Ken Burns’ superb new series on Vietnam War
White House lies. Presidential paranoia about leaks to the news media. A nation riven by divisions so deep that they lead to mass protests, polarization in Congress and rifts within families. Fights over the definition of patriotic duty.
Anyone under the illusion that these pangs on the American psyche began, or reached unseen levels, with the inauguration of President Trump on Jan. 20 should check out the epic new documentary “The Vietnam War.” This 10-episode, 18-hour series, to be aired on PBS starting Sept. 17, explores the war that tore apart a nation and embedded a skepticism about government that prevails to this day.
“History, particularly good history, holds a mirror up to the present ... because history is the set of questions we in the present ask of the past,” said filmmaker Ken Burns, who has become America’s defining storyteller with his documentaries that dispelled myths and raised fresh insights about everything from baseball and jazz to the Civil War and World War II.
“The echoes are so striking,” Lynn Novick, his filmmaking partner, said of the rancor and jolt to Americans’ confidence created by a war that, in the end, failed its military mission while taking more than 58,000 American lives.
“Vietnam called so many things into question that we’re still playing out,” Novick said, adding that today’s rancor and mistrust of government are “toxic byproducts that started then.”
Novick and Burns visited our editorial board last week as part of their promotional tour for their series, a preview copy of which I had watched beforehand.
Even those of us who are familiar with the guiding narrative and turning points of the Vietnam War have much to gain from the 10-year quest by Burns and Novick to deepen our understanding of the conflict: Its origins, its colossal miscalculations along the way, the acts of heroism, the indelible scenes of horror and — perhaps most enlightening of all — the human impact on and far away from the battlefields.
The series includes scenes and stories that will reverberate long after one has advanced to the next episode. The hills that were conquered by U.S. troops at devastating cost of casualties, only to be abandoned soon after. The disorientation of American forces landing in a foreign land. The starving prisoners of war who were caught catching a prison commandant’s pet cat, which brought them torture but, ultimately, no meal. An American soldier gave a chilling recollection of strangling an enemy in a narrow tunnel, and how it changed him.
Ever clear-eyed, the filmmakers sought out the perspective of North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians alike. Those were among some of the most poignant interviews in the series.
“I witnessed Americans dying ... I saw them crying and holding each other. When one was killed, the others stuck together ... I witnessed such scenes and thought, “Americans, like Vietnamese, have a profound sense of humanity,’ ” said Viet Cong veteran Le Cong Huan.
History, at least as told in this documentary, was less forgiving about our leaders in Washington. The filmmakers scoured the National Archives to unearth White House recordings of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon disparaging the South Vietnamese and offering dour characterizations of the war that directly contradicted their declarations on national television — juxtaposed by the filmmakers to devastating effect. They included the voices of Nixon flatly denying to Johnson that he sabotaged peace talks with backchannel messages to the South right before the 1968 election — later proved to be a lie — and Johnson then telling Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen that “this is treason.” Equally sickening were the voices of Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, each certain that South Vietnam would fall, to hold off the inevitable until after the 1972 election.
No documentary, even one as complete and compelling as this one, will change the minds of anyone who decided decades ago that Vietnam was a noble cause or an obstruction to a determined country’s liberation that was doomed from the start. Burns and Novick do not try. They merely attempt to expand and enlighten Americans’ grasp on the causes, execution and effects of a war that all too often caused us to choose sides and shut off evidence that defied our preconceptions.
As Burns and Novick assert, “There is no single truth in war.” Their superb documentary series confronts myriad myths and mysteries about Vietnam.
John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron