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Burns/Novick: The Vietnam War

crescent

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crescent
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The Vietnam War, a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

The first episode aired last night, I was only able to catch about half.

(I am not sure if the non-Americans in the forum know who Ken Burns is, or the nature of his documentaries. He makes long-form historical documentaries, most famously of the American Civil war. Lots of research, period music, period photos and film [no film from the Civil war, obviously, but his films on more recent topics might have film]. He is well respected in the U.S., but gets a bit of criticism for his formulaic use of "scan and pan" with historic photos. This current film is ten episodes for a total of 18 hours.)

My impression is so far is that Burns and Novick stick to facts and introspection. I like that Burns and Novick seem to interview nearly as Vietnamese (from both sides) as Americans.

I am seeing mixed reviews, some of which seem annoyed that he is presenting a balanced look at how the U.S. got stuck there, including a good rundown of the internal American struggle to oppose colonialism (including WWII era support for Vietnamese independence) while opposing communism (leading to military support for the French effort to maintain control). It has nuance.

Is anyone else watching it?


ETA: I also like that it is being released in Vietnamese as well as English.
 
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I've watched the first two episodes.

The first gave background history of how the French invaded and took over IndoChina in the 19th century up through the French defeat and withdrawal after WWII.

The second episode was the start of major US involvement under Kennedy.

I think the show is very balanced showing all sides. There were more than just two sides. A very complex situation is being laid out. While the inevitability of the North winning is shown, they do show some points along the way where things might have been different.

The only thing that may be lacking is someone saying the US could have won. Not sure if those people exist.
 
Spindrift said:
I've watched the first two episodes.

The first gave background history of how the French invaded and took over IndoChina in the 19th century up through the French defeat and withdrawal after WWII.

The second episode was the start of major US involvement under Kennedy.

I think the show is very balanced showing all sides. There were more than just two sides. A very complex situation is being laid out. While the inevitability of the North winning is shown, they do show some points along the way where things might have been different.

The only thing that may be lacking is someone saying the US could have won. Not sure if those people exist.
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I'm not convinced that Vietnam was unwinnable, had we actually had the will to do so and been willing to invade North Vietnam. It would have been a long, costly, brutal war and probably not worth it. OTOH, invading North Vietnam might have induced the Chinese to send ground troops in, which would have made victory (even if victory is defined as keeping a non-communist regime in South Vietnam while the Communists maintained control of North Vietnam) very difficult and costly indeed.

I don't think the strategy and tactics actually used ever had a prayer of winning. IMO, we went to war in Vietnam in a completely half-assed fashion, and wasted a lot of money and lives in the process, with no hope of success.
 
CORed said:
I'm not convinced that Vietnam was unwinnable, had we actually had the will to do so and been willing to invade North Vietnam. It would have been a long, costly, brutal war and probably not worth it. OTOH, invading North Vietnam might have induced the Chinese to send ground troops in, which would have made victory (even if victory is defined as keeping a non-communist regime in South Vietnam while the Communists maintained control of North Vietnam) very difficult and costly indeed.

I don't think the strategy and tactics actually used ever had a prayer of winning. IMO, we went to war in Vietnam in a completely half-assed fashion, and wasted a lot of money and lives in the process, with no hope of success.
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A problem was that you had one half of the country run by a very repressive regime and the other half was North Vietnam.

There were decisions that could have lead to avoiding the whole war altogether, but given the context of the times, those decisions were never going to be made. One decision would have been to support Ho immediately after WWII and not support the French restoring their empire. Not going to happen when deGaulle says he might have to side with the Soviets if the US doesn't support France with its colonies.
 
CORed said:
I'm not convinced that Vietnam was unwinnable, had we actually had the will to do so and been willing to invade North Vietnam. It would have been a long, costly, brutal war and probably not worth it. OTOH, invading North Vietnam might have induced the Chinese to send ground troops in, which would have made victory (even if victory is defined as keeping a non-communist regime in South Vietnam while the Communists maintained control of North Vietnam) very difficult and costly indeed.

I don't think the strategy and tactics actually used ever had a prayer of winning. IMO, we went to war in Vietnam in a completely half-assed fashion, and wasted a lot of money and lives in the process, with no hope of success.
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It was also tied up in the Cold War. If we invaded North Vietnam, then the Soviet Union could respond by increasing its sponsorship of insurgencies (or outright troop deployment) in South America or Africa, propaganda with communist groups in Europe (especially Greece and France, or the communist groups in West Germany). They could cut off access to West Berlin again. They could start a civil war in Turkey, or clamp down on Austria. The USSR had a lot of levers to pull if the U.S. went beyond the sort of semi-agreed parameters for fighting in Vietnam.

One thing also is that the South Vietnamese government just was not that good. They failed to provide a good enough alternative for South Vietnamese people to fight for. I think it really was at least partly a civil war, most of the people in South Vietnam really did not want to be communist (as evidenced by the mass out-migration in the years after the war). But they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, with an extremely dysfunctional dictatorship on their home turf and a very repressive communist government pushing in. They had no good options, really, and it was probably beyond the power of the U.S. to install good governance in the South (we have enough difficulty trying to have good governance in our own nation).
 
crescent said:
It was also tied up in the Cold War. If we invaded North Vietnam, then the Soviet Union could respond by increasing its sponsorship of insurgencies (or outright troop deployment) in South America or Africa, propaganda with communist groups in Europe (especially Greece and France, or the communist groups in West Germany). They could cut off access to West Berlin again. They could start a civil war in Turkey, or clamp down on Austria. The USSR had a lot of levers to pull if the U.S. went beyond the sort of semi-agreed parameters for fighting in Vietnam.

One thing also is that the South Vietnamese government just was not that good. They failed to provide a good enough alternative for South Vietnamese people to fight for. I think it really was at least partly a civil war, most of the people in South Vietnam really did not want to be communist (as evidenced by the mass out-migration in the years after the war). But they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, with an extremely dysfunctional dictatorship on their home turf and a very repressive communist government pushing in. They had no good options, really, and it was probably beyond the power of the U.S. to install good governance in the South (we have enough difficulty trying to have good governance in our own nation).
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President Diem's wife makes Imelda Marcos look like Princess Diana.

Referring to the Buddhist monks who self-immolated to protest Diem's crack down on the Buddhists as being barbecued.
 
For me, this documentary series has none of the charm and appeal of The Civil War. I'm a very big fan of Burns but this one is not grabbing me so far.
 
William Parcher said:
For me, this documentary series has none of the charm and appeal of The Civil War. I'm a very big fan of Burns but this one is not grabbing me so far.
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Many of the people who found the war uncharming and unappealing are still alive. The wounds are still very raw.

I have to give Burns and Novick credit for picking a subject that is still very raw, very emotional, very controversial.
 
CORed said:
I'm not convinced that Vietnam was unwinnable, had we actually had the will to do so and been willing to invade North Vietnam.

I don't think the strategy and tactics actually used ever had a prayer of winning. IMO, we went to war in Vietnam in a completely half-assed fashion, and wasted a lot of money and lives in the process, with no hope of success.
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This is certainly the lesson that the US military learned from Vietnam: That if we were going to war, we had to commit to win, not just try for a stalemate.

ETA: I will check out the series. I liked Burns quite a bit up until his shows on baseball and jazz, where he revealed a shallow understanding of both and was completely hopeless on the modern era. The final "inning" of the baseball broadcast was embarrassing to watch.

Burns' usual schtick is to use the subject at hand to talk about race. Of course, it would be hard to talk about the Civil War or baseball or jazz without some discussion of race, but Burns always puts it front and center.
 
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Brainster said:
This is certainly the lesson that the US military learned from Vietnam: That if we were going to war, we had to commit to win, not just try for a stalemate.....
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You, like many in the US at the time and since, seem to think the Vietnamese were irrelevant.

That is why the war was a lost cause, not because we didn't drop more bombs.
 
CORed said:
I'm not convinced that Vietnam was unwinnable, had we actually had the will to do so and been willing to invade North Vietnam. It would have been a long, costly, brutal war and probably not worth it. OTOH, invading North Vietnam might have induced the Chinese to send ground troops in, which would have made victory (even if victory is defined as keeping a non-communist regime in South Vietnam while the Communists maintained control of North Vietnam) very difficult and costly indeed.

I don't think the strategy and tactics actually used ever had a prayer of winning. IMO, we went to war in Vietnam in a completely half-assed fashion, and wasted a lot of money and lives in the process, with no hope of success.
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You too seemed to have missed the key point in the first two episodes of the documentary: We backed a corrupt regime that took power after the French colonialists withdrew. Ho Chi Minh, on the other hand, led a revolution against colonialists and the corrupt regime which followed.

Because Kennedy cared more about looking like he was strong against the commies than he cared about what his conscience told him about the Vietnamese, he backed the bad guys. And, he failed to exercise his resolve to stand up to Diem who lied to the US and acted after one top diplomat left before the next one (Henry Cabot Lodge) arrived including cutting off phone lines in the US embassy while Diem slaughtered and arrested a large section of the population.

If we had backed Ho Chi Minh instead of the French in the first place, HCM would not have turned to China for backing.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
You too seemed to have missed the key point in the first two episodes of the documentary: We backed a corrupt regime that took power after the French colonialists withdrew. Ho Chi Minh, on the other hand, led a revolution against colonialists and the corrupt regime which followed.

Because Kennedy cared more about looking like he was strong against the commies than he cared about what his conscience told him about the Vietnamese, he backed the bad guys. And, he failed to exercise his resolve to stand up to Diem who lied to the US and acted after one top diplomat left before the next one (Henry Cabot Lodge) arrived including cutting off phone lines in the US embassy while Diem slaughtered and arrested a large section of the population.

If we had backed Ho Chi Minh instead of the French in the first place, HCM would not have turned to China for backing.
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There was no way that any American president was going to back any communist at the time. The Cold War was waged against communism. America backed a lot of really despicable people simple because they were not communists.
 
Spindrift said:
There was no way that any American president was going to back any communist at the time. The Cold War was waged against communism. America backed a lot of really despicable people simple because they were not communists.
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That - and Ho Chi Minh was a communist from the beginning. We might have avoided the war, but a united Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh would definitely have moved itself into the Soviet sphere of influence, and would have been very despotic.

Which, in retrospect, would probably have been less bad than the war that actually happened. But it was deeply unpalatable at the time
 
crescent said:
That - and Ho Chi Minh was a communist from the beginning. We might have avoided the war, but a united Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh would definitely have moved itself into the Soviet sphere of influence, and would have been very despotic.

Which, in retrospect, would probably have been less bad than the war that actually happened. But it was deeply unpalatable at the time
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I thought Vietnam would have been like Yugoslavia if Ho had won early on before needing to go to the Soviet Union and China. Vietnam would have been within the Soviet sphere but they march to their own drummer.
 
Spindrift said:
There was no way that any American president was going to back any communist at the time. The Cold War was waged against communism. America backed a lot of really despicable people simple because they were not communists.
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What makes you think HCM was a communist as opposed to a nationalist that sought backing by the Chinese because the West turned him down?

HistoryNet
For more than 50 years, most of which he spent away from Southeast Asia, Ho worked single-mindedly to realize the end of French colonialism and the erection of a Vietnamese national state....

... When he turned to the West, Ho Chi Minh rejected the traditional conservative Vietnamese nationalist course of militarism and a mandarin society, and instead chose the course of republicanism, democracy and popular sovereignty. Meeting other Vietnamese nationalists in Paris, Ho found he could not accept their course of peaceful cooperation with the French, and sought another solution. ...

... Excited by the prospect of a peace based on President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points — especially the point concerning national self-determination of peoples — Ho drafted a modest eight-point program for Vietnam and, renting a formal suit, sought an audience with leaders of the great powers. His proposals would not have meant independence for Vietnam, but instead called for greater equity, more basic freedoms, and Vietnamese representation in the colonial government.

Unable to gain a hearing at Versailles, Ho then pursued the colonial question in the French Socialist Party, of which he was a member. At the Party Congress at Tours on Christmas Day, 1920, Ho Chi Minh sided with the Communist wing of the party since the Communists advocated immediate independence for all colonial areas.
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Skeptic Ginger said:
What makes you think HCM was a communist as opposed to a nationalist that sought backing by the Chinese because the West turned him down?

HistoryNet
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Because he was trained in the Soviet Union in 1923?
Because he helped found the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1930?

He started out as a nationalist but turned to Communism long before the Cold War.
 
Spindrift said:
Because he was trained in the Soviet Union in 1923?
Because he helped found the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1930?

He started out as a nationalist but turned to Communism long before the Cold War.
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Got a link because that's not exactly how the link I posted describes things.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Got a link because that's not exactly how the link I posted describes things.
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Those were mentioned in documentary and also wikipedia.

But from your link:
1920, Ho Chi Minh sided with the Communist wing of the party since the Communists advocated immediate independence for all colonial areas. He thus was a founding member of the French Communist Party and became the party’s leading expert on colonial matters. In 1920 and ’21 he traveled throughout France, speaking to groups of Annamese soldiers and workers who were awaiting their return to Vietnam, doubtless earning some early converts to the nationalist cause, if not to the Communist one.

The next half-dozen years were spent as the true Communist internationalist. Ho attended all of the early Comintern conferences, and became acquainted with the great figures of the Russian Communist Party, meeting Lenin probably in 1922. He lived in Moscow for several years; in 1924 as a student at the Eastern Workers’ University. In 1925,
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He traveled to Hong Kong in 1930, where he pulled the various Indochinese Communist movements together into one party. Briefly under arrest in Hong Kong, he surfaced in Moscow in 1934 as a student in the Lenin School. By 1938, he had returned to China and was serving as a radio operator with the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army, eventually becoming political commissar of a guerrilla training mission in Kwang-Si Province.
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Quite a bit more about Ho Chi Minh's communism:

Ho Chi Minh: Disciplined Communist

Thus in 1920 when he joined the Third Communist International at the Socialist Congress of Tours he had already won some experience in the European Socialist movement. In these years he became a close collaborator with some international Communist youth leaders, the Serbian Vuyo Vuyovich, the German Schüller and the Russian Shatzkin (all of whom were liquidated in the thirties).

-----

Ho Chi Minh advanced rapidly in the Southeast Asian bureau of the Communist International. However, after the Communist débâcle in Canton in 1927, the nascent Asian Communist Parties entered their most critical period; thus it was only in 1930 that Ho was able to fuse various Communist groups into an Indo-Chinese Communist Party.
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He was very much a nationalist, sources in the twenties and thirties (from the linked article) described being impressed with his nationalism, suggesting it motivated him more than communism did - but he was undoubtedly more than just a communist of convenience.

Another source:
Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969): Vietnam Communist but Nationalist by choice

He is suffering famine in Paris but he publishes articles in French communist papers. From Moscow of 1923, Dimitri Manouilski, commissar of agriculture in Ukraine, summons Ho Chi Minh to attend 18 months at the new communist university, designed to training members in clandestine activities. Ho Chi Minh is then a member of the Peasant International executive bureau, the Krestintern and attends the 5th International Congress in Moscow and sides with Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev against Trotsky (chief of the Red Army who was for an International revolution.)

In 1925, Ho is sent to Canton (China) to train and teach 300 Vietnamese communist refugees, among them is the future Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. The Chinese communists, lead by Zhu Enlai, Mao Tse tong, and Wang Jingwei enter Shanghai before their ally the nationalists of Tchang Kai-check who foment a massacre against the communists inside the city and expels them. Moscow is no longer supporting the Chinese Nationalists and Ho is recalled to Moscow. Ho is sent to Bruxelles, Berlin, and Paris. In 1929, Ho reaches Thailand from Vladivostok and unites various small Vietnamese communist parties into one and appoints Tran Phu as secretary-general.
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I'm in.

I'm a little leery, but it might have more to do with the local station airing priorities than the material.

KQED aired a segment a few weeks back as a tease, and it focused on the guys that ran to Canada, and yes, I admit to my bias in this. I have a friend that went to jail rather than submit to the draft. That I have no issue with.

I do have an issue with somebody that ran.

The joke was Canada sent us her best, and she got stuck with our worst.

I always think of this man, even before the 9/11 attacks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla
 
Spindrift said:
Those were mentioned in documentary and also wikipedia.

But from your link:
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Your interpretation differs from mine. I read HCM turned to the communists because the West was not interested in an independent Vietnam, not because HCM had a communist ideology.

Making HCM a commie boogyman has been the US propaganda since the 60s.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Your interpretation differs from mine. I read HCM turned to the communists because the West was not interested in an independent Vietnam, not because HCM had a communist ideology.

Making HCM a commie boogyman has been the US propaganda since the 60s.
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We can't really know what his intentions were, at least, I have not seen anything in his writing to points it out, other than things he wrote in the last decade of his life, long after the mold was set.

We know for certain he was an active participant in communist parties, events, and organizations for nearly 40 years before the U.S. sent in regular combat troops, and for twenty years before the Viet Minh took up arms. That's not a crime or even terribly bad - lots of basically moderate people were or associated with communists in the inter-war years. But is does show a good bit of what might have influenced him, and clearly shows who sponsored him, paying for his food, lodging and travels for most of the inter-war period.

Based on that, it seems logical that he would prefer communism to capitalism -- the USSR had been his sponsors for decades by then.
 
Spindrift said:
I've watched the first two episodes.

The first gave background history of how the French invaded and took over IndoChina in the 19th century up through the French defeat and withdrawal after WWII.

The second episode was the start of major US involvement under Kennedy.

I think the show is very balanced showing all sides. There were more than just two sides. A very complex situation is being laid out. While the inevitability of the North winning is shown, they do show some points along the way where things might have been different.

The only thing that may be lacking is someone saying the US could have won. Not sure if those people exist.
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The US did win, though.

This signature is intended to irradiate people.
 
crescent said:
We can't really know what his intentions were, at least, I have not seen anything in his writing to points it out, other than things he wrote in the last decade of his life, long after the mold was set.

We know for certain he was an active participant in communist parties, events, and organizations for nearly 40 years before the U.S. sent in regular combat troops, and for twenty years before the Viet Minh took up arms. That's not a crime or even terribly bad - lots of basically moderate people were or associated with communists in the inter-war years. But is does show a good bit of what might have influenced him, and clearly shows who sponsored him, paying for his food, lodging and travels for most of the inter-war period.

Based on that, it seems logical that he would prefer communism to capitalism -- the USSR had been his sponsors for decades by then.
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You're cherry picking to fit your bias.

We also know he grew up under French colonial occupation of his country. Foreign domination didn't sit well in dozens of countries including the US and there have been many leaders who emerged to declare and fight for independence.

My bias sees evidence his priority was independence and the communism was simply a vehicle, not an ideology.

I agree to disagree with you.
 
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