PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Ten

Episode Ten deals with the end of the war, with the Vietnam Memorial Wall and memories, and with some of the war’s legacy issues.  There’s much in this episode that stirs me, brings tears to my eyes, renews my anger at the war, and reminds me of lessons yet to be learned to prevent future wars.

The film’s images of tragic division among Vietnamese at the war’s end– victorious NVA and southern NLF fighters and fearful, fleeing south Vietnamese reminds me of what Madame Nguyen Thi Ninh told my wife and me in March on our visit to Vietnam. Leaning close to us as a way of making sure we knew what she was about to say is very important, she said, “More terrible than all the bombing and violence is the way America divided Vietnamese society, divided Vietnamese as a people.” Madame Ninh supported and served the National Liberation Front  and her country in several posts, including after the war as Vietnam’s Ambassador to the European Union; her brother served as a Captain in ARVN, the U.S-backed South Vietnamese army.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have said that the Vietnam War was a tragedy, which certainly is true. While there is wisdom in the film’s publicized slogan that, “There is no single truth in war,” Burns also has said, “At the war’s end, a country disappeared.” That is not true. As the film repeatedly reveals, while never having the courage to explicitly acknowledge, the “country” that disappeared at the war’s end was created and sustained by the United States  Even when the U.S. provided Saigon with more than a half million American soldiers and massive aid and weaponry, “our side” wasn’t winning. As Episode Ten dramatically reviews, when the U.S. withdrew, ARVN collapsed and the Saigon regime of Generals Thieu and Ky fell.

            Duong Van Mai Elliott, who worked on the Rand Corporation’s Pentagon Papers study and most of whose family fled at the war’s end, is quoted saying, “There were many mistakes made by the Americans, but the biggest mistake was creating the sense of dependency.” The film shows that it was much more than “a sense of dependency.” From our earliest involvement supporting the French, America’s war, rationalized by anti-Communism, was a war against Vietnam’s independence. What the war’s end actually marked was the completion of the Vietnamese struggle for national independence. Vietnam is one country and after one hundred years, in Spring 1975 it was finally free from foreign military control and occupation.

            There were two other images in Episode Ten that particularly stuck with me. One was of U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin resisting preparations to evacuate, as he stubbornly insisted that Saigon was not about to fall. While the film suggests he may have been suffering mentally from a bout of Pneumonia, Martin’s view also represented how deeply and dangerously delusional U.S. policy was. The other image, which also appears in the book, The Vietnam War, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (page  561) is of Henry Kissinger and five other white men in suits standing and sitting comfortably in the White House,  joking and laughing aloud, at the same time as Saigon is falling and Vietnamese dependents of America’s War are fleeing for their lives.

           The aftermath of the war was bound to be difficult and painful. While the film makes a point of acknowledging that the “bloodbath” so loudly and often predicted by defenders of the war never happened, the process of recovery and reconciliation was very hard, including the forced reeducation for many supporters of the Saigon regime. At the time this was happening, the same NLF woman leader my wife and I met in March publicly criticized her government's reeducation program as being much too rigid and lasting too long.

Other legacy issues include unexploded ordinance which has claimed many thousands of Vietnamese lives, mostly of children, since the end of the war, and the multi-generational effects of massive spraying of Agent Orange. The U.S. government has been shamefully slow and reluctant in dealing with the effects of Agent Orange on American soldiers. Inspiringly, many American veterans are involved partnering with and supporting Vietnamese who are working on addressing these ongoing effects of the war. Both the film and the accompanying book could have informed us about how to make contributions to American/Vietnamese projects, like the Mine Action Center in Dong Ha or Peace Trees Vietnam, dedicated to healing these wounds of war. Unfortunately, they didn’t do this.

.

The other major issue I need to comment on is how the anti-war movement is portrayed, not just in Episode Ten, but in the whole eighteen hours of the film. Frankly, given Burns and Novick’s claim that one of the film’s two major goals is to understand what was happening on the home front during the war, their portrayal of the anti-war movement is pathetically weak, two-dimensional and, at some points, deliberately biased.

In my responses to the other nine episodes, I’ve cited specific examples of when and how Burns and Novick ignore or provide very sketchy treatments of significant actions and persons in the anti-war movement starting with their failure even to mention the self-immolation of three Americans - Alice Herz, Norman Morrison and Roger LaPorte in 1965.

Burns and Novick give almost no film time to tracing the growth of draft resistance and resistance within the military, and none to the role of religious communities and women's organizations in inspiring and expanding the anti-war movement. Their treatment of Martin Luther King's decision to publicly oppose the war is simplistic and much too brief. While they interview and quote dozens of veterans, except for one activist, Bill Zimmerman, they don’t do interviews or personal stories of any war resisters.

The growth of anti-war demonstrations from a few hundred participants to thousands and more than a million in the Vietnam Moratorium deserves much more attention, including interviews with some of the persons who organized these demonstrations, as well as with participants. Just as debates about military strategies were a focus in the film, so there should have been more attention to debates about strategies within the anti-movement.

As Todd Gitlin writes in his essay on the anti-war movement in Geoffrey Ward’s book accompanying the film, “The millions who passed through it –and they were many millions – were as various as America itself.  .  .  .the movement encompassed members of the armed forces and the clergy, women’s groups, trade unionists, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, nurses, teachers, social workers, scientists, architects, and city planners.” The various, multiple stories about the movement are told poorly if at all in the PBS film.

As I skimmed through  the index to Geoffrey Ward’s book which also pretty closely reflects what is and isn’t covered in the film, I was shocked by how few, if any, references there are to national organizations that played major roles in educating and organizing Americans in opposition to the war. Assuming you may be familiar with at least some of these and without going into details about what each organization did, here’s a list of several national organizations with the number of references in the book's index:

American Friends Service Committee – 0; Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace – 0; Catholic Peace Fellowship and Protestant denominational peace fellowships – 0; Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors – 0; Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam – 0; Fellowship of Reconciliation – 0; Institute for Policy Studies – 0; War Resisters League - 1; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom – 0; and Women’s Strike for Peace – 1.

Here is a partial list of organizations formed in the1960s explicitly to educate and mobilize opposition to the war and how many times they are referenced in the index:

Coalition to Stop Funding the War - 0; Chicano Moratorium - 0; Committee of Liaison (with American POWs) – 0; Indochina Peace Campaign – 1; Indochina Summer – 0; National or New Mobilization Committee to End the War – 0; Resist – 0; Student Mobilization Committee – 0; Vietnam Moratorium Committee - 1; We Won’t Go – 0.

Several important existing national organizations developed strong anti-war positions as the war developed, including the Leadership Council of Women Religious, National Student Association, National Council of Churches, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform). None of these organizations are referenced in Ward’s book or in the film.

 There is a special page in the book, which features a photo of Jane Fonda sitting and expressing solidarity with a North Vietnamese artillery battery, a clearly insensitive spontaneous and counterproductive act for which Fonda apologized many times. Accompanying the photo is text listing several Americans who visited Hanoi during the war, including Cora Weiss who organized the Committee of Liaison to carry mail between American POWs and their families.

The juxtaposition of the photo and names of anti-war activists angered many vets and clearly was intended to associate anti-war activism with disloyalty to country. The anti-war activists whose names appear in that text, including Jane Fonda, and the millions of Americans who opposed the war in Vietnam don’t deserve that biased, shoddy treatment. In failing to portray and personalize the anti-war movement in the way they successfully do with many veterans, Burns, Novick and Ward fail to accomplish the goal of promoting understanding about what was happening at home during the war.

The film makes a major contribution to understanding what happened on the battlefields of Vietnam, including some of the ways the war affected soldiers. Even in that focus, the film fails for not including more about thousands of Vietnam veterans suffering PTSD, homelessness and suicide.  

We have a lot more work to do in understanding and overcoming divisions in our society - divisions that didn’t start with the war in Vietnam but got deeper during it, and recently are exacerbated by Donald Trump, first as candidate and now as President.

During the Vietnam War, as National Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Ron resisted the draft, led an interfaith/interracial mission to Saigon focused on repression, carried mail from between their families and American POW’s in Hanoi, and coordinated national peace marches on Washington, DC in November 1969 and May 1970. Ron lives in Everett WA and can be contacted at ronyoungwa@gmail.com

PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Nine

            Episode Nine of the PBS  documentary, “A Disrespectful Loyalty,” covers the period January 1971-March 1973, including the U.S./ARVN offensive in Laos,  the trial of Lieutenant Calley related to the massacre at My Lai, the emergence of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and mass anti-war demonstrations in Spring 1971, President Nixon’s war strategy related to the1972 election campaign against Senator Mc Govern, the North Vietnamese/ National Liberation Front 1972 “Easter Offensive, U.S Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972, tensions between Nixon and President Thieu in Saigon about negotiations, and the Paris Peace Agreement on January 27 1973, calling for withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam and the release of Prisoners of War.

            Near the beginning of Episode Nine, President Nixon talking about the offensive into Laos, which is failing, says to Henry Kissinger, “It’s a win, see.  . . .I don’t care what happens, this is a win.” The cynical dismissal of what is actually happening on the ground, but even much worse, the dishonesty  and apparent absolutely callous disregard for the many Americans and Vietnamese being sent to their deaths on behalf of failed policies is part of what fueled the formation of Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW).

            With very few exceptions, the utter failure by senior U.S. political and military leaders to acknowledge and take responsibility for failed American war policies in Vietnam, policies which many of us understood were unjust and immoral in the first place, contributed to some of the negative public reaction to Lt. Calley’s conviction for what he and others did in My Lai. Afterall, many people said, Calley was “just doing his duty.”  The other even more disturbing and broader basis of support for Calley is the view that he was “just killing  Gooks.”

Burns and Novick acknowledge in anecdotes how racism was a significant contributing factor in America’s war in Vietnam, but even based just on the evidence they present, the subject deserved a much deeper treatment and accounting. Why didn’t they include one or two of those special subject vignettes the film does well or include an essay on the role of racism in the accompanying book by Geoffrey Ward.

            The film’s coverage of John Kerry and John Musgrave participating in the VVAW action at the Capitol on April 18 is good. That the film has followed Musgrave over several episodes and allowed him to tell his personal story.is informing and moving. If Burns and Novik had done the same with one or two men who had resisted the draft and perhaps gone to prison, allowing them to tell their personal stories, the film would have been less biased and been more helpful to us all in understanding  more clearly what was happening on the home front.

As the U.S. strategy to end the war came to rely more on negotiations, the problem presented by the Thieu regime became more evident. Already in 1969 Thieu’s position was that four issues were “not negotiable" - No coalition government, territorial integrity (i.e., of South Vietnam which meant No to one government for all Vietnam, unless it’s Thieu’s government,), No to participation of the Communist Party and, No to neutralism.” All of these issues were ones that leaders and followers of Vietnam’s “Third Force” movement viewed with more flexibility and in some cases held the exact opposite view. For example, many in those ranks, including such key leaders as Madame Ngo Ba Thanh, Thich Tri Quang, National Assembly member and publisher of Tin Sang newspaper Ngo Cong Duc, and General Duong Vanh Minh, courageously advocated for formation of a coalition government in South Vietnam several years before the end of the war. They and their supporters viewed this as absolutely essential to ending the war and negotiating reunification of the country. 

The Thieu/Ky government was adamant on these issues and used suspicion of disagreement with their views as a basis for arresting and imprisoning people. In 1969, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon publicly acknowledged that the Saigon regime was holding at least 50,000 political prisoners, most of them supporters of the Third Force. In 1970, thanks to a hand drawn map by Loi Nyugen, a former political prisoner, members of a US Congressional delegation on a visit to Con Son island prison were able to find and photograph the infamous Tiger Cages where hundreds of prisoners were tortured. The photo taken by then senate staffer, later Senator Tom Harkin appeared on the cover of Life Magazine July 17 1970. 

Burns and Novick failed to deal substantively with the political positions and significance of  the Third Force movement.The fact that there is not even a reference to the Tiger Cages in the film or in Geoffrey Ward’s book should be a source of serious embarrassment to all three, but I fear it is not.

            Many of the most prominent leaders of the non-Communist Third Force movement may have died. Some also suffered under the Communist government which came to power at the end of the war. Some are still alive and /or their friends and children could tell their stories. To the extent that the United States had paid more attention and provided any significant support for the ideas advocated by Third Force leaders and supporters the transition toward the end of the war and reunification could have been less wrenching and painful. Even more basically, if Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson had paid more attention to these Vietnamese early on rather than ignorantly and arrogantly imposing the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem, there wouldn’t  have been an American war in Vietnam in the first place.

Vietnam is one of many countries where Cold War blinders caused the United States to commit disastrous policies. The costs of doing this in Vietnam, in terms of American and Vietnamese lives (and Cambodian and Laotian lives) were staggering.  The failure of the film more substantially to address this basic issue in U.S. policy and thus address deep divisions in our society resulting from the war represents a waste of some portion of the enormous amount of resources devoted to the film. This also represents the film's failure to shine light on deeper lessons we need to learn. In figuring out why Burns and Novick failed to do this, it may be the case that some funders didn’t want to dig that deep.. 

PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Eight

Episode Eight, “The History of the World,” covers the period May 1969-December 1970.  This period is marked by President Nixon’s decision to make a series of withdrawals of US troops under the policy rubric of Vietnamization, sputtering secret talks and negotiations, increased popular frustration and anger over the ongoing war, the largest anti-war demonstrations in U.S. history, the.invasion of Cambodia, and  a more public, politicized focus on American Prisoners of War.

The June 27 1969 issue of Life Magazine carried the names and individual photos of 242 American soldiers killed in Vietnam in one week  David Halberstam commented that those photos “probably had more impact on anti-war feeling than any other piece of print journalism.” A year later, as a result of U.S. troop withdrawals and the policy of Vietnamization, while fewer Americans were dying in Vietnam, an estimated 300 Vietnamese were being killed every day.

In a month long project, the Daily Death Toll, cosponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Clergy and Laity Concerned, 300 persons came to Washington, DC each day from a different city or town. After visiting their Congressional offices advocating for cutting off funding for the war, they gathered in front of the White House and lay down in the driveway where they were arrested. There was consistently good newspaper and T.V. coverage in the city or town from which the 300 had come that day. One would think that this action and hundreds of other creative anti-war protests would have gotten more attention in this film about the Vietnam war and what was happening at home

Not all protests were as creative or communicated in a such a clear way. Some were combined with the broader generational rebellion of the 1960s against authority, for new sexual freedom, use of mind-altering drugs, and celebrated in great folk and rock-n-roll music. While most of all that was not harmful to most participants, the mixture often didn’t help offer a clear message to millions of Americans still making up their minds about the war. Photos from Woodstock in the documentary remind us of why people may have been confused by some of the protests and protesters.

While organized by miniscule numbers relative to millions of Americans who were against the war by 1969, some protests, including the “Days of Rage”.in Chicago and attacks on some banks and labs associated with weapons of war were violent. These actions were decidedly delusional and counterproductive. By the summer of 1969, there also were violent protests by men in the military, in the form of “fraggings” of gung-ho officers who seemed intent on getting more of their men killed, even as Nixon ordered more American troops to come home. Both among civilians and soldiers there was growing frustration, anger and desperation to end the war that more and more people believed was continuing based on lies and lack of political courage.

1969-1970 were years that saw the largest anti-war protests in the history of the country. The Vietnam Moratorium was a call for people to interrupt ordinary work or school on the 15^th of every month to organize some form of protest against the war. On October 15, more than a million people participated in a wide variety of events across the country, including marches, rallies, teach-ins and strikes.. A month later on November 15 500,000 people gathered at the Washington Monument in D.C and another 250,000 in San Francisco, calling for an end to the war and immediate U.S. withdrawal from  Vietnam.

 

For two days preceding the mass march in Washington 38,000 people walked in a continuous single file from Arlington Cemetery to the Capitol carrying the names of men from their home state who had been killed in Vietnam and calling out the names as they passed by the White House. The protest was called the March Against Death and was memorialized in a poster by Pablo Picasso

On May 1 1970 the United States invaded Cambodia. Response on campuses across the country was swift and intense. New Mobilizaion leaders who organized the November 15 1969 March called for people to come to Washington on Saturday May 9. 100,000 people, most of them students came. 250 handed over their Draft Cards to be taken to Saigon, where a Vietnamese student leader, Buddhist monk and Catholic Priest would participate in burning them. On May 4 at Ken State in Ohio four students  protesting the war were killed by National Guard. Ten days later two student war protesters were killed at Jackson State in Mississippi.

There are plenty of people in their sixties, seventies, eighties and probably several in their nineties who helped plan, lead and participated in the anti-war protest movement during the decade of the war. The PBS documentary would have been better, more complete, more complicated and, yes, maybe a bit more controversial if  Burns and  Novick had selected a dozen of them, instead of just one, Bill Zimmerman, to offer comments on developments in Vietnam and at home during those years as they did with many veterans.

 .

 In addition to Vietnamization and the invasion of Cambodia, another important and controversial initiative by President Nixon revealed in this episode of the film was his decision to make the issue of American Prisoners of War in Vietnam much more public and political. At times, It even seemed that Nixon was claiming we were still fighting the war to bring home our POWs, when it was obvious that the way to get our POWs back home was to end the war.

This issue is an example of another opportunity missed by Burns and Novick to help explain what was happening at home.  The U.S refused to recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). As a result, the International Red Cross was not able to perform its traditional role of serving as a liaison between prisoners and their families back home. Cora Weiss and other leaders of the anti-war movement formed a Committee of Liaison which regularly carried mail between the America POWs and their families. COL delegations, including one in which I participated in December 1970 were able to visit with several of the prisoners and, in a few cases, bring an American soldier or two home.

One of the prisoners we met with told us that he had never been in Vietnam or met a Vietnamese until his fighter bomber was shot down over the Noerh. He flew off a carrier in the South China sea.   When he landed in a field by parachute, he broke his ankle. Vietnamese peasants surrounded him and, after a brief argument about what to do, they bandaged his ankle and carried him a few hundred yards and down into an underground bunker. Within minutes a wave of B-52s began their bombing run over the area. This young American said he’d never experienced a B-52 bombing raid from the ground before and he wouldn’t want anyone else to experience that ever again. It would have been good to see this former Prisoner of War interviewed in the film.

.

The story of the Committee of Liaison was certainly an important one to be told in relation to who cared and who did anything to help our POWs during the war. Cora and the Committee’s work get very brief mention in Episode Nine on a feature page, the dramatic focus of which is a photo of Jane Fonda sitting and expressing solidarity with a North Vietnamese artillery battery. Burns and Novick knew exactly what they were doing in portraying that connection. That page may understandably anger some veterans but it also insults the intelligence and moral courage of many veterans who fought the war and many veterans of the anti-war movement.

. Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Seven

Episode Seven of the PBS Documentary, entitled, “The Veneer of Civilization,” covers the period June 1968-April 1969. By April 1968 there were 543,432 American soldiers in Vietnam; 40,794 American dead; and the United States had spent 70 billion on the war.

The previous episode covered the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, mass riots that followed, and the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy on June 9, the night he ostensibly won the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. Episode Seven covers confrontations In Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the election of Richard Nixon as President. Despite the ways these events related to the war and their enormous effects in shaping what was happening at home, disappointingly, the film footage in both episodes continued to concentrate on military battles and the voices of men who fought, ignoring the stories and voices of growing numbers of Americans who opposed the war.

As riveting and emotional as some of the battles and feelings of the fighters are, the lack of a wider lens gets boring. I’ve heard from several friends who have stopped  watching the series.  Here’s a link to a podcast with Tom Fox, who after the war for many years was Editor and Publisher of the National Catholic Reporter. During the war Tom served with International Voluntary Services working with Vietnamese (estimated at 3 million) who had been forced from their villages in the countryside by massive US bombing and Agent Orange raids.  So far in the series, the film ignores Tom’s story and the stories of hundreds of other courageous, dedicated young Americans who spoke Vietnamese and worked with IVS or with the Quaker Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Center in Quang Ngai, a province very heavily bombed and sprayed with Agent Orange, where 40% of the population had been displaced into refugee camps.

The numbers of men resisting the draft, resisting the war within the military, and fleeing and deserting to Canada or Sweden grew significantly in 1967 and 1968. In a two page Ad in The New York Times 100 student body presidents declared, “We believe the war in Vietnam is unjust and immoral, and we should not be forced to fight in it.”  100,000 draft age youth across the country signed pledge cards making this same declaration.  Dr. Benjamn Spock, the famous baby doctor, and Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Chaplain at Yale, and three others faced federal trial for supporting draft resistance. Nine Catholic activists, including Fathers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan stole and burned draft files in Catonsville, Maryland. Mixed-age community groups gathered at local Draft Boards across the country and read the names of all the Americans who had been killed so far in Vietnam. Muhammed Ali spoke for a growing number of African Americans when he refused military service and declared, “No Vietnamese ever call me nigger.” None of this, none of these American stories have been given significant attention or time in the film.

Another important dimension of what was happening at home related to the war were debates about strategy for the ant-war movement. The film does a relatively good job portraying debates about war fighting strategies among military and political leaders on both sides, and revealing the skepticism and sometimes spoken or unspoken dissent over particular strategies by the men and women actually doing the fighting. The film needed to take the same approach to debates about strategy for the anti-war movement. What was the goal and strategy of the October 1967 “Confront the Warmakers” demonstration at the Pentagon, the Student Strike at Columbia University in April 1968, and the mass demonstration at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968 – and what actually was accomplished by these actions.

To achieve understanding of these events would have required Burns and Novick to include diverse perspectives and voices, just as they did in relation to war fighting strategies. Clearly, they decided not to do this and, as a consequence, the film’s contribution to understanding what was happening at home is much weaker than it might have been.

The stories of resistance to the war, like some of the stories of awful things American soldiers admitted doing in the war, and debates about strategies will surely be controversial. It is precisely this fuller, whole story, however, which needed to be found in the film if the multiple truths in the war or about the anti-war movement, and the preponderant truth, if there is one about this particular war or anti-war movement, are going to be perceived by the film’s audience, and lessons learned. So far, sadly, I don’t think it’s happening.

PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Commentary on Episode Six

            Episode Six of the PBS Documentary takes a line from William Butler Yeats’ famous poem as its title, “Things fall apart,” and covers the period January-June 1968. Those six months were marked by three events that dramatically affected American involvement in Vietnam and the course of American history more broadly: the Tet Offensive by North Vietnam and the southern National Liberation Front at the end of January; the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, one year to the day from King’s sermon denouncing the war; and on the night he ostensibly won the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.

            In January 1968, in response to my act of draft resistance, I received a federal indictment in the mail that read: “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VS. RONALD JAMES YOUNG.” While I suppose I could have anticipated this wording, nevertheless, it came as quite a shock for a guy who only ten years earlier had earned the Boy Scouts’ Eagle Scout and God and Country awards, had been president of my church Youth Fellowship, and had seriously considered applying to attend the Military Academy at West Point.

            Invited to speak at the annual national gathering of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam in February I wrote a poem titled, “We Are America,” that said in part,

“The Vietnam War started like civil rights,

As a question in my mind.

But cut quickly and deeply into me,

           

The government of my country

Is destroying the Vietnamese people,

In the name of national security,

And in the name of saving Vietnam,

A salvation from which

Vietnamese are trying to save themselves.

The government needs more soldiers.

And continues to send them to the slaughter.

But we do not go willingly as before.

Because of the Atomic Bomb,

And civil rights,

And wars in the cities that have begun,

And the Beattles and Alice’s Restaurant,

And P-O-T and L-S-D.

And because the government

Doesn’t always tell the truth.

And because we are learning the Truth

That people are more important

Than any idea or system.

And that people are power.

The government needs more soldiers

But we have something to say now,

'We won’t go.

We want to build not burn.'

And we’re telling our friends.

And we earnestly believe we are right.

And no matter how the indictments may read,

We believe we are America,

And We Shall Overcome!”

           There were thousands of young Americans with backgrounds and experiences like mine, including many like myself who worked earlier in the Civil Rights Movement. But once again Burns and Novick ignore their stories and voices, focusing Episode Six almost entirely on military battles and the stories and voices of men who fought the war. Many of the battlefield stories are riveting and the voices of those who fought are emotional and compelling, including some who express growing doubts about the war’s purpose and progress proclaimed by both sides’ military and political leaders. Yet, failing to include more personal stories and voices of Americans who opposed the war not only reflects a serious imbalance and bias, but contributes to the failure to achieve the film’s goal of more fully understanding what was happening at home.

            Episode Six is convincing on how the Tet Offensive, despite the enormous loses suffered – perhaps half of the 84,000 Vietnamese who participated in the attacks – broke the back of American opinion in support the war. That was dramatically revealed in President Johnson’s reaction to Walter Cronkite returning from Vietnam and declaring on his TV special, “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” Johnson responded that evening but not publicly, “That’s it," he said, "If we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost middle America.” Johnson’s address to the nation on March 31 announcing that he would not seek a second term epitomized the tragic Shakespearian drama of his Presidency, memorialized in two plays by Robert Schenkkan, All the Way and The Great Society, performed as a pair in Seattle.

What Burns and Novick don’t address about Tet, and they could have by doing interviews in the South and North with people who were civilians in 1968, is how the Tet Offensive affected Vietnamese opinion. Particularly in the south, how did Vietnamese civilians in the cities and in the countryside view the offensive? What effects did it have on their view of the Saigon government, the American military presence, and the growing  “Third Force” peace movement, etc? The film’s primary focus on the military and interviews with those who fought results in a failure to understand more deeply what was happening politically both in America and in Vietnam.

            Martin Luther King’s sermon against the war on April 4, 1967, King;s assassination, and the eruption of riots in many cities across the country deserved more coverage in the film.  These events, followed three months later by Bobby Kennedy’s assassination had significant effects on prospects for ending the war and on relations between blacks and whites. Except for the incident where Marine Corporal Roger Harris, returned from Vietnam, refuses orders to join military action against black rioters in D.C, the fllm seems to duck dealing with race relations and with the obvious racist dimension of the war itself. The accompanying book by Geofffrey War does more on this, causing  one to wonder if taking on the racial dimension of the war, as well as interviewing men who risked imprisonment for resisting the draft and men who resisted within the military were topics too hot to handle in the film for a few of the major funders.

PBS Vietnam War Documentary - Response to Episode Five

            Episode Five of the Documentary, “This is What We Do” (July-December 1967) is the most telling so far about what is missing from the Burns/Novick film. It also is the most exhausting episode. Several friends have told me they have stopped watching the series, not because they were not interested or didn’t learn anything from watching, but because so much of the film footage is about battles.It’s almost as if the filmmakers became intoxicated with battle scenes and stories, and forgot what they claimed was the purpose of the film. (It will be very interesting to learn how the numbers of viewers of the series changes over the course of the ten episodes.)

            In their Introduction to the book, The Vietnam War, based on the film series, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick write, “It’s been more than forty years now, and. . .we have been unable to put that war behind us. The deep wounds it inflicted on our nation, our communities, our families, and our politics have festered.”  In presenting their goals for the film, they write, “Most important, we wanted to understand what the war was like on the battlefield and on the home front, and we wanted to find out why. . . Americans have been unable to have a civil conversation about one of the most consequential events in our history.” Reviewing the photographs and texts of the book and the film so far, I believe Burns and Novick have succeeded in helping us understand what it was like on the battlefield but fail to help us much on understanding the home front and why conversations about Vietnam are still so difficult.

While appreciating the positive accomplishments of the PBS Documentary, Tom Fox, who served in Vietnam as a community worker in the nongovernmental International Voluntary Service, suggests that a place to start in figuring what went wrong is the very title of the series. Writing in National Catholic Reporter online, Tom commented, “However large Burns and Novick's scope, I fear their lens has been too narrowly focused on the military aspect of the conflict and not wide enough to adequately digest all its bitter lessons. Yes, the title is "The Vietnam War." I would have preferred something like "Vietnam, America and the War."

There is no magic in a title, but Tom’s preferred title would have kept reminding the filmmakers that their purpose was not simply to understand the war which can be viewed as primarily a military matter, but also to learn somethings about Vietnam and, very importantly as Americans, to view what was happening on the home front during the war in ways that help us achieve a more complex, deeper, more critical understanding of our own country’s history, culture and politics.

A serious problem with Episodes Four and Five's treatment of the home front is that, except for three nationally prominent figures, Senator Fulbright, Martin Luther King, and Dr. Spock, who voice anti-war views, and occasional snippets from a single anti-war activist Bill Zimmerman, the anti-war movement continues to be portrayed two-dimensionally and mostly with generalities. The film’s effect would have been very different if Burns and Novick had selected ten or a dozen individual American students, teachers, women, clergy, union and business leaders opposed to the war and had them tell their personal stories, as the filmmakers did very effectively with several veterans of the war. Then if the film had focused back and forth over time between the experiences and changing perceptions of those fighting the war and those fighting against the war, I believe Burns and Novick could have made a major contribution to our understanding of what was happening on the home front and to our learning lessons for the future. One has to wonder if major funding from the Bank of America and David Koch may have posed a serious restraint on their developing the film in this direction.

I can’t end this response to Episode Five without a brief comment on the October 21, 1967 demonstration at the Pentagon, in part because I know there are plans developing for a commemoration of that event a month from now. By the Fall of 1967 Americans paying attention to the war in Vietnam had plenty to be angry about. The numbers of American soldiers killed and wounded were growing. The numbers of Vietnamese killed and wounded were several times the American numbers. U.S. bombing campaigns and Agent Orange defoliant raids were resulting in enormous destruction and suffering. And several government  secrets and lies about the war already had become public. 1967 was the year that a majority of Americans had come to doubt the war. It was not surprising that by Spring/Fall 1967 the feelings and attitudes of protesters and the tone of anti-war demonstrations became more confrontational.

The challenge or problem is that greater anger and frustration are not very good bases for smart strategies. (That was true in the 1960s, and it's true today in the time of Trump.) In 1967, marching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon to confront the warmakers may have made sense. The loud, public calls to “Shut Down the Pentagon” (Jerry Rubin) or “Levitate the Pentagon” (Abbie Hoffman), and the call by some to physically rush the soldiers surrounding the building were not smart ideas. These “strategies” would certainly fail; they risked harm for no worthwhile, credible goal; and they sent a confusing message to Americans who were still making up their minds about the war that made the protesters appear to be against the soldiers (a wrong message which also got communicated by anti-war demonstrations “greeting” soldiers on their return home from Vietnam). What if after an overnight vigil at the Pentagon, we had gone home and at least some of us returned on Monday as “normal” visitors to the Pentagon determined to engage in conversations about the war with as many employees in the building as we could, before very likely being ejected or arrested.

Returning to the film, obviously choices get made about what vets or what activists to interview. If Burns and Novick had adopted the approach of involving more anti-war activists in parallel with the many veterans they involved in the film, they would have had to be as careful and sensitive in selecting representative activists who would be good communicators as it seems they were in selecting vets to participate.

During the Vietnam War, as National Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Ron resisted the draft, led an interfaith/interracial mission to Saigon focused on repression, carried mail from their families to American POW’s in Hanoi, and coordinated national peace marches on Washington, DC in November 1969 and May 1970. Ron lives in Everett WA and can be contacted at ronyoungwa@gmail.com

PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode Four

Episode Four, “Resolve,” (January 1966-June 1967) confirmed both my appreciation for positive contributions of the film series and my critique of it’s profound failings.

There were more stunningly awful scenes of military battles, with multiple images of wounded and dying soldiers, and still photos of stacks of carelessly piled bodies of dead Vietnamese. There were more riveting visuals and interviews with American and Vietnamese veterans of the war. Interviews with several American vets revealed a growing disconnect during this period between the deepening doubts soldiers were feeling about the purpose and progress of the war, and their military and political leaders’ callous certainty and lack of courage in facing reality.

As it became clearer that the U.S war in Vietnam might be unwinnable, the response by the military, backed by most political leaders, was to increase the bombing of Vietnam and to send even larger numbers of American soldiers to fight the war. There are brief snippets, but a whole lot more could and should have been done in the film to explore how this disconnect compounded the fears and frustrations of fighting men and the anxieties of their families, and how it complicated and deepened the pain and bitterness families felt when one of theirs was killed or wounded.

There is no doubt that belief in American idealism, exceptionalism and sense of invincibility that many Americans carried with them into the war suffered a tremendous shock by the realities they confronted in Vietnam. And also no doubt that this disconnect, this contradiction is an important unresolved dimension in the continuing contentiousness over the war. It deserved more direct, explicit and fuller treatment in the film.

The film records how this period, January 1966-June 1967, saw major increases in public anti-war sentiment and expansion of the anti-war movement. And yet, relative to the amount of attention to military battles, to experiences of soldiers and interviews with veterans, there are very few visuals or individual interviews with Americans who actively opposed the war. Except for a few very prominent persons, Burns and Novick continue in this episode to treat Americans who were against the war more abstractly with generalities rather than through presenting their photos and personal stories. That troubling imbalance impedes chances that as viewers people will adequately understand what was going on in our country about the war and be sufficiently challenged in considering lessons we need to learn from the war for going forward.

The film's abstract treatment of the huge anti-war demonstrations in New York and San Francisco on April 15, 1967 was a missed opportunity to introduce personal stories of some of the speakers and/or some of the 300,000 participants. I was one of the 150 or so draft-age young men who burned our Draft cards in Central Park that day.  What motivated many of us to give up safe student deferments from the war or even Conscientious Objector status and risk Federal prosecution and going to prison. Were our actions rooted in the same American idealism that inspired other young men our age to sign-up for military service in Vietnam?

Two nationally prominent figures that the film does focus on, Senator J. William Fulbright and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., played key roles during these years in growing opposition to the war. The film’s treatment of Fulbright is good. Fulbright’s reversal from supporting to opposing the war worried President Johnson who sought unsuccessfully to detract attention from Fulbright’s Senate Hearings by taking off to Honolulu for a conference with Saigon government heads, Generals Thieu and Ky. The highpoint of the hearing was testimony against the war by George Kennan, who had been a prime architect and advocate for containment policy against Communism. Kennan testified, “If we were not already involved. . .I would know of no reason to become involved.” He suggested U.S. preoccupation with Vietnam was like an elephant being frightened by a mouse. And Kenan agreed with Fulbright that “we can’t achieve it (victory) even with the best of wills.”

The film’s treatment of Martin Luther King’s speaking out against the war on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church was irresponsibly brief and inadequate. As James Cone has written, “More than any other person, past or present, black or white, Martin Luther King proclaimed and lived the American dream.” Most of the media and King’s closest allies criticized his speaking out on the war, charging that he should stick with civil rights issues. But King’s conscience made him see clearly and declare boldly that America’s war in Vietnam “made a mockery of the ideals the United States professed to be defending.” And in a statement which may have marked him for death a year from the date of this speech, King declared that he could never again speak “against the violence in the ghettoes,” without first speaking clearly “to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my government.”

   

   Burns’ and Novick’s failure to deal adequately with Martin Luther King speaking out was compounded by their not portraying or interviewing any of the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV) that sponsored the event at Riverside Church and followed-up by helping to organize Vietnam Summer in 1967 that involved 10,000 people, many of them young people, ringing millions of doorbells, and laid the basis for the 1968 Presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. The "who's who" of CALCAV offered a great opportunity to personalize opposition to the war. Burns and Novick didn't take it. 

PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode Three

Episode Three, entitled “The River Styx,” covers the period of January 1964-December 1965. The episode reflects some of the really positive contributions of the film and some very troubling tendencies, particularly if they persist in other episodes, that reflect the film’s profound failings.

            The most important positive contribution of the film, as viewed in these initial three episodes, is that it candidly and courageously portrays the utter awfulness of war. There are scenes that reveal the capacity, willingness and even inclination of those fighting for whatever side or cause to commit unspeakable violence and scenes with equal honesty show the horrendous consequences and toll in human suffering.

This truth about war is portrayed powerfully enough that some persons watching the film may well conclude that no matter what the calling or cause we won’t go to war ever again. While there’s no evidence that Burns and Novick have come to this conclusion themselves or wish that others would there is power and meaning in much of the film’s footage that presses us in that direction.

            Another very positive and powerful effect of the film is experienced in some of the visuals and interviews with American veterans and with Vietnamese veterans, including Vietnamese who fought on opposite sides. It’s clear that one of Burns’ and Novick’s major goals for the film is to honor veterans of the war, even as the film presents a preponderance of evidence, if sometimes in confusing ways, that the war should never have happened. One other important positive take-away is that while the film’s documentary footage realistically depicts what it was like for those fighting the war, the film is very clear in holding high level political leaders responsible for the decision to go to war and for decisions about how to fight it.

            This leads me to what so far is a serious failing of the film. From the start of this project and in the enormous publicity campaign about the film, Burns and Novick have emphasized that this film is not just about the war, but about how the war deeply divided America, and that these divisions continue to haunt us today. Obviously, the divisions over the war were between real flesh and blood persons, even sometimes different persons within the same family, all with real personal stories. In the first three episodes, while there have been a number of stirring photos and warm personal portrayals of men who fought in the war, some movingly presented along with their families, there’s been only one of a man, Bill Zimmerman, who fought against the war. So far, Americans who opposed the war are portrayed anonymously as participants in protests, e.g. Teach-Ins and the SDS March on Washington, etc. I fear this serious imbalance will continue in future episodes.

           The film acknowledges the secrecy and lies high government and military officials regularly practiced to keep the American people in the dark about what was happening and about major impending decisions about how to pursue the war. Indeed, by 1965 Secretary of Defense McNamara apparently had concluded that the war was unwinnable, but still supported sending a much larger number of Americans to fight because he lacked the courage to go public and because, like President Johnson, he believed "losing was not a politically acceptable option."

The film details the complexity of the actual situation surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident, though in a way that doesn’t make it explicitly clear that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized the American war was based on a lie. More Americans knowing that earlier might have helped prevent the US invasion of Iraq, which also was based on a lie. Knowing it now can help us prevent future wars.

            In focusing as much as it does on the military dimensions and battles in the war, the film fails to help us adequately understand what was happening politically in Vietnam. Episode Three reveals the increasingly repressive nature of the Saigon regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and references the role of the Buddhist opposition movement, including the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, in contributing to Diem’s eventual end. Hopefully, coming episodes will focus more attention on the growth of this so-called “Third Force” peace movement and how Vietnamese involved in it related to Vietnamese who supported the Communist-led National Liberation Front.

By so far not including more photos and personal stories of Americans who opposed the war, the film fails to help us understand what was happening politically in America.  In 1965, appalled by what they knew the U.S. was doing in Vietnam and inspired by Thich Quang Duc, three Americans, each with her or his own personal story, immolated themselves as a protest against the war.  March 16 - Alice Herz an eighty year old grandmother in Detroit; November 2 - Norman Morrison, a Baltimore Quaker and father, on the grass under the Pentagon office window of Defense Secretary McNamara; and November 9 – Roger LaPorte,  a twenty-two year old former Roman Catholic seminarian, in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York.

PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode Two

Following in France’s Footsteps - Episode Two reveals that while France was motivated by colonialism and the U.S. by anti-Communism, the patterns of the two countries involvement in Vietnam, including an abysmal lack of understanding of Vietnamese history and culture, whom we allied with, and the focus on military action rather than politics were the same. 

In his review of the PBS Documentary, Thomas Bass quotes David Halberstam of the New York Times as having said, “The problem was trying to cover something every day as news when in fact the real key was that it was all derivative of the French Indo-China war, which is history. . .So you really should have a third paragraph in each story which should have said. . . ‘None of this means anything because we are in the same footsteps as the French and we are prisoners of their experience.” It became clear early on to Halberstam, but to all too few political leaders that the eventual outcome of our involvement would also be the same.  

Dominoes and a Chess Piece - On April 7, 1954 President Eisenhower gave his famous “falling dominoes” speech, comparing  the prospect of France’s defeat in Vietnam by the Communist-led nationalist forces to a falling domino, first in a line of dominoes, including Burma, Thailand, Indonesia and even Japan that might also fall to Communism.  That fearful, if absurdly mechanistic and misguided image and theory was a prime motivation for Kennedy and Johnson in their thinking about increasing military involvement in Vietnam.    

Cold War ideology and the politics of fear provided a framework in which images and theory about Communism became more important than reality.  As Leslie Gelb, who directed the Pentagon Papers project, tells Burns and Novick in Episode Two, “Vietnam was a piece on a chessboard, not a country.” And as Gelb wrote in his summary of the Pentagon Papers, “We must note that South Vietnam (unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia) was essentially the creation of the United States.” This “creation of the United States” is the “country” Burns bemoans disappearing at the end of the war.

A contrast of two Parades - In 1957, three years after the United States installed him in power and two years after he refused country-wide elections mandated by the 1954 Geneva Accords which almost everyone believed Ho Chi Min would win, President Ngo Dinh Diem came from Saigon on a state visit to the United States. Diem was greeted at the airport by President Eisenhower who hailed him as great patriot and defender of freedom; he addressed an enthusiastic joint session of Congress, was wined and dined by Cardinal Spellman, and treated to a huge Ticker-Tape parade in New York City with 250,000 people lining the streets.

In contrast, Diem sponsored a parade in Saigon to celebrate an anniversary of his rule which was so autocratic, corrupt, nepotistic and unpopular that, out of fear of protests or violence, the Diem regime and police allowed no one on the streets to observe the parade.

   

Fabricated News and Good Journalists – The Cold War profoundly affected news coverage from 1947 to 1990 and was a major reason why there wasn’t more opposition earlier to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.  Media coverage of Diem’s 1957 visit to the United States was carefully and effectively managed by American Friends of Vietnam, an anti-Communist elite lobbying organization created by Joseph Buttinger. (Buttinger later became disillusioned with Diem and denounced him.)

As Episode Two reveals, in Vietnam, the Saigon government, U.S. Embassy and the U.S military all worked very hard to present news about the war in the most positive light, often including what later were proven to be outright lies. Most American journalists, and as a consequence most Americans, got their news about the war from these sources. 

There were a handful of journalists, including Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne and David Halberstam, who dug deeper, sometimes at risk to themselves, for the truths about the war. Sheehan received the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg and wrote what they revealed in The New York Times. He also wrote the book, A Bright and Shining Lie, later made into a film. Malcolm Browne, raised a Quaker, famously photographed Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation in June 1963, which contributed to the downfall of the Diem regime. David Halberstam wrote, Vietnam: the Making of a Quagmire in 1964, which prophetically predicted why the U.S. war was unwinnable months ahead of the arrogant and tragic massive increases in the numbers of young Americans being sent to fight the war.

Whatever one’s take away from the Burns/Novick PBS Documentary, the works of these three journalists are resources we should make sure to study and urge that young people study in schools. The following words from the end of David Halberstam’s book seem a good way to end this commentary on Episode Two:

“In the early fifties the people of America were subjected to constant statements. . .  .about the West’s battle to save Southeast Asia from the Communists. But the war was taking  place in Vietnam, what was at stake were the lives of Vietnamese people, and to them the names seemed wrong; it was not a matter to them of the West against the Communists, but of themselves against the colonialists.  It was a classic example of seeing the world the way we wanted to, instead of the way it was.”