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.”

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

On Protests, Violence and Voting Rights

Violence at recent demonstrations and counter demonstrations reveal the need for cities and states, with support from Congress, to refuse protest permits to groups that threaten violence. The simplest way to do that, while respecting the right of freedom of speech, is to refuse permits for protest rallies or marches in which participants plan to carry guns. It’s one thing to allow “open carry” of firearms in public, it’s quite a dangerous different decision to allow persons to carry firearms in a protest march when political confrontation and violence are very real possibilities. To its credit, apparently, ACLU is considering not defending this form of provocative protest. The NRA’s shameless support for violence-prone, gun-toting protests should cause politicians to think twice before taking money from the gun lobby. 

            These are not new issues, but the Trump Presidency is generating an even more dangerous context. In 1966, I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago, supporting the campaign for implementing fair housing policies. The ACLU controversially defended the right of neo-Nazis to march. When we black and white marched together, we needed the National Guard to protect us from screaming white mobs lining both sides of the street.  History teaches us that when politics are deeply divisive, as they are today, fueled in part by the President, dangers to democracy intensify.

Freedom of speech is a right worth defending, even when the message of an individual or group is morally repugnant. The danger in restricting the right is that political contexts and what majorities might want to prohibit change over time. Refusing the right of persons to spew white supremacist, neo-Nazi hatred today may seem a good and necessary limitation, especially to people who have experienced hate-motivated physical violence. In another time and context, a majority, including some of the same people, might support limiting speech of those who oppose their government’s war or who advocate against unfair taxation or for a single-payer “socialist” solution for achieving universal healthcare.  The risks of freedom of speech are real, the risks of denying this right are even greater. Refusing protest permits for groups in which participants carry guns would protect public safety while preserving freedom of speech.

Our work together for a better America is about much more than denouncing hate groups. We need to work together to build effective political support for overturning two recent Supreme Court decisions that are disastrous for our democracy.  “Citizens United vs the FEC” (2010) granted corporations the same right of free speech and right to contribute money to political campaigns as individual citizens and “Shelby County vs. Holder” (2013) gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. We need to challenge all politicians and prospective candidates for office, Democrats or Republicans, to support legislation that would overturn these decisions that deny protections for voting rights and greatly compound the problems of big money in politics. Realistically, overturning these court decisions is a longer term goal.

Nationally, in the meantime, we need to resist Republican voter suppression efforts, including restrictive voter I.D. laws, new limits on voter registration, reduced times and locations for voting, and provisions that make it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions – all of which are designed and work in ways that fall heaviest on minorities, the elderly and youth.

Locally, we should support citizenship education, encourage voter registration, and expose hate groups, like anti-Muslim “Act for America” which claims 750,000 members nationwide and recently doubled the number of chapters in Washington. In Everett specifically, we should support the proposed change in how we vote for City Council members to include voting by districts, as well as for at-large members. District voting will attract candidates who have direct personal connections with more multi-cultural, underrepresented and under-served neighborhoods in our city.

Locally and nationally, we’ve got to denounce and protest each new demonstration promoting racist, proto-Fascist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ hatred. In most cases, I’m sure we can turn out much larger numbers than these hate groups and, if we’re consistent and creative, we can win over a lot more people to side with us against hate and stand-up for justice and peace. Strategically, looking toward the 2018 elections, our goals need to be to strengthen voting rights and increase the numbers of eligible voters who come out to vote. “Si, se puede, yes we can.”