Burns and Novick Assassinate Kennedy

[Dan Doyle]

Great review

http://fair.org/home/ken-burns-vietnam-war-an-object-lesson-in-the-failures-of-the-objective-lens/

[James DiEugenio]

Lots of inside info about Burns and his approach.  Which is consciously middle of the road.

BTW, I did not know that detail about Galloway and his book with Moore.  Nice one.

 

Edited October 2, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Dan Doyle]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

Lots if inside info about Burns and his approach.  Which is consciously middle of the road.

BTW, I did not know that detail about Galloway and his book with Moore.  Nice one.

 

thanks

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, I just finished the Burns/Novick version of the Johnson years.

Yech.

It turns LBJ into a WIlly Loman character who just sadly stumbled into Vietnam.  To do so they skip everything from November 1963 to the Gulf of Tonkin.

Which is sort of like asking Mrs. Lincoln, "But besides the assassination, what did you think of the play?"

IN those 8 months, Johnson was setting the stage for Tonkin.  Like a waiter setting a table.  And they cut all of this out, as well as NSAM 273, and 288.  Without which there would have been no Tonkin.

[Karl Kinaski]

On 29.9.2017 at 5:45 PM, James DiEugenio said:

 edit

 

Edited October 3, 2017 by Karl Kinaski

[Dan Doyle]

23 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

BTW, I just finished the Burns/Novick version of the Johnson years.

Yech.

It turns LBJ into a WIlly Loman character who just sadly stumbled into Vietnam.  To do so they skip everything from November 1963 to the Gulf of Tonkin.

Which is sort of like asking Mrs. Lincoln, "But besides the assassination, what did you think of the play?"

IN those 8 months, Johnson was setting the stage for Tonkin.  Like a waiter setting a table.  And they cut all of this out, as well as NSAM 273, and 288.  Without which there would have been no Tonkin.

The real loss here is that the MSM is going to promote this work as the definitive documentary on Vietnam.  In five years it's canon.

[James DiEugenio]

I agree with you Dan.

But the real truth is that the previous one PBS did in 1983, Vietnam: A Television History, was a lot better.

And I am going to finish up with that as an example of what has happened to PBS.

Edited October 4, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Part 3 of the series is now up at Kennedysandking.com  This one deals with Episodes 3-6, the Johnson years.

I will place it in this thread, since much of it deals with what LBJ did to JFK's policy, which Burns and Novick ignore.

https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/ken-burns-lynn-novick-the-vietnam-war-part-three-the-johnson-years

Edited October 6, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Mathias Baumann]

On ‎30‎.‎09‎.‎2017 at 4:40 PM, Michael Walton said:

Here's that show. I was going to type something here about HK but a comment on the YTV page said it better.

"Henry Kissinger critiquing a film about nuclear war is like John Gotti critiquing a film about mob violence. And did Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers somehow have Kissinger in mind when they created the character of Dr. Strangelove? I was just waiting for Kissinger to raise his right arm in a Nazi salute then quietly put it back down."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcCLZwU2t34

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Henry Kissinger is Jewish. He fled to America when the Nazis seized power.

[Kirk Gallaway]

20 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Henry Kissinger is Jewish. He fled to America when the Nazis seized power.

That's right Mathias, not all war criminals are Nazis.    heh heh

[James DiEugenio]

I have not seen all of the Nixon episodes yet, but really those should actually be good because today almost all the Nixon tapes have been declassified.  

Back in 1994 when Oliver Stone started his film about Tricky DIck, almost none of them were.  Because Nixon had fought every attempt in the courts all the way until he died that year.  So basically what people had was the fine book The Haldeman Diaries. 

But since then with the construction of the Nixon archives in Yorba Linda and the deal the Nixon heirs worked out with NARA--money almost always solves problems, does it not?--about 80% of the tapes have been declassified and transcribed.  And boy, let me say this, once you listen to these talks, you understand why Nixon did not want them declassified in his lifetime.  Nixon was nothing but a John Foster Dulles clone.  A Cold Warrior  to his bones.  And Kissinger was really not that much better.  Almost every conflict and crisis they face somehow invokes Neville Chamberlain and Hitler at Munich.  And I exaggerate very little on that.  Even the Pakistan/Bangladesh independence movement is compared to that.

The comparison with Kennedy is really stark in every way.  It is amazing that Nixon and Kissinger developed the reputations they did as being Foreign Policy mavens when, in fact, they had no originality or insight into either the Cold War, or the Third World conflicts at all. I will write about this in part four of my review.

But the worst part of the whole Vietnam angle is that there was almost nothing in the final agreement of 1973, that they could not have gotten in 1969.  But there was one difference.

If they had signed in 1969, Saigon would have fallen before the1972  election.  As Nixon told Haldeman, he was not going to be the first president to lose a war in office.  And Kissinger, even more than Nixon, is explicit about this on the tapes. So, for instance, that is why there was a holocaust in Cambodia.  So Nixon could get a second term.

Yech.

 

Edited October 7, 2017 by James DiEugenio