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.