Burns/Novick: The Vietnam War

crescent

Philosopher
crescent
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
6,086
Location
Colorado
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.
 
Last edited:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

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).
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Last edited:
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.....
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom