Ken Burns' Vietnam

[Kirk Gallaway]

Certainly in 64, there are more questions left answered. But politically speaking, and after all Nixon is a politician with avowed foreign policy experience. Politically, in 1967 Nixon was in Viet Nam because he had every intention of running for the Presidency in 1968, just like George Romney. Politically, that's just  what politicians did because the Viet Nam War was the issue of the day.

[James DiEugenio]

Technically, that is correct Kirk.

But I think we should note that, even a rather sympathetic biographer like Ambrose has admitted, that Nixon was a little fruity when it came to Vietnam.

The ambassador at this time would probably have been Bunker. (Or maybe Lodge)  The fact that Nixon is meeting with Lansdale is interesting.  Because Lansdale was as obsessed with Vietnam as Nixon was.  Recall, this is just a few months before Tet.

Edited October 8, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Ron Bulman]

23 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

Certainly in 64, there are more questions left answered. But politically speaking, and after all Nixon is a politician with avowed foreign policy experience. Politically, in 1967 Nixon was in Viet Nam because he had every intention of running for the Presidency in 1968, just like George Romney. Politically, that's just  what politicians did because the Viet Nam War was the issue of the day.

This can't be dismissed that easily.   At least one of us speculate Nixon might have been trained by and controlled by the Dulles brothers early on.  This all rolls forward and backward in relation to "that bay of pigs thing" and the JFK Assassination.

How does Angleton figure into the middle of all this?  As an associate of Dulles?  Did he have private files on Oswald?

https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Secret-Spymaster-James-Angleton/dp/1250080614/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507441980&sr=1-1&keywords=ghost+morley

[Kirk Gallaway]

At least one of us speculate Nixon might have been trained by and controlled by the Dulles brothers early on. 

Ron, Isn't that kind of a low bar? One person can speculate anything!!

I'm aware of all those connections. I hold more credence to Nixon ties to Prescott Bush because I know of that tie.

We can all agree that given Nixon's actions throughout his career, he's hardly above suspicion. But when politicians go to war zones , they confer with military heads,  people with knowledge on the ground ( Lansdale's first came to Viet Nam in the mid 50's!) It's also not unusual for politicians  to go to their embassy, which is where Lansdale worked. This is what they did then and do to this day. Nobody would find this unusual.

Certainly a picture of Nixon with Lansdale is hot and will raise a lot of speculation here. Why not? It would be interesting to hear anything "juicy" in what they might have said. But as for Nixon's being there in the first place, any political campaign manager worth his salt would say "Dick, get your xxx to Nam and reinvent yourself", which is really what that trips about. Having some experience growing up with Nixon in California, no one will convince me otherwise that the foremost drive going on with Nixon at that point in his career is  getting elected President.

[Douglas Caddy]

 

[Douglas Caddy]

http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org/index.php/daniel-ellsberg-think-major-omissions-quite-fundamental-disturbed-quite-bit-although-overall-thing-impressive/

[Ron Bulman]

On ‎10‎/‎8‎/‎2017 at 1:53 AM, Kirk Gallaway said:

At least one of us speculate Nixon might have been trained by and controlled by the Dulles brothers early on. 

Ron, Isn't that kind of a low bar? One person can speculate anything!!

I'm aware of all those connections. I hold more credence to Nixon ties to Prescott Bush because I know of that tie.

We can all agree that given Nixon's actions throughout his career, he's hardly above suspicion. But when politicians go to war zones , they confer with military heads,  people with knowledge on the ground ( Lansdale's first came to Viet Nam in the mid 50's!) It's also not unusual for politicians  to go to their embassy, which is where Lansdale worked. This is what they did then and do to this day. Nobody would find this unusual.

Certainly a picture of Nixon with Lansdale is hot and will raise a lot of speculation here. Why not? It would be interesting to hear anything "juicy" in what they might have said. But as for Nixon's being there in the first place, any political campaign manager worth his salt would say "Dick, get your xxx to Nam and reinvent yourself", which is really what that trips about. Having some experience growing up with Nixon in California, no one will convince me otherwise that the foremost drive going on with Nixon at that point in his career is  getting elected President.

Above suspicion?  His actions defy it.  He was not quietly in Vietnam in 67 running for President of the USA.  The rare picture provide by http://www.blackopradio.com/ (you won't see it in the chicken sh*t msm) shows him in Lansdales's living room, not the embassy in a public performance.  Note the checkerboard U S tile and magazines stacked under the faux wood table.  He said "I'm not a crook" and flashed the peace sign on the way out.  He lied.  I don't believe much of anything he said, ever.  If he was running for president in Vietnam it wasn't  for election by the U S populace.  The picture hasn't been widely promulgated by the Main Stream Media, in his own memoirs, or by his proponents (e.g. roger stoned).

Who was Nixon's campaign manager in April 67?  A year before MLK, RFK, LBJ quits? 

Edited October 10, 2017 by Ron Bulman

[James DiEugenio]

I am now almost done watching this series.

I have to say, if I did not have to write about it, I would hot have lasted anywhere near this long.

There are so many misstatements of fact, so many unjustified observations, and just about zero that is actually new.  Which is really the most disappointing part.  You would think that with their budget and the amount of time they had, they would have had a researcher or two out there who could have found something new.  But as far as I can see, and I am pretty knowledgeable about Vietnam, I could not find anything new.

And what they did to Jane Fonda and John Kerry.  

Those two people were probably the two most important figures to turn pubic opinion in America against the war.  Fonda actually came to my hometown, a rather small place of about 130,000 people and spoke at a college.  She packed the place to standing room only.  And she spoke with several from the VVW and they explained the anti-peronnsel weapons that the Army was using in Vietnam.  That is weapons that exploded into hundreds of sharp metal particles that were designed to take out up to ten other people within their range, or maim  them. And this was designed to increase body count.

Wonder why. Maybe because they violated the Geneva Convention rules of engagement?  

If you get foundation money from the richest families in America, you don't say things like that.  If you do, the spigot gets turned off.

 

 

Edited October 11, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Douglas Caddy]

David Talbot wrote on Facebook today:

 

Thanks to Steve Wasserman and Judy Gumbo for this article by Christopher Koch, the first American reporter to visit North Vietnam during the war. The best article I've read on the PBS "Vietnam" series. The author nails it -- Burns & Novick demean the antiwar movement, thereby removing any moral center from the series, and they establish false equivalencies between the U.S. invaders and the Vietnamese who resisted them. No, the American and Vietnamese were NOT equally culpable. This kind of fuzzy narrative-- in which the United States is once again let off the hook and portrayed as a country whose good intentions simply took a tragic turn -- dooms us to keep repeating our horrific history.

Steve Wasserman
October 7 at 8:12am · Albany ·
My thanks to my longtime friend and comrade, Judy Gumbo, an original member of the Yippies, for alerting me to the following critique of the Burns-Novick Vietnam War series. Written by Christopher Koch who in 1965 became the first American reporter to visit North Vietnam, it is the most cogently argued and compelling of any of the criticisms made so far.

The Tragic Failure of Ken Burns' Vietnam by Christopher Koch
There is so much to love about this series. The uncompromising scenes of combat, the voices of both Americans and Vietnamese, the historical context, the exposure of the utter incompetence of our military leaders, the terrific music that is frequently exactly where it should be, the slowly revealed powerful still images and Peter Coyotes’ wonderful narrative voice. Its tragic failure is its inability to hold anyone responsible for their actions.

Burns and Novick tell us that the war was begun “in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and …” whatever the current threat. That’s probably true of most wars. However, as we used to teach our children, you have to be accountable for your actions. If you kill someone speeding the wrong way down a one way street you’ll get charged with manslaughter even if you’re rushing someone to the hospital.

It’s the lack of accountability, the failure to prosecute those who lied to get us into the war, who encouraged battlefield tactics that resulted in the massacre of women and children, who authorized the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, who drenched Vietnam in chemical poisons that will cause birth defects and death for generation.

In order to maintain this central lie, Burns and Novick must establish a false balance between good and evil on both sides. Every time the United States is shown doing something bad, Burns and Novick show us how the Vietnamese also did bad things. In one absurd example, Coyote intones something like, “we called them ‘Dinks,’ ‘Gooks,’ ‘Mamasans;’ they called us ‘invaders’ and ‘imperialists.’” The GI terms are dehumanizing, but the Vietnamese terms are accurate. People who cross 3,000 miles of ocean to attack a country that has done them no harm, are accurately called ‘invaders.’ I suppose you could argue about the ‘imperialist’ charge.

Vietnamese soldiers killed some 58,000 Americans and wounded a couple of hundred thousand more. Buns and Novick put the number of Vietnamese we killed at 3 million, but most experts say it was more like 4 million and Vietnam says it’s 6 million, with more people continuing to die from unexploded ordinance and Agent Orange. We destroyed 60% of their villages, sprayed 21 million gallons of lethal poisons, imposed free fire zones (a euphemism for genocide) on 75% of South Vietnam. They attacked US military bases in their country and never killed an American on American soil. There are no equivalences here.

Burns and Novick do a good job of explaining that the United States worked with Ho Chi Minh during World War II and that Ho hoped to get our support after the war. They do not mention that having friendly relations with Communist countries was a successful strategy we used with Yugoslavia, because although it was Communist, Yugoslavia was also independent and a thorn in the Soviet Union’s side. Any minimal understanding of Vietnam’s history would have identified Vietnam’s fiercely independent streak. Intelligent leaders (anyone with half a brain) would have adopted the Yugoslav strategy in Vietnam.

This brings us to another central problem of the Burns and Novick series, Leslie Gelb’s smiling recollection (he looks so smug) that nobody knew anything about Vietnam and didn’t for several years. In fact, throughout the series, many people say “we should have known better.” Is ignorance really a good excuse for launching a brutal war and the war crimes that followed?

Unmentioned is how easy it was to gather information on Vietnam. French historians and journalists had studied every aspect of the country and its culture during and after their defeat in the French Indo China war. Much of this material had been translated into English. That’s how I figured out in 1965 that we were going to lose the war in Vietnam.

Burns and Novick fail to mention my trip to North Vietnam in 1965 nor any of the other trips to North Vietnam by members of the American peace movement such as Tom Hayden, Staughton Lynd and Herbert Aptheker who went in January 1966 and members of Women’s Strike for Peace who went later. They only show us Jane Fonda’s trip in 1972, when she broadcast to US troops asking them to stop the bombing and was photographed sitting in an anti-aircraft gun. No one else who went to North Vietnam did either of these things.

Our earlier trips to North Vietnam were important, because we were the only Americans to witness the destruction being rained down on North Vietnam. Burns’ documentary shows lots of aerial shots of bombs and napalm going off (Mussolini’s son called them rosebuds blooming in the desert when he attacked Ethiopia) but very few shots of the bomb’s effects on the ground in North Vietnam. We hear talk of precision bombing, but those of us who traveled to North Vietnam observed hospitals, schools, churches, markets, and working class neighborhoods utterly destroyed. And this was ten years before the war ended!

The Burns’ documentary doesn’t show us the makeshift hospitals with children and old people without arms and legs or suffering from horrendous burns, all victims of American bombing attacks. The documentary focuses our compassion on the American pilots who dropped the bombs.

In fact, the only heroes in Ken Burns’ Vietnam are American GI’s. Almost everyone else is their enemy: the Vietnamese they fought, the officers whose absurd strategy sent them to their deaths, and the American peace movement that struggled to end the war and bring them home. Burns and Novick portray the peace movement in the worst possible terms. In at least three places, they have moving sound bites about how returning soldiers were spit on or in other ways disrespected. It’s a false memory, at least in any general sense. They couldn’t find any visual support, no signs about baby killers, because it didn’t happen, or happened extremely rarely.

To me, this is the central flaw of Burns and Novick’s film, their failure to deal truthfully and equally with the peace movement. Six million Americans took part in the anti-war effort (only 2.7 million Americans served as soldiers). Everyone I knew in the peace movement honored the veterans and wanted justice for them. They studied books, took part in teach-ins, and watched newsreels. But Burns and Novick, with a couple of notable exceptions, characterize the peace movement as uninformed, chaotic, disrespectful, self absorbed and violent. At one point, they intercut 1969 pictures of kids at Woodstock wallowing in great music with soldiers fighting in Vietnam. What was that supposed to mean?

The kids who refused to go (many out of righteous opposition), who fled into exile in Canada or Sweden, or who, like boxer Muhammad Ali lost his right to fight for three years, or the Fort Hood 3 who went to prison, or the professors and journalists who lost their jobs, the protestors beaten by riled up construction workers, Martin Luther King who went public with his opposition in 1967, the priests who raided draft offices and burned their records, Alice Hertz and two other Americans who burned themselves to death in honor of the Buddhist monks who did the same in South Vietnam protesting our puppet regime — these are not worth profiling, all tinged by the same brush, they are the bad guys who disrespected our troops and went violent. What a wonderful authoritarian message that gives to viewers. Don’t protest an evil war or your country’s war crimes.

The only heroes in Burns and Novick’s Vietnam are American servicemen and I am thrilled to see them finally recognized for what they went through. We have moving back stories of their homes, their motives for joining, their families waiting for them.
None of the six million participants in the American peace movement gets similar treatment. The same is true, incidentally, of the Vietnamese. While the sound bites are great, there are no Vietnamese back stories either.

Without the peace movement, there is no moral center to this series. The lack of accountability is fatal. That an American general can watch from a helicopter the massacre at Mai Lai (as the films tells us) and suffer no consequences is sickening. If military courts had aggressively prosecuted violators of human rights, or even if we only had held detailed and accurate reconciliations where the truth came out, there would have been a chance that our reckless invasions of Iraq with its policy of torture and the invasion of Afghanistan would not have followed so easily. When people are held accountable for their actions, perpetrators of questionable violent acts think twice.

Last week on NPR an American general in Afghanistan announced that we are not trying to occupy territory in Afghanistan, we are simply trying to kill terrorists. Here, again, is the same rationale of the body count that led to disaster in Vietnam. We are reliving the Vietnam War because no one was ever really held responsible for its horrors.

The moral center of the Vietnam War was held by those who opposed it. Several people I’ve talked to say the series is depressing. I had the same feeling of despair at the end. Burns and Novick suggest Vietnam’s a tragedy. It’s not. In tragedy a powerful human makes a terrible mistake and suffers the consequences. No one suffered any consequences for Vietnam. Burns and Novick assure us that even if people did wrong, they didn’t mean to. America is still the shining city on the hill and we can do no wrong.

[James DiEugenio]

This is good and I agree.  It was really a shame that Burns and Novick felt they needed to belittle the anti war movement.  And paint it as somehow ineffective.

Not true.  As I will show in Part Four of my review.

The anti war movement stopped Nixon from launching an all out  1969 offensive against Hanoi.

[Ron Bulman]

It's been noted in a couple of posts here that the show was funded in part by the Koch's.  I think it should be further noted that they started turning the large oil company inherited from their father into the monster Koch Industries has become in the 1960's.  One might say the Vietnam War fueled their rise to the top of wealth and power.  Transporting men and equipment half way around the world, not to mention in country use of jet, helicopter, truck, jeep, tank and personnel carriers fuel put a lot of government tax dollars in the pockets of at least a few oil barons.

I feel sure they felt Burns was "safe".  He was probably well vetted before any funds were contributed, maybe on a personal basis by them.  Certain aspects of the war were off limits.  It's conceivable to me they may have had an advisor on hand during production that reported back to them on a regular basis.  They could have had an opportunity to review and approve the whole thing before it's public release.   

[James DiEugenio]

Certain elements of the were were off limits?

There is not one word about the Golden Triangle poppy/heroin business, or the body bags packaged with heroin coming into the USA. Something even Hoover acknowledged.

 

[James DiEugenio]

My installment on the Nixon years and the Fall of Saigon. 

Difficult to write because Nixon was an even worse skunk than the film portrays him as.

 Really sad to compare what happened there under Tricky DIck with what Kennedy was doing in 1963.  And no they do not mention the Cambodia genocide or the Golden Triangle heroin running, which Ky was involved in.

 

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

[Ron Bulman]

On ‎10‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 9:44 PM, James DiEugenio said:

My installment on the Nixon years and the Fall of Saigon. 

Difficult to write because Nixon was an even worse skunk than the film portrays him as.

 Really sad to compare what happened there under Tricky DIck with what Kennedy was doing in 1963.  And no they do not mention the Cambodia genocide or the Golden Triangle heroin running, which Ky was involved in.

 

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

Excellent IMHO.  

https://www.bing.com/search?q=the+world+is+seting+on+a+time+bomb+song&form=PRUSEN&mkt=en-us&httpsmsn=1&refig=0c39f6193ca045019e976052b210a994&sp=-1&pq=undefined&sc=0-24&qs=n&sk=&cvid=0c39f6193ca045019e976052b210a994

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Ron.

BTW, the reason I knew a lot about the Nixon/Kissinger Vietnam story was that, at one time, I was going to do a long, detailed examination about how American foreign policy changed from Kennedy, to LBJ, to Nixon.  In other words, how it unmistakably and specifically lurched rightward.  A  big part of that story was dealing with Vietnam.

The Burns/Novick pastiche allowed me to do that comparison.

Let me add, one of the publicity tag lines for the series was that it would expose buried secrets.  I watched all 18 hours of this bloated mediocrity. I could find no major revelation in it that had not been published previously.  The thing it tries to trumpet, about the rivalry for power between Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan was revealed five years ago in a book called Hanoi's War.  So in addition to the imbalances and outright censorship I mentioned, there is also the fact that Burns and Novick came up with very little, if anything, that was new.  Which is really kind of surprising considering the time and money they spent on this.