole period itself). It would have been better had at the end it focused on lessons learned but didn’t. Kind of like our country: we never learn anything or if we do we forget it quickly.
Very disappointing review and a classic example of a circular firing squad based on nitpicking. The thrust of the documentary is overwhelmingly realistic and damning – the constant government lies, the brutality of the war, the suffering and slaughter of innocent civilians, the corruption of both North and South Vietnamese governments, the personal insights of combatants on both sides of the struggle, the turmoil in America, the futility of the war and its senseless strategies of war, the duplicity of politicians, and so much more.
Just one example of the nitpicking: the use of the word “killing” for the My Lai massacre. Anyone watching the segment has NO doubt that the slaughter was murder. Moreover, the word “MURDER” is blazoned across the screen in the form of a sign carried by a protester back home as part of the segment.
Is any piece perfect? No. But the overwhelming thrust is to lay bare the essence of the Vietnam War. While I have not been a fan of Ken Burns over the years, this documentary exposes the Vietnam War for the travesty against humanity that it was and Burns and Novick deserve praise, not nitpicking.
I found some old books by a man named Ernie Pyle. and WW 2. Wow, the world and war seemed different then. Maybe, could it be that people felt that Pearl Harbor was the event that made future America not so big and strong? Maybe that war’s ending was what made the next group of Americans so sure that winning was the American way. When I learned that Vietnam asked Harry Truman for help in starting a democracy, and Truman said no——-then Kennedy went in too??/ Wow, so no one should be surprised that America just keeps having wars. My Lai, should really be renamed OUR American LIE, and then maybe it’s time for America to leave the killing – for- no -reason except for the killer oil companies business , and we need to start fighting , together with the world, the real war of climate change. We need more history writers like Howard Zinn. Maybe his work would inspire Mr. Burns, but then maybe Napoleon was right, that history is just a bunch of agreed upon lies. Sadly Howard Zinn is gone, so who can you trust now?
I remember a documentary on PBS about the Truman Doctrine. I can’t find it, but here is an excerpt from the US Office of the Historian: “With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts.”
After watching part I of the “Vietnam War” (which I ordered and am half-way through), I came away believing that Truman had more to do with our involvement in Vietnam than anyone else. Indeed, as far as our disastrous involvement, Truman was the first domino.
As for this critique of this documentary, it carries as much weight as any other critic’s views on films – not much. The difference is that this one is more tortured in trying to make a point.
I just finished watching the whole thing and was left far from ambiguous. The result of the war was the lesson. It was horrible cost for a dumb mistake and we stuck to it for too long instead of admitting it was a mistake. It emphasized how misunderstanding a culture can lead to horrible decision for us.
I’m not sure how anyone could have seen the same thing and not got that, or how that relates to our current “longest war.”
If a deep dive in Cleland’s story was missing, there were many others. A son calling his mom from Vietnam saying he won’t make it out alive. She says, “You will, you’re special.” He says, “There are a lot of guys out here, who’s moms think they are special too. I just put pieces of some of them in a bag yesterday.”
The full macro analysis has been covered and recovered myriad times. TV is an emotional medium and Burns used it to great effect in covering the micro level.
Trent Reznor’s did the original music. He ain’t no John Phillip Sousa. His music is jarring, disjointed, and chaotic.
The film highlighted how the U.S. ambassador made zero plans for evacuation. And how that and many other bad decision meant the US abandoned it’s South Vietnamese allies. The waste, the insanity, the brutality, all were heavily punctuated.
There were many interviews with North Vietnamese soldiers. Their view wasn’t pro-American.
I fear in trying to slant the film as biased, this review is doing the same thing it accuses the film of doing, just on the other side.
I watched the first three episodes but I actually gave up on the series during the first episode when Ken Burns endorsed the cliched, false historical narrative of well-meaning American politicians who paved the road to hell with their supposedly good intentions. But I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968) at the 12th USAF Hospital at Cam Ranh Bay AFB, and even though I never committed nor witnessed any war crimes, being “in the rear with with gear,” I did serve in a criminal war. Most of the wounded grunts on the ward joked so casually that they shot first and asked questions later. So when Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre after I had returned to the world, I was actually more surprised that the civilians were shocked and surprised by what the massacre said about the heart of darkness in the soul of the nation that had lost its moral compass. I haven’t watched any more episodes. The series came across as the usual, middlebrow propaganda which has become an art form on PBS which was meant to assuage the shame of that genocidal war for comfortably its complacent and naive viewers who still are unable to deal with the criminality of the war.
Richard Pryor once joked, “Do you believe me or your lying eyes.” I think this applies to this documentary. The narrative plays a secondary role to what anyone can cleanly see. In this case, the viewer’s eyes are not lying and can see very clearly how the the United States conceived/deceived, rationalized/lied about and conducted the war, no matter how Burn’s narrative describes what we can see and feel for ourselves.
It is ironic that the truth about the Vietnam War is clearly revealed even though Burns spent ten years making a documentary that often obscured or denied it with his narrative. We also must appreciate the reality of what can get on television, even public television, in the heart of the beast. This kind of very expensive documentary will only be funded with a limited amount of hard truth telling as a narrative. If we watch to see one that does, we can ask the radicals at our Left-wing media centers to fund and produce it, and put it on television for a mass audience. Wait a minute, where are our Left-wing media centers?
One other observation: the child’s fairly tale, The Wizard of Oz, was far more than that. It was a powerful critique of robber barons and the ways they protected their wealth. If you want to see this revealed, read the Web of Debt by Ellen Brown (www.webofdebt.com/). Ellen opens every chapter by quoting sections of the Wizard of Oz.
The Burn’s documentary also reveals far more than what some would say is the fairy tale of much of its narrative. Yes, we can believe what we see with our eyes, no matter how much Burn’s narrative is lying about it.
Noticed there were two Black men serving in Viet Nam, if the footage is to be believed. And no American Indians, Asians, or Filipinos. Or women who died serving as nurses. Although the film states:” 42,000 Native Americans served, the highest number of any ethnic group,” not in any footage or photos. Huh.
In his WWII PBS Ken Burns excluded the famous Black Tuskegee Airmen, as well as the 500,000 Mexican Americans who fought, including Guy Gabaldon who on one of many occasions talked 800 Japanese into surrendering when he was alone and unarmed.
Then, there were also amazing Native American fighters and Japanese Americans whose families were in detention camps. Instead, Burns featured two pretty white boys–AND when the NAACP, LULAC and other groups protested, he refused to add minorities to the original film but only made two more “separate but equal” short films about our NM men who mostly were in the Bataan Death March and the Tuskegee Airmen who never lost a plane.
The problem isn’t so much inadequate condemnation of official lies & brutality. It is the failure of Burns & Novick, as well as this review, to dig more deeply into the structural, historic and economic forces that drove and shaped the war: imperialism. colonialism, the brutal pro-corporate repression of dissent during the McCarthy era. As a naive college freshman in 1967, it didn’t take too long for me to expand my understanding of what was going on in Santo Domingo, as well as Algeria, Angola, Selma and Detroit. David Koch and B of A are not going to sponsor this discussion, but someone should. I’m watching Burns & Novick for a lot of detail about the War that I missed at the time, or don’t recall clearly, like some details about the Tet offensive. (I was at the Dem convention in Chicago; while much more cd be said, and has been, the series gets it pretty right for the amount of time allotted.)
How the frak were Burns & Novick going to pack all that you and other left-wing extremists like you wanted (‘dig more deeply into the structural, historic and economic forces that drove and shaped the war: imperialism. colonialism, the brutal pro-corporate repression of dissent during the McCarthy era’) into a 10-hour documentary? And if you think you know more then they do, why don’t you get the funds and staff together to make a film of your own?
Much thanks for this piece. As stated, despite the wonderful interviews, Burns’ grandiose aspiration to cultural healer is belied by his narration and framing. American neo-imperial hubris remains a festering wound, thanks in no small part to specious apologies for our murderous cold-war legacies. You cannot avoid choosing sides in the continuing struggle against the military-industrial complex, and for peace.
Good to know I can skip this overlong white washing, airbrushing, self-censoring, imperialist apologizing, self-pitying narrative that is Ken Burn’s documentary on Vietnam. If you want a real good objective look at Vietnam check out the Cold War series on youtube and their chapters on Vietnam, here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s0Z2mwTrXY&list=PL8hNHC9nbLlzb4miGp5pZPYCk9Zw0dGke&index=11 and if you want real uncomfortable truths on the Vietnam War then watch the documentary “Hearts and Minds” which got an Oscar for best documentary film, then watch journalist and media critics John Pilger’s speech in 2007 on the corporate/state media in the US and UK “Freedom Next Time” and pay close attention to when he talks about Vietnam and the media’s role and language in justifying that imperial murderous project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXCzoPp8dDc . and rather then watching this overly long junk Ken Burn’s has produced your better off just reading the Pentagon Papers, Nick Turse’s book on the systemic war crimes that took place in Vietnam (My Lai wasn’t an aberration, not a few bad apples), John Pilger’s book “Heroes” has an excellent chapter on Vietnam and the media and watch his documentary at his website http://www.johnpilger.com go to videos and check out Vietnam: The Last Battle, and “Heroes” on the shameful treatment Veterans experienced during the war. all of those will be worth your time and money then this shameful imperialist apologist and self-censoring waste of film by Ken Burns and PBS instead of Public Broadcasting Station should rename itself either Pentagon Broadcasting Station or Propaganda Broadcasting Station or even Pure Bullshit Station.