The PBS Vietnam War documentary ten week series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick will be aired nightly on most Public Television stations September 17-22 and 26-29. I encourage you to find ways that you and your family and friends in other areas of the country can be involved in community responses to the film. Ideas for how you can participate include writing an Op-Ed or Letter to the Editor, helping to arrange a panel at a church, synagogue, mosque or local Library, distributing the model flyer at your local station or other public venue, and working with Veterans for Peace. While there's a lot in the series that is positive, including visuals and interviews with diverse Americans and Vietnamese with very different views of the war, I fear that the imbalance of voices and the film's distorted historical framing of the war will keep us from learning lessons to help prevent future wars.

Following this brief Blog Post on Episode One is a Commentary I wrote after my wife and I attended a Preview by Burns and Novick in Seattle, and a flyer we distributed to 1000 attendees. You're welcome to reproduce (or adapt) the Commentary and/or the Flyer for use in your area. Replies to "contact: vietnamlessons@gmail.com at the bottom of the flyer come directly to me and I am happy to respond to any replies. I’ve also included a link here to a Commentary by Tom Fox in the National Catholic Reporter online.

PBS Vietnam War Documentary – Response to Episode One

Episode One covers the period 1858-1962, focused largely on US involvement with France’s military campaign to reimpose French colonial rule at the end of World War II. This happened after the Viet Minh national independence movement, led by Communist Ho Chi Minh and aided by the US helped to defeat the Japanese occupation. The US wound up paying 75% of French war costs before France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. 

The US imposed the authoritarian government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the southern zone. Diem, with US support, refused country-wide elections in 1956 – elections mandated by the international Geneva Accords and elections which almost everyone agrees Ho Chi Minh would have won.

The film quotes Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon offering the anti-Communist rationale for US deepening military involvement, but fails to pay sufficient attention to President Roosevelt whose opposition to French colonialism and support for Vietnam’s independence suggested a wiser, more realistic policy path that could have avoided generating disastrous divisions in Vietnam and the United States, and saved more than 58,000 American and more than 2.5 million Vietnamese lives.

In an exchange with Secretary of State Stennius in 1943, President Roosevelt, when asked in which direction US policy should lean, replied it was "perfectly clear that Indo-China should not go back to France, but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country--thirty million inhabitants for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were in the beginning.” When pushed on the idea of the US accepting some lesser goal than full independence, Roosevelt said, “No--it must be independence. . . that is to be the policy, you can quote me in the State Department."

Beginning with President Truman, this was not the policy the US pursued in Vietnam. Episode One’s lack of sufficient attention to this possible alternative policy path results in an historically distorted framing of the American War in Vietnam, described in the film’s opening Episode as “begun in good faith, with good intentions.”

Another serious problem with Episode One is that there is no attention paid to the fact that Vietnam was not the only country during the 1950s, ‘60s and 70s in which exaggerated US fears of Communism and over reliance on military power led our country to intervene against nationalist movements that we suspected of being socially progressive, including interfering in elections, orchestrating the overthrow of elected leaders, and intervening militarily. The list includes:  Italy (1948), Japan (1951), Iran and the Philippines (1953), Lebanon (1957), Laos (1958), Congo (1960-61), Dominican Republic (1963-65), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1964-73).

Failing to acknowledge this pattern in US Cold War policies leads to an almost apologetic view of the US war in Vietnam portrayed as the result of ignorance, misunderstandings and mistakes, rather than the reflection of a fundamentally flawed US foreign policy framework. This approach also leads us away from learning essential lessons that could contribute publicly to preventing or ending disastrous US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Attending the gala Preview at the Kennedy Center on September 12, John McCain and John Kerry, who together with President Clinton in 1995 played important positive roles in our normalizing relations with Vietnam, both had high praise for the Burns/Novick PBS Documentary.  In 2003, both voted YES to authorize the US invasion of Iraq

Commentary on the PBS Vietnam War Documentary

By Ron Young

In the PBS Vietnam War documentary, filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick present visuals and voices Americans and Vietnamese reflecting complex, different views of the war. However, I fear the film’s imbalance of voices and distorted historical framing of the war will keep us from learning essential lessons to help prevent future wars.  

In the film, we hear the voices of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson  and Nixon defending the war but not the voice of Roosevelt urging US support for Vietnam’s independence nor voices of Senators Morse and Gruening who voted against the1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This deceitful resolution effectively authorized the war, just as forty years later the government’s false claim about Iraq having nuclear weapons provided the rationale for the disastrous U.S. invasion. The film doesn’t give us the voice of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam who got it right in his 1964 book, The Making of a Quaqmire, on why the American war in Vietnam was unwinnable.

We hear agonized, brave voices of young American soldiers who fought the war, more than 58,200 of whom never came home, but not the voices of an estimated million or more who went AWOL or deserted and very few personalized stories of soldiers and civilians who courageously resisted the war and risked imprisonment. We hear nothing from young Americans like Don Luce, Tom Fox and Lady Borton, who went to serve in Vietnam as civilians, who learned the language, and worked side by side with Vietnamese, not fearing them but learning from them.

The worst distortion is Burns’ historically inaccurate statement that at the war’s end, “a country (South Vietnam) disappeared.” While Vietnamese had different political views then and do now, Vietnam was and is one country. This was recognized in the 1954 Geneva Accords that ended French colonial rule, temporarily divided the country into two zones, and mandated Vietnam-wide elections in 1956, elections the U.S. backed Diem regime refused. In truth, the war’s end in April 1975 marked Vietnam’s independence. The country was finally free of foreign domination.  

The American war in Vietnam didn’t need to happen. On February 28, 1946 Ho Chi Minh wrote to President Truman informing him how the French were making preparations for returning French troops to Hanoi to make Vietnam a colony again. Ho wrote urgently, “I therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people.  .  .to support our independence.  .  .in keeping with principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco charters.” 

President Truman, blinded by Cold War ideology which pitted the U.S. against many anti-colonial nationalist movements, never replied. Instead, the U.S. paid 80% of France’s losing war costs. And then we spent $168 billion ($1 trillion in 2017 dollars) for the American War that robbed resources at home from the War on Poverty and Great Society programs.

Burns and Novick view their film as helping to create reconciliation over a war that generated deep divisions among Americans. As South Africans understood in creating their post-Apartheid commission, you can’t have reconciliation without truth-telling. While the film’s slogan, “there is no single truth in war,” is wise in general, it is possible to determine the preponderant truth about a particular war. The basic truth about the American War in Vietnam is that it was wrong and, like the U.S. war in Iraq, it never should have happened.

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

A Model Flyer

WHAT the WAR DOCUMENTARY WON’T SAY!

The American War in Vietnam Didn’t Need to Happen 58,220 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese didn’t need to die. All could have been spared suffering from UXOs, Agent Orange, PTSD and suicides.

In 1944, President Roosevelt sent US OSS agents, including Mac Shin from Seattle, to assist Ho Chi Minh’s forces in defeating the Japanese occupation, after which France tried to reimpose its colonial control.

On February 28, 1946 Ho Chi Minh wrote to President Truman.

On behalf of the Vietnam government and people, Ho informed the President that the French were making preparations for returning French troops to Hanoi to make Vietnam a colony again. Ho wrote, “I therefore earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people.  .  .to support our independence.  .  .in keeping with the principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco charters.” 

President Truman, blinded by Cold War ideology which pitted the U.S. against many anti-colonial nationalist movements, never replied. Instead, the U.S. paid 80% of France’s losing war costs. And then we spent $168 billion ($1 trillion in 2017 dollars) on the American War that robbed resources at home from the War on Poverty and Great Society.

SAY IT! The American War in Vietnam Was Wrong!

This war (and the war in Iraq) Never Should Have Happened!

CONTACT: vietnamlessons@gmail.com