The upcoming PBS documentary series about the Vietnam War, scheduled to shown beginning next month, is drawing critical interest and concern from those who worked for peace during that difficult period in American and world history.
A number of peace activists from the 1960s and 1970s have joined together to form the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, which is trying to use the occasion to continue to educate the public about the origins and impacts of the Vietnam War.
Film makers Burns and Novick outlined their goals in a New York Times op ed, available here. Reactions by anti-war viewers so far have been mixed, and can be read here. The creators have cautioned audiences to withhold judgement until they see the full series.
This commentary by Ron Young, published earlier this summer, lays out some of the issues. It is reprinted, with permission, from Ron’s blog.
Commentary on Previewing the PBS Vietnam War Documentary
By Ron Young
At a preview of the PBS Vietnam War documentary, while filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick presented visuals and voices of diverse Americans and Vietnamese reflecting complex, different views of the war, 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 preview, we hear the voices of Nixon, Agnew and Johnson defending the war but not the voices of Senators Morse and Gruening who voted against the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This deceitful resolution effectively authorized the war, just as forty years later the false claim about Iraq having nuclear weapons provided the rationale for the disastrous U.S. invasion. The preview, and my guess is the film itself, 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.
In the documentary’s preview 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 or voices of soldiers who courageously resisted and risked imprisonment.
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 today, 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 which the U.S. imposed Diem regime refused. In truth, the war’s end marked Vietnam’s independence. The country was finally free from decades 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. The truth is the American War in Vietnam was wrong. It was a war, like the war in Iraq, that 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 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.
