Burns series on Vietnam

Toefoot · Sep 27, 2017

I know some are watching it and would like your opinions about it. I like it, I do appreciate that they talked about Vietnam's History prior to US arriving, They gave some History of the French and also insight to Ho Chi Min prior to the conflict.

Also of note is how our own government failed the soldiers inserting politics as policy for war fighters in regards to ROE and missions.

I need to dedicate some time this winter to watch the series completely. War and my perspective has changed over the years when it comes to past battles. My time within the ME and ROE was frustrating to say the least.

Also, to all the men and women who served in Vietnam and the families, Thank you for being who you are and what you did. I did not have to deal with heavy vegetation and this in itself must have played some serious mind tricks with you and your tactics, especially at night.

waltky · Sep 28, 2017

The Many Sides of ‘The Vietnam War’ With Director Lynn Novick...

Explore the Many Sides of ‘The Vietnam War’ With Director Lynn Novick
September 26, 2017 - Novick co-directed with Ken Burns and we had a wide-ranging conversation about the film and the war's aftermath in America.

The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick explores “many sides” of the conflict in a way that explodes the “hippies vs. patriots” caricature of the era that’s been such a bad influence on American political discourse. Every American seems to have at least a few regrets about how things went down back then and that’s before we learn about the head-spinning complexity of the Vietnamese positions on their civil war. Lynn Novick directed the series in partnership with Ken Burns. His may be the name that everyone recognizes, but Lynn has working been with Burns since The Civil War and she previously co-directed seven episodes of their World War II film The War and 2011’s underrated Prohibition. In the midst of the publicity blitz before the series debut, Novick took the time for a wide-ranging discussion about the film and the influence of the Vietnam War on American society. There are very mild spoilers below if you haven’t started watching the series.

Portraits of Lynn Novick, producer for upcoming documentary “Vietnam” along with Ken Burns of Florentine Films, to be shown on PBS. Photos taken on March 15, 2017.

You were born in the ‘60s. What was your experience of the Vietnam war?

My memories of my childhood are sort of spotty and fragmentary. It’s more images and moments than anything continuous or properly organized. But I don’t remember a time growing up when the Vietnam War wasn’t happening. It just felt like it was always there and it was always going on and it was something that the adults around me seemed very concerned about and focused on, watching it on TV, reading about it in the paper, talking to other adults and people older than me. I just had this sense of something sort of looming and frightening and disturbing, and something that the adults were concerned about and I was not really understanding what was going on. I don’t have any family members or family friends even who served in the military during that time. I knew a lot of people whose families were focused on how to avoid military service.

By the time I really became aware of the war and began to understand that question, it was in the early 70’s, by which time it really had become quite unpopular. There were more people trying to get out of it than eager to get into it. I certainly remember that and I remember protests and a sense of questioning the government, a sort of “They don’t know what they’re doing and we’re not getting told the truth.” I remember that in the background, kind of the bass notes, all the time. By the mid-’70s, there were quite a few people in my family who weren’t going to college and they were called up to serve. And then we didn’t talk about it anymore. It was this absolutely closed subject from about ’72, ’73, onward.

Marines marching in Danang. March 15, 1965.

I was just in Vietnam, showing some clips of the film there. And a Vietnamese man who watched some of the clips said, “I’m not going to sleep tonight after seeing the scenes of the film that we just saw.” He was from a South Vietnamese family and he said he remembered scenes of fleeing, trying to get away, the communists were coming south. And now he would have nightmares, having seen the film. Then he said, “I have tried to basically put the Vietnam War into a drawer and close the drawer and not think about it and just try to not remember it because it’s too painful. Vietnamese have this saying, we sort of — we celebrate the good things and just put the bad things in the closet and shut the door. But seeing the film made me realize you can’t do that.” For different reasons, I think Americans have done the same thing with the Vietnam War, unsuccessfully, I would say.

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Mr_Truth · Sep 28, 2017

I have not watched all of the episodes and did not see any mention of the terrorist COINTELPRO group created by Hoover's FBI. There terrorists committed crimes, destroyed property, and disrupted peaceful anti-war protests and were done by federally employed provocateurs paid by traitor Hoover. These atrocities were done in order to discredit the peaceful and patriotic anti-war efforts.

Did anyone see any mention of these criminals?

waltky · Sep 29, 2017

Interview with Ken Burns...

Going Deep on ‘The Vietnam War’ With Ken Burns
September 28, 2017 - I had a chance to talk with Ken Burns early this summer about The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. We ended up having a wide-ranging and relatively intense conversation about why they made the film and how they decided what to include and what to leave out.

If you’ve made it through more than a couple of episodes of the series so far, you realize that there’s nothing easy about watching it and the experience of spending a decade making The Vietnam War had to be an almost unimaginable challenge. There’s a determination in this film to give a voice to the men and women who participated in this war, no matter their loyalties or political persuasions. Check that: everyone who participated has a willingness to engage points-of-view that may not align with their own and it’s that hunt for perspective that makes this series so important. The Vietnam War showed me things I never knew or understood, changed my mind and frustrated me at the same time. Burns talks about his philosophy in this interview. “The only way you have a conversation is not to make the other [person] wrong.”

If you haven’t watched much of the show, we get into specifics about some of the interview subjects. Several of them have life-changing experiences during the course of the war. Burns and Novick don’t reveal those changes until the moment in the timeline when they actually happen, so some of our conversation may qualify as spoilers if you worry about that kind of thing. As I promised Ken, I don’t ruin the final moment of the film. Even though I was born in the Sixties, the Vietnam War seems like most significant event in my lifetime. It affected people in my generation, especially, how we approached everything: from school to military service to finding our careers. A lot of Vietnam era people would consider my group too young to be a part of all that, but the war was this shadow over everything in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was overwhelming for me to see things that I vaguely remembered or didn’t really know firsthand at the time because I was 6, 7, 8 years old.

Well, I was born in 1953. It was very much a part of my life. But my co-director, Lynn Novick, was born in ’62 and she describes Vietnam as just being exactly that. As soon as she became aware of the world around her, beyond her family, she knew there was this bad thing going on. Well, the shadow, you said. I come from a family with generations of people who served in the military but there was absolutely no question of whether I should consider it or be allowed to join. I didn’t serve because that’s not what we did coming out of high school in the 80’s.

What was your personal experience? You’re in the demographic. The draft was an issue in your life. What was it like for you?

It was scary and I lived in a college town, the son of a college professor. A lot of it was very much about the opposition to the war. And yet I was torn inside myself. I think a lot of people talk about Vietnam as being this thing we buried and didn’t want to deal with. As you know in the opening, Karl Marlantes says it’s like having an alcoholic father. “Shhh, we don’t talk about that.” And we haven’t talked about that. When we do, it causes divisions between us. But it’s also revealing, it seems to me, of divisions within us.

I saw the deaths, the body counts at the end of the week on the nightly news and I was so relieved that we were killing more of them than us. And so I was psychologically torn. But none of that was relevant in making the film. It was just stuff you had to shed because everything everyone knows about Vietnam is off in some way. You’ve got to realize that there’s been all this new scholarship on the war. We’ve opened up, we’ve triangulated with the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong and the South Vietnamese civilians and military alike and got to know what actually happened from the top down, from all of the decisions that Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations were making. To me, it was our responsibility to try to find out as much as we can exactly what the facts were and then try to process 80 people’s memories of it.

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Space_Time · Oct 9, 2017

Here's more:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ken-burnss-vietnam-is-fair-to-the-troops-but-not-the-cause-1507324058
OPINION COMMENTARY
Ken Burns’s ‘Vietnam’ Is Fair to the Troops, but Not the Cause
The antiwar narrative could have been lifted from PBS’s last effort, which aired in 1983.
U.S. Marines land on Red Beach in Da Nang, Vietnam, 1965. PHOTO: PETER ARNETT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Mark Moyar
Oct. 6, 2017 5:07 p.m. ET
530 COMMENTS
For the past several years, American and South Vietnamese veterans awaited Ken Burns’s “The Vietnam War” series with gnawing fear. Would Mr. Burns use his talent and prestige to rehash the antiwar narrative, which casts veterans as hapless victims of a senseless war? The program’s final episode has aired, and it is safe to say that worries about the portrayal of veterans were somewhat misplaced, while those concerning the war itself proved justified.

Mr. Burns and co-director Lynn Novick should be commended for giving veterans a central role in the series. In the interviews, American veterans explain they were driven to serve mainly out of patriotism and admiration of veterans in their communities. They denounce the caricature of veterans as deranged baby-killers. Several South Vietnamese veterans are featured as well, a welcome change from earlier productions.

The treatment of the war itself is much less evenhanded. The documentary corrects a few of the mistakes that have been common to popular accounts, for instance acknowledging that Ho Chi Minh was a full-blooded communist, who pulled the strings of the ostensibly independent southern Viet Cong. Yet the show mostly follows the same story line as the last PBS megaseries, “Vietnam: A Television History,” which aired in 1983.

The documentary’s 18 hours highlight the worst military setbacks incurred by the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, while spending little time on the far more numerous battles in which the North Vietnamese suffered decisive defeat. Most of the combat scenes involve one or two Americans speaking somberly over gloomy music while the screen displays images of American troops who are dead, wounded or under fire. The interviewees then explain how the trauma and futility of battle led to their disillusionment with the war. On the few occasions when we hear of the excitement, camaraderie and pride that are as much a part of war as the fear and sorrow, the words usually come from the mouths of North Vietnamese veterans.

Some American troops did become disenchanted, joining the likes of John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and they deserve to be heard. But they do not merit the disproportionate airtime they are given in this series. Even by the most generous estimates, Vietnam Veterans Against the War never represented more than 1% of Vietnam veterans, whereas 90% of Vietnam combat veterans said they were glad to have served, and 69% said they enjoyed their time there, according to a 1980 survey conducted by the Veterans Administration. Yet about one-third of the American military veterans in the show otherwise espoused antiwar views, and few of the other interviewees expressed pride or satisfaction in their service.

Among those surveyed by the Veterans Administration, 92% agreed with the statement that “the trouble in Vietnam was that our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win.” This subject seldom arises in the on-camera interviews or in the narration, presumably because it doesn’t fit the narrative of an unwinnable war. The audience does not hear of the bitter disputes in Washington over the use of U.S. ground forces in Laos or North Vietnam. Nor does it mention revelations from North Vietnamese officials acknowledging that such measures would have thwarted Hanoi’s strategy.

The documentary disregards most of the positive achievements of America’s South Vietnamese allies. Viewers are told that South Vietnam’s strategic hamlet program—which sought to stem communist influence in the countryside—destroyed itself by alienating the rural population. Never mind that numerous North Vietnamese communists have admitted the program hurt them until it was disbanded after the American-sponsored coup of November 1963. The remarkable improvement of the South Vietnamese armed forces after the Tet Offensive receives less attention from the filmmakers than the Woodstock Festival.

After some initial discussion of America’s strategic rationale for the war—the fear of Asian countries falling to communism like dominoes—the series goes silent on geopolitics. The audience isn’t informed of facts that demonstrated Vietnam’s strategic importance, such as the fervent support of America’s Asian allies for the intervention, or the role of American intervention in averting a communist takeover of Indonesia in late 1965.

Historical perspective is also lacking. The narrator and several subjects suggest that the lies of successive U.S. presidents invalidated the American cause. There is no denying that John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon lied repeatedly about the war. The same could be said about Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, but no one argues that their dishonesty discredited their wars.

Numerous interviewees contend that the ineffectiveness and corruption of the South Vietnamese government showed that the U.S. supported the wrong side. But America’s allies in South Korea and Taiwan, who were less effective and more corrupt than their communist rivals, survived because the U.S. did not abandon them. South Korea and Taiwan eventually became two of the most prosperous and vibrant nations in Asia, while their foes remain dour police states that still pose serious threats to international peace.

Mr. Burns has said he intended to produce a definitive account that would bring Americans together. He could have pulled it off, but he chose instead to make it another partisan harangue that is certain to keep Americans divided.

Mr. Moyar is the author of “Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965” (Cambridge, 2006).

Appeared in the October 7, 2017, print edition.
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yiostheoy · Oct 9, 2017

Toefoot said: ↑

I know some are watching it and would like your opinions about it. I like it, I do appreciate that they talked about Vietnam's History prior to US arriving, They gave some History of the French and also insight to Ho Chi Min prior to the conflict.

Also of note is how our own government failed the soldiers inserting politics as policy for war fighters in regards to ROE and missions.

I need to dedicate some time this winter to watch the series completely. War and my perspective has changed over the years when it comes to past battles. My time within the ME and ROE was frustrating to say the least.

Also, to all the men and women who served in Vietnam and the families, Thank you for being who you are and what you did. I did not have to deal with heavy vegetation and this in itself must have played some serious mind tricks with you and your tactics, especially at night.
Click to expand...

If you buy and read "Rolling Thunder In A Gentle Land" by the Navy League you will see where all of Burns' data and info are plagiarized from.

yiostheoy · Oct 9, 2017

waltky said: ↑

The Many Sides of ‘The Vietnam War’ With Director Lynn Novick...

Explore the Many Sides of ‘The Vietnam War’ With Director Lynn Novick
September 26, 2017 - Novick co-directed with Ken Burns and we had a wide-ranging conversation about the film and the war's aftermath in America.
Click to expand...

The best overall explanation for the Viet Nam War comes from "Rolling Thunder In A Gentle Land" by the Navy League.

The Indochina War started in the 1850's as a religious war between Buddhists and Catholics.

French Catholics.

yiostheoy · Oct 9, 2017

Mr_Truth said: ↑

I have not watched all of the episodes and did not see any mention of the terrorist COINTELPRO group created by Hoover's FBI. There terrorists committed crimes, destroyed property, and disrupted peaceful anti-war protests and were done by federally employed provocateurs paid by traitor Hoover. These atrocities were done in order to discredit the peaceful and patriotic anti-war efforts.

Did anyone see any mention of these criminals?
Click to expand...

My greatest impression of the decline of South Viet Nam into chaos is when the CIA advised Diem NOT to hold elections because he would lose. So he cancelled them.

Not exactly sure if this was Diem or someone else, but the fraud committed upon the people of North and South Viet Nam was depriving them of a vote to reunify their two separated countries.

Truman, Ike, JFK and LBJ were all equally paranoid about Moscow and Beijing.

randlepatrickmcmurphy · Oct 14, 2017

I'm watching the final episode right now. It's very good, although I liked Burns's Civil War and Baseball docs better. They rounded up a very good group of talking heads for this one, including The Things They Carried author Tim O'Brien and Harold Kushner. And, of course, the go-to narrator for documentaries these days, Peter Coyote.

Space_Time · Oct 17, 2017

Here's more:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news...cts-wrong/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

A faulty retelling of ‘The Vietnam War’
Richard Nixon kept his promises, Ken Burns did not

Illustration on Richard Nixon’s role in the Vietnam War by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times more >
Print
By Oliver North - - Monday, October 16, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
When Richard Nixon was in the White House, I was in Vietnam and he was my commander in chief. When I was on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, I had the opportunity to brief former President Nixon on numerous occasions and came to admire his analysis of current events, insights on world affairs and compassion for our troops. His preparation for any meeting or discussion was exhaustive. His thirst for information was unquenchable and his tolerance for fools was nonexistent.
Mr. Nixon’s prosecution of the war in Southeast Asia is poorly told by Ken Burns in his new Public Broadcasting Service documentary “The Vietnam War.” That is but one of many reasons Mr. Burns‘ latest work is such a disappointment and a tragic lost opportunity.
It’s sad, but I’ve come to accept that the real story of the heroic American GIs in Vietnam may never be told. Like too many others, Ken Burns portrays the young soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the Vietnam War as pot-smoking, drug-addicted, hippie marauders.
Those with whom I served were anything but. They did not commit the atrocities alleged in the unforgivable lies John Kerry described to a congressional committee so prominently featured by Mr. Burns. The troops my brother and I were blessed to lead were honorable, heroic and tenacious. They were patriotic, proud of their service, and true to their God and our country.
To depict them otherwise, as Mr. Burns does, is an egregious disservice to them, the families of the fallen and to history. But his treatment of my fellow Vietnam War veterans is just the start. Some of the most blatant travesties in the film are reserved for President Nixon.
Because of endless fairy tales told by Ken Burns and others, many Americans associate Richard Nixon with the totality and the worst events of Vietnam. It’s hardly evident in the Burns “documentary,” but important to note: When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, he inherited a nation — and a world — engulfed in discord and teetering on the brink of widespread chaos. His predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, was forced from office with a half-million U.S. troops mired in combat and fierce anti-American government demonstrations across the country and in our nation’s capital.

Ken Burns may not recall — but my family remembers: It was Lyndon Johnson who sent my brother and me to war. It was Richard Nixon who brought us home. It is very likely we are alive today because Mr. Nixon kept his word.
That’s not the only opportunity for accuracy Mr. Burns ignored. He could have credited Mr. Nixon with granting 18-year olds the right to vote in July 1971 with the 26th Amendment to our Constitution. (Does Ken even recall the slogan, “Old enough to fight — old enough to vote!” He should. Mr. Burns turned 18 that same month.)
President Nixon pressed on to all but finish the war. As promised, he brought our combat units home, returned 591 prisoners of war to their wives and families, ended the draft, leveraged the conflict to open ties with China and improved relations with the Soviet Union. He pushed both Communist giants in Beijing and Moscow to force their North Vietnamese puppet into a negotiated settlement. Yet he is portrayed in the Burns documentary as a cold-blooded, calculating politician more interested in re-election than the lives of U.S. troops in combat.
Contrary to the film’s portrayal, Mr. Nixon had a complicated strategy to achieve “peace with honor.” His goal was to train and equip the South Vietnamese military to defend their own country in a process he called “Vietnamization,” and thereby withdraw American troops.
President Nixon succeeded in isolating the North Vietnamese diplomatically and negotiated a peace agreement that preserved the right of the people of South Vietnam to determine their own political future. Imperfect as the Saigon government was, by 1973 the South Vietnamese had many well-trained troops and units that fought well and were proud to be our allies. This intricate and sophisticated approach took shape over four wartime years but receives only superficial mention in Mr. Burns‘ production.
Despite Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress, Mr. Nixon — a deft political powerhouse — attained consistent support from America’s “Silent Majority.”
If Mr. Burns read President Nixon’s memoir or his two successive books in which the former president recounts his emotional anguish at the war’s toll — “No More Vietnams” and “In the Arena” — there is little evidence in the PBS production. Instead, Mr. Burns cherry-picks from the infamous “Nixon tapes” to brand the president as a devious manipulator, striving for mass deception — a patently false allegation.
By the time President Nixon resigned office on Aug. 9, 1974, the Vietnam War was all but won and the South Vietnamese were confident of securing a permanent victory. But in December 1974 — three months after Mr. Nixon departed the White House — a vengeful, Democrat-dominated Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam.
It was a devastating blow for those to whom Mr. Nixon had promised — not U.S. troops — but steadfast military, economic and diplomatic support. As chronicled in memoirs written afterwards in Hanoi, Moscow and Beijing, the communists celebrated. The ignominious end came with a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion five months later.
Despite the war’s end — and the trauma that continues to afflict our country — there is little in the Burns so-called documentary about the courage, patriotism and dedication of the U.S. troops who fought honorably, bravely and the despicable way in which we were “welcomed” home.
The PBS “documentary” frequently reminds viewers of the “gallant nationalist fervor” among the North Vietnamese. But the South Vietnamese are portrayed as little more than conniving urchins and weak pawns of the imperialist Americans.
In a technique favored by the “progressive left,” Mr. Burns uses a small cadre of anti-war U.S. and pro-Hanoi Vietnamese “eyewitnesses” to explain the complicated policies of the U.S. government. Mr. Burns apparently refused to interview Henry Kissinger, telling the Portland Press Herald he doubted “Kissinger’s authority to adequately convey the perspectives of the U.S. government.” This alone disqualifies this “documentary” as definitive history on the Vietnam War.
Though Mr. Burns and his collaborators claim otherwise, the real heroes of “The Vietnam War” were not U.S. protesters, but the troops my brother and I led. They fought valiantly for our country and the president who brought us home.
Since meeting President Nixon in the 1980s, I have always remembered how he understood the incredible sacrifice of American blood in the battlefields of Vietnam. He was dedicated to ending the war the right way and committed to sustaining American honor. He kept his promise to bring us home.
Ken Burns failed to keep his promise to tell all sides about the long and difficult war in Vietnam. Mr. Burns, like John Kerry, has committed a grave injustice to those of us who fought there.
• Oliver North was a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam, and recipient of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and two Purple Hearts.
Click to expand...

cerberus · Oct 17, 2017

Toefoot said: ↑

I know some are watching it and would like your opinions about it. I like it, I do appreciate that they talked about Vietnam's History prior to US arriving, They gave some History of the French and also insight to Ho Chi Min prior to the conflict.

Also of note is how our own government failed the soldiers inserting politics as policy for war fighters in regards to ROE and missions.

I need to dedicate some time this winter to watch the series completely. War and my perspective has changed over the years when it comes to past battles. My time within the ME and ROE was frustrating to say the least.

Also, to all the men and women who served in Vietnam and the families, Thank you for being who you are and what you did. I did not have to deal with heavy vegetation and this in itself must have played some serious mind tricks with you and your tactics, especially at night.
Click to expand...

I'm one who has been watching it - I watched the final episode last night, as a matter of fact - and it should be made compulsory viewing for all Americans, as should Bitter Lake. They exemplify the 'lions led by donkeys' aphorism.

Toefoot · Oct 18, 2017

Here is Oliver North commenting on the series.

https://www.weaselzippers.us/360750-oliver-north-a-faulty-retelling-of-the-vietnam-war/

Space_Time · Oct 28, 2017

Duplicate post.

Space_Time · Oct 28, 2017

Here's more:

https://hyperallergic.com/408347/in...claims-of-objectivity-obscure-patriotic-bias/
In Ken Burns’s Vietnam War Documentary, Claims of Objectivity Obscure Patriotic Bias
By accepting patriotic doctrine even as it claims to present all sides, the epic documentary takes some slippery liberties with truth and history.
Dan Schindel2 days ago
Still from Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War (images courtesy Magnum Photos, AP Photos, Getty Images, Doug Niven/Another Vietnam, © 2017 Vietnam Film Project, LLC)
The Vietnam War, a 10-part, 17-hour PBS documentary directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, pays plenty of dues to all conventional wisdom about the horrors of war. Nearly all the veterans of the conflict interviewed in the series (from both sides) speak of this — the carnage they witnessed, the horrors they suffered, the nightmares they still have. Narrator Peter Coyote recites words like “tragedy” and “senseless” plenty of times. Burns has stated that he sees war as a virus and his film as a “vaccination” against it. But no matter what he, Novick, or the explicit text of their ambitious project claim, the aesthetics betray a more conventional view of their subject matter.

Burns’s various films about American history, including 1990’s The Civil War, 1994’s Baseball, and 2007’s The War, have earned him a reputation as our premier documentarian. His cinematic style has become a template for nonfiction filmmaking (it’s not often that movie artists get a technique popularly named after them). While it may be easy to dismiss his no-frills construction as boring, there is an art to the standard pattern of the documentary and its use of talking heads, archival footage and photos, and explanatory graphics.

Plenty of filmmakers misuse these elements, failing to make their stories compelling or to properly convey the information at hand. This is one reason that some may hold a suspicious view of documentaries, or an instinctive dread of educational films. Burns and Novick are masters of this documentary genre — call it “PBS Standard”— and The Vietnam War is as skillful a showcase of it as one can find, likely to go on to become a canonical example. But anyone looking for a story of the Vietnam War that’s actually new here will find it lacking. Instead, it retreads tired apologia for US atrocities in Vietnam.

“Objectivity” is considered sacrosanct for a good documentary, and Burns is its champion, referring to the presentation of all sides in the conflict as “triangulation,” and asserting it’s the only way to answer the question “What happened?” But objectivity is an illusion. It is always an illusion, of course, but the pretense otherwise is especially insidious here. Plenty of publications have already enumerated the ways in which The Vietnam War misrepresents history to whitewash US actions in the war. Among other things, the show shortchanges the experiences of Vietnamese civilians, presents the US-installed South Vietnam dictator Ngô Đình Diệm as coming out of nowhere, and reports the long-debunked official line on the Gulf of Tonkin incident as fact.

Again and again, critics bring up an early piece of narration as particularly indicative of the series’ ideological shortcomings. Coyote, reading Geoffrey Ward’s script, claims the war was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings.” Any evaluation of history not blinkered by patriotism will recognize that statement as false. No matter how much one presents ugly casualty statistics or footage of civilian suffering, the documentary’s insistence on pulling any punch that might make America look too bad obscures the full horror of the history in question.

This skittishness toward the question of whether the US could possibly have been “the bad guy” in the conflict is reflected even in small choices. For instance, there’s the frequent referral to US “involvement” (as opposed to “invasion” or “occupation”) in Vietnam — euphemisms as old as the war itself. The façade of “triangulation” is undermined even more by the mere presence of a narrator. While the interviewees are given license to express whatever opinions they hold, a disembodied voice existing alongside them implies the existence of a parallel and more authoritative narrative — an official version of events the viewer can trust. It exists apart from the people we see, explaining things to us from a position of apparent omniscience. Yet this supposedly reliable narrator is also the source of all the mistruths referred to above.

The score, from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, betrays the documentary’s sympathies even more clearly. Scenes dealing with fear of the spreading red tide of communism in the middle of the 20th century are accompanied by ominous music. The same happens whenever the North Vietnamese forces score a win over the Americans. It becomes ever clearer over the course of each episode that, while Burns and Novick have deigned to include North Vietnamese voices in their project, they are present mainly to fill in expositional gaps concerning battles or political shifts or the like. They get to speak, but we are not meant to understand their point of view. They are still the enemy.

Not long after The Vietnam War exonerates the American government as acting in “good faith” when meddling in Vietnam, it executes a sequence which, coming from the PBS Standard, is mildly surprising. Straying from a predictable pattern of straightforward interview/narration/footage, it indulges an artistic flourish: To transition from the first episode’s introduction to the beginning of the history it examines, the documentary literally rewinds the war. Explosions shrink and bombs fly from the ground into the bellies of planes. Antiwar protestors march backward. A bullet withdraws from Nguyễn Văn Lém’s head into Nguyễn Ngọc Loan’s gun. It recalls a passage from Slaughterhouse-Five, or the final scene of Come and See. Entropy is reversed, order is brought to chaos, lives are saved.

Still from Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War
Conceptually, it’s intriguing. But the scene is over in about a minute. The music is as indifferently, generically “intense” as it is during any given battle sequence. There is none of Vonnegut’s melancholy, born from personal experience in war. There’s none of Come and See’s anguish, the sense of attempting to undo history through sheer force of will. It’s nothing but a “cool” transition. The Vietnam War, which took ten years and $30 million (some of which came from Bank of America and David Koch) to make, does almost nothing new with its topic. It can’t say what any number of books, documentaries, articles, or fiction films haven’t already said. There are some interviews with people from whom most Americans might not have heard before. That’s it. It averts its eye from the possibility of America as a historical villain in pursuit of some nebulous “answer” which supposedly exists in the median between divergent viewpoints. How can it elucidate the pain of a historical wound when it noncommittally diffuses experience among so many sides for fear of offending any of them? How can this series be anything but another tool which future lazy teachers will use in lieu of robust lesson plans?

It can’t.

The Vietnam War is streaming on PBS.
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Space_Time · Nov 2, 2017

Remarkable, read the whole thing at the link:

http://thefederalist.com/2017/11/02...-kennedy-administration-okayed-assassination/

This Man Could Have Kept Vietnam From Communists, But The Kennedy Administration Okayed His Assassination
Geoffrey Shaw’s account is a page-turning, sorrowful account of how the United States betrayed a man of remarkable character and political genius.
Casey Chalk By Casey Chalk
NOVEMBER 2, 2017
On 2 November, groups of Vietnamese men, women, and children will gather for memorial services across the world to honor the death of a man largely forgotten in American historical memory. Once this man was a household name, frequently featured on the front pages of our nation’s newspapers and spoken from the mouths of reporters on the nightly news.

That man is Ngo Dinh Diem, president of the Republic of Vietnam (better known as South Vietnam) from 1955 to 1963, his rule and life cruelly ended in a military coup tacitly supported by the U.S. government. A recent book on Diem’s life, “The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam,” by military historian Geoffrey Shaw clarifies why Americans would do well to mourn the tragic loss of a man many deemed to be Vietnam’s best chance of defeating communism.

Diem was rarity in history as a devout Catholic head of state in Asia. He has not been served well by the most popular American appraisals of the Vietnam War era. Less than two months ago, Ken Burns’ popular PBS series on the Vietnam War devoted much of its second episode to Diem’s rise and fall. Burns’ portrayal appears to borrow heavily from an earlier PBS documentary on the Vietnam War produced by foreign correspondent Stanley Karnow that aired in 1983. Both tell essentially the same story.

An Overplayed Trope: Diem the Antipathetic Ally
According to the Burns and Karnow narrative, Diem, a member of a well-respected, well-connected aristocratic Vietnamese Catholic family, served in various French colonial government positions prior to Vietnam’s independence in the 1950s. Vietnam’s division between north and south at the 17th parallel at the Geneva Conference in 1954 enabled Diem to assert his authority over South Vietnam with the support of the French and Americans.

A referendum held in the south in 1955 — one many viewed as illegitimate due to fraud — sealed Diem’s role as president of the country. With the approval of the United States, Diem shortly thereafter rejected the Geneva stipulation that the north and south were to hold nationwide, conciliatory elections in 1956 to determine the government of a unified Vietnam, allegedly because he knew he would lose to the more popular Ho Chi Minh, who ruled the communist north.

As the years progressed, Diem and his notorious brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were plagued by turmoil within his administration, failing government programs across the countryside, and rising popular support for the communist insurgency. The brothers in turn pursued ever-more repressive measures to preserve their authority. Secret police forces led by Nhu imprisoned, tortured, and murdered enemies of the regime, while government policies enriched the country’s Catholic minority to the detriment of the majority-Buddhist nation.

Eventually, the Vietnamese could take no more. Protests erupted across the country, resulting in some of the most iconic moments of the Vietnam War era. Photos of the public self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức ultimately scored American photographer Malcolm Browne a Pulitzer Prize, and seemed to encapsulate the degree of resentment among the Vietnamese populace towards Diem and his brother.

The two, fearing the loss of their authority, pushed even harder on the Buddhist protesters, while Washington, which by this point was pouring significant financial and military resources into the country, grew increasingly impatient with the seemingly intransigent and incompetent Diem regime.

Members of the John F. Kennedy administration, finding Diem an intractable force increasingly hostile to U.S. interests, gave the green-light to leaders in the south Vietnamese military to remove Diem from power. A coup initiated on 1 November, 1963 drove the brothers into hiding. By the next day, their hideout in a Catholic Church discovered, they were both dead, murdered in the back of a military truck.

Although many of the details above are true, Shaw’s work shows that the overall theme — Diem the troublesome, dictatorial politician — is far from accurate.

Diem, the Ideal Vietnamese Leader
Shaw’s biography of Diem paints a far different picture of “America’s Mandarin.” For starters, Diem was a deeply religious man, whose Catholic faith was central to every decision in his life. Often attracted to the religious life, Diem had to be constantly pushed to embrace his natural skills as an administrator and politician.

Diem had a reputation both as an ascetic scholar and a capable bureaucratic, one who seemed to perfectly fit the role of the ideal Vietnamese Confucian leader. Indeed, as Shaw shows, Ho Chi Minh admired Diem’s austerity, and likely sought to emulate it. Even at the height of his power, Diem lived meagerly, and was known to constantly give money away to any in need. He was known to rise early every day to attend Mass, and worked brutal 16-hour days.

Nor was he a distant, removed politician unfamiliar with the people he governed. According to many first-hand accounts, Diem seemed most alive when tramping through the Vietnamese countryside meeting with peasants, hearing their stories, and seeking to improve their lives. Nor is “Diem the anti-Buddhist” a fair caricature. Diem’s government poured large sums of money into supporting the preservation or revival of Buddhist buildings and organizations.

The Buddhist protesters who so famously undermined Diem’s regime in the months leading up to his ouster were in fact a minority within the south, incited by Buddhist extremist leaders very likely supported by the communists. Rather than a reflection of the teetering authority of the government, the Buddhist crisis was more likely a propaganda effort to obstruct what so many contemporary accounts and historical documents suggest: Diem and his brother were incrementally winning on both the political and military fronts.
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