If you were a young man eligible for the draft, then you are part of the Vietnam generation. I was such a young man.
Ken Burns' 1990 documentary on the Civil War revolutionized documentaries. There had never been anything like it. It was artistically a triumph. He pieced together narrated letters and other primary source documents, photographs, paintings, sketches, and other images from the war. He used no reenactments. Everything from the era was still. There are interviews with historians who were specialists in the Civil War. He added background music to produce emotional effects, which it surely did. But it was not orchestral music. It was folk music, Negro spirituals, and a piano that was in the background with a very light touch. The soundtrack's CD still sells. The haunting fiddle tune, "Ashokan Farewell," became an instant classic.
That same piano player has stayed with Burns ever since. This time, you can hear him playing softly in the background, but only if you pay attention.
I have seen his documentary on baseball. I reviewed the one on jazz. I have seen The Roosevelts. I reviewed his documentary on the Dust Bowl of the 1930's, which I titled: "Sand in Our Eyes." This one is the best that he has produced since 1990.
BURNS' ARTFUL SELECTION OF FACTS
This time, he included no interviews with historians. There are no interviews of senior government officials. This time, he limited the interviews to eyewitnesses. Most of them were in the military. All of them had served in Vietnam. He interviewed one stateside family. Their son had been killed. There were interviews of a few peace activists.
He hired Peter Coyote to do the narration. Coyote is the go-to guy for television documentaries. He is a decent actor and a spectacular narrator. He has a peculiar voice that is instantly identifiable. He has the right pace. Only David McCullough can match him. McCullough was the man Burns hired to do The Civil War. Keith David is #3.
The episode on the origin of Ho Chi Minh's Communist guerrilla movement was not detailed, but it was sufficient for an American audience. There was decent coverage of the defeat of the French colonial government.
There was almost nothing on the relationship between Ho Chi Minh's government and the communists of the USSR. It was mentioned, but there were no details. The reality was this: this was a clash of empires. This was not what Burns talked about. The two empires, the Soviet Union and the United States, were struggling for world supremacy. Any discussion of the Korean War or the Vietnam War that does not focus on the clash of empires has missed the fundamental point of the world between 1945 and 1991.
The premier book on the war was recognized as such almost as soon as it was published: David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. It was published in 1972, the year before the complete withdrawal of American troops. The book was on the Ivy League graduates who advised Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. They gave the advice that led to the disaster.
Halberstam's book should be read in conjunction with a book that almost nobody has read, Otto Scott's book on South Africa, The Other End of the Lifeboat (1985). In the first half, he details the demise of a similar group of very bright fellows, the Roundtable Group run by Alfred Milner, who was the institutional heir of Cecil Rhodes. They got Britain into World War I, and then they got Britain into World War II. By 1946, Britain was finished as an empire. The two wars had bankrupted the nation.
Here is Scott's assessment. They were too clever by half.
When Britain pulled out of the empire trade, Harry Truman moved in. You cannot understand what happened from 1946 to the suicide of the Soviet Union in 1991 if you don't recognize that the American establishment self-consciously moved into the vacuum that Britain had produced by leaving. It was a self-conscious effort. It produced the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It was supervised by the CIA, which had been the OSS during World War II. The CIA, like the OSS, was staffed by members of Yale's secret society, Skull & Bones. From 1952 to 1961, it was run by a Princeton grad, Allan Dulles. Dulles persuaded Kennedy to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion. These were the best and the brightest of their day.
They, too, were too clever by half.
A MATTER OF LEGITIMACY
There was something else. Specialists know about it, but it is never mentioned in the standard textbook accounts of the war, and it was certainly never mentioned in the documentary. It is mentioned on Wikipedia, but you have to know the name of the man involved, not many people do: B?o ??i.
Bao Dai (22 October 1913 – 30 July 1997), born Nguyen Phuc Vinh Thuy, was the 13th and final emperor of the Nguyen Dynasty, which was the last ruling family of Vietnam. From 1926 to 1945, he was emperor of Annam. During this period, Annam was a protectorate within French Indochina, covering the central two-thirds of the present-day Vietnam. Bao Dai ascended the throne in 1932.The Japanese ousted the Vichy-French administration in March 1945 and then ruled through Bao Dai. At this time, he renamed his country "Vietnam". He abdicated in August 1945 when Japan surrendered. From 1949 until 1955, Bao Dai was the chief of state of the State of Vietnam (South Vietnam). Bao Dai was criticized for being too closely associated with France and spending much of his time outside of Vietnam. Prime Minister Ngo Dình Diem eventually ousted him in a fraudulent referendum vote in 1955.
It has been widely held that Vietminh or Ho Chi Minh founded the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam alone. However, Stanley Karnow in Vietnam: A History argued that "Nothing has reinforced the Vietminh cause more than the mercurial Bao Dai's decision to abdicate. For his gesture conferred the 'mandate of heaven' on Ho, giving him the legitimacy that, in Vietnamese eyes, had traditionally resided in the emperor."
This was the real turning point in Vietnam. It was a crisis of legitimacy. Once Bao Dai was gone, nobody else had any legitimacy. That opened the door to Ho Chi Minh's mandate from heaven, which was an odd phrase for a Marxist Communist to use. From that time on, one tyrannical ruler was as good as another.
When colonial governments allowed democracy in the subject societies -- not yet nations -- the struggle for legitimacy began. That was the tolling of the bell for colonialism. There were two competing ideologies: nationalism and Communism.
Burns' documentary makes it clear that each of the governments that ran South Vietnam was corrupt to the core. This was the problem of legitimacy. He did not point out that Ho Chi Minh's government was run by a tyrannical Communist who oversaw a murderous regime from day one. We learn about what Ho Chi Minh had to do with the war, but nothing about his domestic policies. Burns gave Ho Chi Minh a free pass.
MORAL CORRUPTION
Burns' use of recordings of telephone calls by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon is creative. We see an old tape recorder turning, and we hear the voices. From their discussions, there is no question that Johnson and Nixon knew the war could not be won. There is also no question that they kept the war going for domestic political reasons. These two men sacrificed the lives of over 50,000 Americans for the sake of their personal political ambitions. This message comes through loud and clear. For this alone, I regard the documentary as a success. I hope a lot of people watch it.
The people who watch it will be mostly liberals. They will be well-educated liberals. Maybe they were in college during the war, but most of them were not. They are going to get a real sense of the degree of the moral corruption of the two most politically astute Presidents of the Cold War era.
The political corruption of the South Vietnamese rulers was nickel and dime stuff. They were just authoritarian grafters. They had their hands in the till. Nothing new here. This is the story of civil government from the beginning. But the degree of moral corruption of Johnson and Nixon, who sacrificed tens of thousands of lives so that they could be re-elected, was monstrous. I think Burns gets this across. He doesn't scream it in our ears, meaning he doesn't have Peter Coyote scream it in our ears, but anyone watching this series from start to finish cannot miss the point. Presidents lied. Young men died.
The documentary also makes clear that the war destroyed them both. Johnson did not run again, and Nixon resigned. No President had ever resigned before Nixon, but Johnson was in second place. He didn't resign, but he refused to run again. For Johnson, it might as well have been a resignation. He wanted power as much as Nixon did. I think the two of them were the two most power-hungry Presidents ever elected. They lived for power. They lived for politics.
Lincoln had a lot of power, but it was thrust on him by the war. He did not run for President in order to run a war. Neither did Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt had a roaring good time as President until the war broke out. I think the war killed him. It aged him rapidly. Before the war, he had enjoyed all the perks of the Presidency, including mistresses. But he had not been consumed by a quest for power. He was a patrician. He had been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. He really wasn't trying to prove anything crucial in his life when he went into politics. He thought he would like to be President the way his cousin Theodore had been. At Harvard, he had been very upset by the fact that he didn't get into the prestigious secret society, Porcelian. Cousin Theodore had. This galled him for years thereafter.
In contrast, Johnson and Nixon were poor boys who clawed their way to the top through politics. All they had ever known was politics. Neither of them had any successes in their lives except as politicians. Both of them were deeply resentful of better-off boys and young men who had looked down on them, or so they imagined, and they wanted social revenge.
Burns' script writer, Geoffrey Ward, does not talk about this. Yet it is at the very heart of the morally debauched political strategy that these two men pursued at the expense of the lives of 58,000 Americans.
Here is the underlying message that I took away from this documentary: Politics giveth, and politics taketh away.
RECONCILIATION
This documentary ends exactly the way that The Civil War ended: the reconciliation of warriors. Groups of combatants who fought each other not quite to the death have reunited, at the initiative of Americans, to reminisce through translators about the war. It was the central event in their lives, and for the same reasons: their lives were on the line. They were members of a bloody brotherhood, as all battlefield warriors are, but they were essentially first cousins with the bloody brotherhood on the other side of the ever-shifting front lines. They had gone through what civilians had not gone through. That experience forever separates combatants from civilians. It is supposed to separate them. It is good that it does separate them.
We have seen this happen again and again in the history of warfare. It happened between the Americans and the Germans after World War II. Two nations attempt to destroy each other on the battlefield, sacrificing the lives of young men to do this. And then, after the peace treaty, and after 10 years or 20 years, the combatants reunite. This is not pushed by the governments on either side. It is a voluntary transaction between survivors.
CONCLUSION
The Vietnam War was futile for America. The United States government had no business getting involved in southeast Asia. But that's what empires do.
I think this is the greatest weakness of the documentary. It does not make it clear that there was a clash of empires after 1945. It led to World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. After 1945, clever members of establishments on both sides of the Iron Curtain had the same agenda: to push people around beyond their own borders. The old slogan is true: "When elephants fight, ants get crushed."
But something else is true. Ants eventually eat elephants. One bite at a time.
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