PBS - The Vietnam War

[Duman]

Watching PBS series The Vietnam War.

So far I'm impressed with the series. A lot of things I never knew about our involvement and escalation.

There were a lot of complex political things going on in Vietnam before the U.S. became involved.

People in power, from Johnson on down, knew it was a disaster before we had boots on the ground. Nuts.

[USMC88-93]

Anything Ken Burns is involved in is worth watching.

[thvigil11]

Agreed, I think Burns is the best, most even handed documentarian I've ever seen. Been watching the series as well. The mix of history and personal accounts is very well done.

[OtterbatHellcat]

PBS does offer some good programming from time to time. Sometimes the money thing really gets in the way, I've donated...and once you do, they do hound you for a while. At least that's been my experience, perhaps others have different experiences with donating to them.

[Joe_K]

I'm currently watching the second episode. So far so good.

Sent from my SM-G920T using Tapatalk

[ben4372]

I watched the 1st episode. Great story telling. I really like the early back story. It's supposed to be 18hrs. Lots left to see. I've never seen any of his work but heard great things. And a long interview he did talking about Prohibition and taxes, still on my list to watch. Smart, even, logical, and loyal to PBS because they gave him a shot in the begining.

[Gman]

His Civil War series was really good. I also remember watching one about the history of baseball.

[Zundfolge]

I fully expect them to continue the lies that we lost the '68 Tet Offensive and lost the war militarily and not tell the truth that the Democrats handed the Vietnamese people to the commies for the rape/torture/murder fest that followed all because they couldn't stomach the idea of an American military victory and they wanted to rub the GOP's nose in Nixon's defeat.

[BushMasterBoy]

Did they mention the nuclear weapons we used in the war? They were firing nuclear tipped missiles into space to knock out Russian reconnaissance satellites. It was called Program 437. I am betting the results of these operations will never be declassified.

[Bailey Guns]

I fully expect them to continue the lies that we lost the '68 Tet Offensive and lost the war militarily and not tell the truth that the Democrats handed the Vietnamese people to the commies for the rape/torture/murder fest that followed all because they couldn't stomach the idea of an American military victory and they wanted to rub the GOP's nose in Nixon's defeat.

There's no way democrats were gonna let us win that war. Too much political capital to be made. Seeing the results of the war and they way the left and democrats behaved during this time is why I despise the left. That's not to say the cluster fuck that was Viet Nam was solely the fault of democrats...but they bear most of the responsibility.

It's a pretty good series on the war...for some of the footage if nothing else.

[Skip]

There's no way democrats were gonna let us win that war. Too much political capital to be made. Seeing the results of the war and they way the left and democrats behaved during this time is why I despise the left. That's not to say the cluster fuck that was Viet Nam was solely the fault of democrats...but they bear most of the responsibility.

It's a pretty good series on the war...for some of the footage if nothing else.

If only more people truly understood who and what the Dims are and how much they have always hated America.

Right now, all this racial strike, just because pantsuit lost an election... Makes me sick.

[BladesNBarrels]

I am finding the history very interesting.
When I was living the 60's and the Vietnam War, there was no perspective that a look-back 52 years later can give.
If I could have seen what is being shown now as the reasoning and view of that time, I would have had a whole different thought.
But then, being 52 years older and having seen more of the human errors being made, I have a different view anyway.

[Mtneer]

Did they mention the nuclear weapons we used in the war? They were firing nuclear tipped missiles into space to knock out Russian reconnaissance satellites. It was called Program 437. I am betting the results of these operations will never be declassified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_437

[Gman]

But then, being 52 years older and having seen more of the human errors being made, I have a different view anyway.
Wisdom is earned, not given.

[Zundfolge]

When I was living the 60's and the Vietnam War, there was no perspective that a look-back 52 years later can give.

One man's "perspective" is another man's "revision" :p

[Musashi]

This offers an interesting perspective: https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/2017/9/13/burning-history-ossifying-the-false-narrative

Read and discuss amongst yourselves [emoji850]

[Irving]

Here is an interview with Ken Burns about this series.

http://www.npr.org/2017/09/21/552575164/in-vietnam-war-ken-burns-wrestles-with-the-conflict-s-contradictions

[Duman]

The war was before my time.

History is (typically) written by the winners. It's never free of bias. Gathering a lot of information from different sources can help triangulate on some form of truth.

Another data point is McNamara's video "The Fog of War".

[BigBear]

If a fellow don't have air/cable TV... is there still a way to check this out?

[Joe_K]

There are some Vietnamese versions on YT. The downside is if you aren't a Vietnamese speaker all the Viet speakers have no captions, and the English speakers have Vietnamese captions.

Sent from my SM-G920T using Tapatalk

[Aloha_Shooter]

This offers an interesting perspective: https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/2017/9/13/burning-history-ossifying-the-false-narrative

Read and discuss amongst yourselves [emoji850]

Thanks for the link. Excellent posts about each episode as they come out. I liked Burns' documentaries on the Civil War and Baseball but don't think I trust his liberal instincts on Viet Nam.

[DenverGP]

If a fellow don't have air/cable TV... is there still a way to check this out?

http://www.pbs.org/show/vietnam-war-not-edited/

Looks like the first 3 episodes are up there now, and I believe they will all be as they are released.

Also looks like it's available on Amazon Prime video if you happen to be a prime member.

[JohnTRourke]

If a fellow don't have air/cable TV... is there still a way to check this out?

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/

it streams. so watch it on your computer or hook the computer to your TV thru hdmi cable.

[Aloha_Shooter]

Another view on Burns' latest:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/4/the-vietnam-war-documentary-left-out-certain-facts/

Like Peaking at 70, Stearman points out some facts inconvenient to the narrative established by PBS.

[Duman]

Those are good points. I thought the series avoided some of the atrocities committed by the north.

The series did point out that the Tet offensive nearly broke the back of the north.

The series reported on finding mass graves, but wasn't covered in great detail, as was My Lai.

The fact that Washington's micro-management of the war kept us from winning is not a secret.

[Martinjmpr]

Just finished the whole series.

I liked it. I think it was very well done and very fair-minded.

In addition to pointing out the failures of US policy, they also spend a lot of time showing the terrible mistakes made by the North, including the Tet and the two "mini-Tet's" that followed in 1968, as well as the disastrous 1972 Easter Offensive.

I think the people who come off the worst in that documentary are McNamara and LBJ, who both knew the war could never be won but kept it going because Johnson didn't want to be "the first American president to lose a war." As bad as Nixon was on so many other things, on Vietnam his primary goal was to end the war.

Two others who come off really badly in the documentary are Jane Fonda and John Kerry. Fonda is shown to be an easily-manipulated ditz and Kerry to be a grandstanding boob who, during his senate testimony, repeated allegations of "atrocities" that he didn't actually witness and only heard about second hand, as if he was actually there.

EDITED TO ADD: I'm actually a little surprised they didn't get either Kerry or Fonda to be interviewed for the series. You would think that Fonda, at least, would jump at the chance to give her side of things. Who knows, maybe they asked them but they declined.

I've done a lot of reading on Vietnam (dad was a professor at CSU who taught a Vietnam history class and when he retired I got to raid his library) and the documentary seemed pretty accurate based on what I've read.

[JohnTRourke]

So being a history buff, one of the books recommended with this in another forum (starts with AR) was Street without Joy by Bernard Fall about the French war in Vietnam (46-54). It was published in the early 60's.

Clearly not one American leader read it. We literally followed the French footsteps and made the exact same mistakes (with pretty much the same results).

it's depressing.

https://www.amazon.com/Street-Without-Joy-Indochina-Stackpole/dp/0811732363

[Martinjmpr]

So being a history buff, one of the books recommended with this in another forum (starts with AR) was Street without Joy by Bernard Fall about the French war in Vietnam (46-54). It was published in the early 60's.

Clearly not one American leader read it. We literally followed the French footsteps and made the exact same mistakes (with pretty much the same results).

it's depressing.

https://www.amazon.com/Street-Without-Joy-Indochina-Stackpole/dp/0811732363

Oh, hell yes. Street Without Joy is a "must read" for anyone who is wondering "how did we ever get into that mess?"

I'd also highly recommend two others:

https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Shining-Lie-Neil-Sheehan/dp/B007CKLP96/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1507822635&sr=8-2&keywords=a+bright+shining+lie

Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" which is a bio of John Paul Vann, an early advisor and ultimately a high ranking USAID civilian leader who was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in the early 70's, and

https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-at-War-History-1946-1975/dp/0891413065/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507822704&sr=1-1&keywords=the+vietnam+war+phillip+davidson

"Vietnam At War 1946 - 1975" by Phillip Davidson. Davidson is a retired 3 star general and was Westmoreland's G2 (intelligence officer.) I think these two books, more than any other, give the "big picture" view about why and how the Vietnam war was lost.

As befits an intel officer, Davidson's book spends a lot of time talking about the enemy, specifically General Giap, who was the architect of most of the NVA's operations. Davidson also spends a lot of time talking about the struggles and conflicts WITHIN North Vietnam over strategy.

Essentially, there were many in the North who wanted to more or less ignore the South after the 1954 agreement that partitioned Vietnam into two countries and just concentrate on the "socialist revolution" (and rebuilding the shattered economy) of the North. But there were others who said that there was no point in working to "fix" the North while Vietnam remained divided and they wanted to put their efforts into subverting and undermining the South, equipping and training the Viet Cong, etc. These two factions struggled a lot during the war.

And of course the biggest problem was that there was never a South Vietnamese government that was worth a damn. RVN political leaders and generals spent more time fighting each other for power, suppressing internal "enemies" like the Cao Dai and the Buddhists, and figuring out how to loot the treasury and enrich themselves than they ever did on figuring out how to create a legitimate government or fighting the VC. That's the whole reason we had to ramp up our military operations.

The more I read about Vietnam the more I have to agree with SFC Clell Hazard, the character played by James Caan in the movie "Gardens of Stone": That from the US perspective in Vietnam, there was "nothing to win and no way to win it."

[JohnTRourke]

Here's another good question on an interesting topic.

How and why did Westmoreland stay in charge for so long????

[Duman]

McNamara tried to talk Kennedy and LBJ out of Vietnam, until finally LBJ essentially fired him.

[Martinjmpr]

Here's another good question on an interesting topic.

How and why did Westmoreland stay in charge for so long????

During the early stages of the war he was always saying (and the political leaders believed) the end was "just around the corner." No need to change leaders when the whole operation will be ending soon, right?

Westmoreland was basically "kicked upstairs" after Tet and replaced by his own deputy.

[JohnTRourke]

During the early stages of the war he was always saying (and the political leaders believed) the end was "just around the corner." No need to change leaders when the whole operation will be ending soon, right?

Westmoreland was basically "kicked upstairs" after Tet and replaced by his own deputy.

Yeah I knew that and everyone agrees that Abrams had the chops and "saved" the army. But 4 years of idiocy? I mean are they just believing each other's BS? stroking each other off? Westmoreland had naked pictures of LBJ? 1 or 2 years I get, but after that, I don't get it.

[Rhino0427]

Yeah I knew that and everyone agrees that Abrams had the chops and "saved" the army. But 4 years of idiocy? I mean are they just believing each other's BS? stroking each other off? Westmoreland had naked pictures of LBJ? 1 or 2 years I get, but after that, I don't get it.

I think you need look no farther than Afghanistan to see the Vietnam mentality in practice to this day. I was there in '03-'04 and left thinking "I don't know what the Hell we're trying to do here. I just hope my son doesn't end up fighting my war." He was 6 at the time and is now 18 and wants to be in the military after college. The way things are going, he may get the exact same hootch I slept in.

Vietnams and Afghanistans happen when the military promises to win a political war. Vietnam was a civil war that we went over to fix and never developed an idea of how to win or even what "winning" looked like. So like a blind man in a dark room, we flailed about getting Americans killed and not really accomlishing anything.

Don't get me wrong. Afghanistan started as a "good war". However, as soon as we defeated the Taliban and brought some measure of peace, we should have claimed victory, came home to parades and left that hellhole of a country alone, never to be thought of again. However, we decided to build a peaceful, stable, harmonious democracy in a county that has NO interest in doing that. So, 16 years later, my son may get the "priveledge" of fighting my war. Sounds a lot like what happened in SE Asia.

[Aloha_Shooter]

I don't believe any of McNamara's self-serving claims. He did more damage to the Defense Department than any single individual in history with the possible exception of Bradley Manning.

Different perspective of Vietnam from https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/:


The Fallacy of Inevitability

The war was unwinnable. This is the underlying motif in every episode, the main message of the entire series. And it is a fallacy. The theme begins with episode 1, Déjà Vu which ends with the devastating loss by the French at Dien Bien Phu, but never tells us why the base is there in the first place or that the North Vietnamese and Chinese communist were attacking in Laos in an attempt to widen the war. Déjà Vu is meant to be an omen that what happened in 1954 will inevitably reoccur in 1975. Burns hammers at this point through the following nine episodes, sometimes subtly other times blatantly, through four American presidents, through edited clips showing only their fears, skepticism, pessimism and duplicity.


The theory of the unwinnable war rests on the fact that the war was not won. Because it happened this seemingly gives one arguing from that perspective the right to claim inevitable, but a change in any precursor might have produced a very different history.


And if politicians didn’t see the possibility of winning the war, thousands, perhaps millions of American and South Vietnamese soldiers did. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, it became common to hear American veterans say, “We were winning when I left.”


Camp Eagle (101st Abn Div basecamp) sat close to Highway 547, the main road from the populated coastal lowlands to the mountains and jungles of the A Shau Valley. The first firebase west of Eagle was Birmingham. Through the spring of 1970 Americans only went to Birmingham via 547 in armed convoy. By late summer of that year the trip was often made by two guys in a jeep. Or recall Hue during the Tet offensive of ’68. Two and a half years later we would sightsee in Hue and the surrounding villages, and because it was peaceful GIs not on duty were not allowed to carry their weapons.


Imagine also, at each step along the way, that the American “anti-war” movement, with many of its leaders having ties to the international communist movement, had not garnered its high degree of influence over the American media; and imagine too that JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Ford were not continuously reacting to public pressures created by the incomplete and slanted narratives these groups produced.


After Saigon fell one of the voices in the Burns documentary declares, “The Vietnamese people could finally live normally.” What?! Hello!!! Also said, “…no blood bath.” How many people have to be executed for a documentarian to label an action “a blood bath”? I guess 60,000 murders in the first 90 days after the fall does not qualify. If one adds in the number of people who died in the gulags of re-education, does that push it into the category of blood bath? Some 1.5 million South Vietnamese men and women were treated to these communist camps—approximately 10% of the population of that country. Many were tortured. Many were starved. Many were worked to death.


1.7 million of 6 million Cambodians died after “the war was over.” Not a bloodbath, Mr. Burns? Francois Bizot, in his 2003 book The Gate “…understood the true nature of the Khmer Rouge long before other outsiders. Decades later, his frustration remains: ‘What oppresses me, more still than the unclosed eyes of the dead who fill the sandy paddy fields, is the way the West applauded the Khmer Rouge, hailing their victory over their brothers in 1975. The ovation was so frenzied as to drown out the protracted wailing of the millions being massacred…’”


Burns show American veterans returning to Vietnam years after the war, hugging and reconciling with North Vietnamese soldiers who had opposed them on the battlefield. The occasions are joyous, friendly, healing. All-well-in-good, BUT what about showing Americans reuniting with ARVN soldiers who were their allies? That’s not shown. And it’s not shown for a reason. ARVN vets are still second class citizens in Vietnam. There are numerous accounts of U.S. charities attempting to aid these men, many of whom still suffer physically from war wounds. Communist cadre always take a percentage of whatever is donated. Sometimes they take it all. Medical equipment meant to help these men is diverted to hospitals for communist party members. Americans who have pushed for fairness have become persona non grata.


Conclusions

From the very first fallacy of accepting communist propaganda portraying Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist, then repeating it in multiple variations to make it a “fact,” this series has been intellectually dishonest; slanted toward a fake left-wing narrative for what purpose I do not know? Just a quick reminder: a true nationalist does not murder all his nationalist allies because only his sect of nationalism is acceptable.


With all the promise and potential, with all the wonderful presentations, the incredible photography and the moving musical scores, the slanting by choice of material and by massive omission renders this series not history but propaganda.

From where I stand, the Left has accomplished its goal of making SW Asia another Vietnam with the same kind of treasonous backbiting, mythological storytelling, and outright lying propaganda. There were a lot of good reasons for being very careful about going into either Afghanistan or Iraq and some of our reasons for going into Iraq later turned out to be based on bad intelligence but as Del Vecchio says about Vietnam and soldiers saying we were winning when they left, we were winning in Afghanistan and Iraq before the Democrats took over Congress and before Obama got in the White House.

I don't accept the myths created by Burns or Sheehan (IIRC, Stearman saw that Sheehan was undermining the war effort with slanted reporting from the moment he set foot in Saigon). Vietnam was a tragedy for both the US and the Vietnamese people but it's not made any better by the Left's propaganda.

[Martinjmpr]

I don't believe any of McNamara's self-serving claims. He did more damage to the Defense Department than any single individual in history with the possible exception of Bradley Manning.

Different perspective of Vietnam from https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/:

I don't accept the myths created by Burns or Sheehan (IIRC, Stearman saw that Sheehan was undermining the war effort with slanted reporting from the moment he set foot in Saigon). Vietnam was a tragedy for both the US and the Vietnamese people but it's not made any better by the Left's propaganda.

Yeah, even people like LTG Davidson, who were neck-deep in the war, agree that it was unwinnable. I mean, what would "winning" have even looked like? There was ZERO chance that the North would stop their incursions into the South, no matter what, and if we had invaded and "conquered" both Cambodia and Laos, so what? We would have just ended up being the new French, and had the same difficulties that they did.

Ditto with invading and occupying North Vietnam (which was never an option anyway.) We would have just become a new version of the French, dealing with a pissed off populace and endless insurgency.

A two-state solution, a la Korea in 1953, could not work in Vietnam because the South Vietnamese never had the military power or the political will to prevent the North from sending in troops along the Ho Chi Minh trail and operating out of safe havens in Cambodia and Laos. In Korea it worked because Korea was a peninsula and it was much, much more difficult (damn near impossible) for North Korea to infiltrate people into the South in any strength.

Potentially, the US had the military power to occupy Cambodia and Laos, but there was no political will to do so, and in any case, for how long? As long as the North Vietnamese were willing to fight one day longer than us, they could not lose and we could not win.

And the South Vietnamese never were able to set up a government that cared more about the people than it did about aggregating power and money to itself. That was the core problem right there. The communists may have been bastards but at least they had a plan, all the South had was a bunch of kleptocrats who spent their time fighting internal enemies and figuring out how best to loot the treasury. It's hard to fight an insurgency when you spend more of your time fighting your fellow countrymen.

[Martinjmpr]

I think you need look no farther than Afghanistan to see the Vietnam mentality in practice to this day. I was there in '03-'04 and left thinking "I don't know what the Hell we're trying to do here. I just hope my son doesn't end up fighting my war." He was 6 at the time and is now 18 and wants to be in the military after college. The way things are going, he may get the exact same hootch I slept in.

Vietnams and Afghanistans happen when the military promises to win a political war. Vietnam was a civil war that we went over to fix and never developed an idea of how to win or even what "winning" looked like. So like a blind man in a dark room, we flailed about getting Americans killed and not really accomlishing anything.

Don't get me wrong. Afghanistan started as a "good war". However, as soon as we defeated the Taliban and brought some measure of peace, we should have claimed victory, came home to parades and left that hellhole of a country alone, never to be thought of again. However, we decided to build a peaceful, stable, harmonious democracy in a county that has NO interest in doing that. So, 16 years later, my son may get the "priveledge" of fighting my war. Sounds a lot like what happened in SE Asia.

Sadly, I have to agree with this as well. Once we destroyed the Al Quaeda bases and put the Taliban on the run, we should have handed the keys back to Karzai and said "it's your baby now. But BTW if terrorist groups ever start setting up bases here again, we'll flatten them without a second's hesitation. Bye."

I was talking to my Dad about this and he used an analogy that I thought was appropriate: "Winning" in Afghanistan is like trying to nail jello to a wall.

[Gman]

Just use Jello shank nails.

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

[Duman]

"I don't believe any of McNamara's self-serving claims. He did more damage to the Defense Department than any single individual in history with the possible exception of Bradley Manning."

What are you basing that on? I'm not a fan of McNamara, or anyone else.

[Aloha_Shooter]

What are you basing that on? I'm not a fan of McNamara, or anyone else.

My opinion is based on the his use of "wunderkind" to let academics override professional military judgment in military operations and targeting, the budgeting system McNarama devised that still shapes (hampers IMO) the way DoD builds its budgets, and the way he had Washington micromanaging Vietnam. Others may of course have a different opinion, this is mine.

[Duman]

That's fair. Good points.

McNamara did a lot to improve the effectiveness of the air corps during WWII, but the same metrics didn't apply in Vietnam. When defining victory is like nailing Jell-O to a wall, the wonks with numbers likely will have out-sized influence.

[Aloha_Shooter]

BTW, LTG Davidson obviously has a more personal and informed opinion about Vietnam than I do but I would point out that numerous Vietnamese generals have admitted they were within 2-3 months of collapsing when Nixon and Kissinger gave them everything they wanted, that they couldn't have won without the backbiting from the press (like Sheehan) and "useful idiots" (to use one of Lenin's terms). IIRC, MacArthur begged Johnson to not expand the effort in Vietnam from his deathbed. OTOH, it's hard to say what would have happened if the American Left hadn't undermined everything on the homefront. I've got zero respect for Johnson and the way he expanded and interfered with the Vietnam War but I rather suspect that if WW II would have been the same kind of disaster if Roosevelt had been hit with the same kind of domestic resisteance that Johnson/Nixon/Bush had to contend with.

[CO Hugh]

I don't believe any of McNamara's self-serving claims. He did more damage to the Defense Department than any single individual in history with the possible exception of Bradley Manning.

Different perspective of Vietnam from https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/:





















From where I stand, the Left has accomplished its goal of making SW Asia another Vietnam with the same kind of treasonous backbiting, mythological storytelling, and outright lying propaganda. There were a lot of good reasons for being very careful about going into either Afghanistan or Iraq and some of our reasons for going into Iraq later turned out to be based on bad intelligence but as Del Vecchio says about Vietnam and soldiers saying we were winning when they left, we were winning in Afghanistan and Iraq before the Democrats took over Congress and before Obama got in the White House.

I don't accept the myths created by Burns or Sheehan (IIRC, Stearman saw that Sheehan was undermining the war effort with slanted reporting from the moment he set foot in Saigon). Vietnam was a tragedy for both the US and the Vietnamese people but it's not made any better by the Left's propaganda.

The best comment I heard was that for years a war had raged across Vietnam and there were not that many refugees, then when Saigon fell, there were thousands of refugees trying to get out.

Also, though I haven't seen anyone address it specifically, I believe the US was afraid to invade the North and be active because in Korea MacArthur went too close to the chinese boarder and then the Chinese got involved, so officially the US wanted to keep the Russians and Chinese out of it.

I also am struck that during the war outside of Col. Hackworth there were not that many critics, then in the 80s every general and senior officer criticized the strategy, but yet not when they were sending troops into the meat grinder.

I also remember when the refugees showed up and entered our schools, I realized late that none of the ones I meet had an intact family: ie parents and all children, if they were lucky one parent, otherwise living with uncles aunts, or other extended family.

[KestrelBike]

This offers an interesting perspective: https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/2017/9/13/burning-history-ossifying-the-false-narrative

Read and discuss amongst yourselves [emoji850]

Awesome. Thank you so much.

[Aloha_Shooter]

... and from Ollie North: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/16/ken-burns-vietnam-war-got-some-facts-wrong/


Mr. Nixon’s prosecution of the war in Southeast Asia is poorly told by Ken Burns in his new Public Broadcasting Service documentary “The Vietnam War.” That is but one of many reasons Mr. Burns‘ latest work is such a disappointment and a tragic lost opportunity.


Because of endless fairy tales told by Ken Burns and others, many Americans associate Richard Nixon with the totality and the worst events of Vietnam. It’s hardly evident in the Burns “documentary,” but important to note: When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, he inherited a nation — and a world — engulfed in discord and teetering on the brink of widespread chaos. His predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, was forced from office with a half-million U.S. troops mired in combat and fierce anti-American government demonstrations across the country and in our nation’s capital.


President Nixon succeeded in isolating the North Vietnamese diplomatically and negotiated a peace agreement that preserved the right of the people of South Vietnam to determine their own political future. Imperfect as the Saigon government was, by 1973 the South Vietnamese had many well-trained troops and units that fought well and were proud to be our allies. This intricate and sophisticated approach took shape over four wartime years but receives only superficial mention in Mr. Burns‘ production.


By the time President Nixon resigned office on Aug. 9, 1974, the Vietnam War was all but won and the South Vietnamese were confident of securing a permanent victory. But in December 1974 — three months after Mr. Nixon departed the White House — a vengeful, Democrat-dominated Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam.


It was a devastating blow for those to whom Mr. Nixon had promised — not U.S. troops — but steadfast military, economic and diplomatic support. As chronicled in memoirs written afterwards in Hanoi, Moscow and Beijing, the communists celebrated. The ignominious end came with a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion five months later.


In a technique favored by the “progressive left,” Mr. Burns uses a small cadre of anti-war U.S. and pro-Hanoi Vietnamese “eyewitnesses” to explain the complicated policies of the U.S. government. Mr. Burns apparently refused to interview Henry Kissinger, telling the Portland Press Herald he doubted “Kissinger’s authority to adequately convey the perspectives of the U.S. government.” This alone disqualifies this “documentary” as definitive history on the Vietnam War.