I just watched Burns’ and Novick’s first episode, and, predictably perhaps for a mainstream take on the US war against Vietnam, it was jarring, upsetting, infuriating, impressive, appalling, and moving. Here’s my initial take, and I’m interested in hearing other perspectives. (As this is a quick take, I apologize, but I’m not including historical footnotes).
The opening montage, showing infamous clips from the war running in reverse, I found heartbreaking and extremely effective — what if we could have turned back time and reversed all the suffering of the tale that is about to un-spool?
The first part (of 10), attempts to introduce the series and cover the century+ from 1859-1961. It’s far too much to try to cover in 80 minutes.
This problem was exacerbated by the filmmakers’ bizarre choice to randomly inter-cut this history with (admittedly quite moving) interviews with US combat veterans who fought in Vietnam, not in the time period being discussed, but in the late 1960s. What are they doing there? My interpretation is that Burns and Novick were afraid that a first episode that focused so much on the historical suffering of the Vietnamese people would scare away racist viewers in the US who they feared wouldn’t watch unless the sufferings of predominantly white people were randomly and nonsensically interspersed. So Burns and Novick made the racist and nationalistic choice to pander, even at the expense of the coherence of their own film. I hope they abandon this practice in the remaining episodes, and instead include these vital testimonies in chronological context.
Now, this interpretation must be tempered by the fact that Burns and Novick deserve credit for making the first episode focus largely on the suffering and resistance of the Vietnamese people to the invasions of the French, the Japanese, and then the incipient invasion of the US. Towards the very beginning, the film makes the all important point that while the US lost over 58,000 soldiers fighting in Vietnam, there were an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians killed. I would have wanted the scale of this murderous destruction to have been illustrated in a filmic way. Can you imagine a pan of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ memorial wall, and then an image that showed that wall — multiplied by 40 — to represent the Vietnamese victims?
Strangely, by the way, the invasions of Vietnam by the Chinese, and the resulting deep historical legacies (see, for example the work of Frances Fitzgerald), get about half a line. The war crimes committed by the Nationalist Chinese who were invited by the great powers to invade Vietnam at the end of World War II to re-take it from the Japanese military, for example, are never mentioned, even though they are essential to understanding Ho Chi Minh’s motives for attempting to negotiate with the British and the French as they re-invaded after WWII.
The film also deserves much credit for incorporating Vietnamese voices from a few sides of the conflict into the mix on a regular basis. They add a vital humanizing element, and these kinds of interviews have been woefully absent from most of the previous documentaries on the subject.
The framing at the beginning of the film was similarly mixed. To its credit, the film does say up front that many Vietnamese regard the war, not as a civil war, but as one of a series of wars for national independence. On the other hand, Geoffrey Ward, the screenwriter, makes the egregious claim that the US phase of the Vietnam War was “begun in good faith by decent people.” Huh? Good faith? If there’s one thing that almost all sides of the conflict agree upon it’s that US Presidents and military leaders in particular lied the country into war, lying early, lying often, lying regularly, lying systematically, and lying quite consciously. The sheer magnitude, audacity, and frequency of these lies were what made Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers so electrifying: the papers proved that the anti-war movement, if anything, had underestimated the mendacity of US government military and political leaders.
Indeed, the film skips over the many lies told by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s in the lead up to the war. The film does mention that “everyone” knew that Ho Chi Minh would have won the election of 1956 if there had been a free and fair election throughout the country as called for by the 1954 Geneva accords, but it omits the fact that Eisenhower acknowledged that fact in his memoirs even as the US lied about following the Geneva accords. The film elides these lies by using the pernicious passive voice, saying, “The election would never be held,” instead of admitting that the US and Diem refused to allow the elections.
In the film, Diem magically becomes the leader of the newly created state of South Vietnam. The fact that the US government hand picked him and installed him as a puppet ruler was omitted. Instead, they featured Leslie Gelb puckishly and grotesquely claiming that the US was the “victim” of Diem, because, once in office, Diem realized how reliant the US was on him, and so didn’t always follow US government diktats. In reality, the Vietnamese people were the victims of Diem’s repressive rule, a regime underwritten and created by the US, until the moment that JFK deposed him. As Daniel Ellsberg so memorably says in the best film I’ve ever seen on the Vietnam War, the Academy-Award winning Hearts and Minds, describing the US creation of South Vietnam, “The US was not on the wrong side of a civil war. The US was the wrong side.” (I haven’t seen the film in years, so that might not be an exact quote).
Before this point, the film had set us up to understand the crucial truth that the US was the next in a line of colonial powers trying to impose its dominance on the people of Vietnam. The film does emphasize the crucial points that Ho Chi Minh appealed to Wilson at Versailles after WWI to support self-determination for Vietnam, was on the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) payroll during WWII to fight the Japanese military, that Ho Chi Minh hoped to appeal to a US anti-colonial impulse, and that, instead, the US sided with the French, paying, by the end of the war, 80% of French war costs in Vietnam.
But then, at this crucial turning point, the film looks away, refusing to admit that the US imposition of a government on a South Vietnam that was itself a fiction created by the United States was a bloody colonial act doomed because it violated the nationalist aspirations of the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese.
The one intimation of this truth is an extremely well chosen quotation from JFK as a Senator about how, if the US does not become anti-colonialist, it will fail in Vietnam. But then the film skips ahead to JFK as a bellicose Presidential candidate, and fails to explore what motivated him to reverse his position. Similarly, the film features several men identified as South Vietnamese diplomats expressing their hatred of the French colonizers, but fails to explore with them what motivated them to then work for the US colonizers.
It’s possible that this was motivated by the repressiveness of Ho Chi Minh’s regime in the North, but this too was minimized. The North Vietnamese regime’s murder of thousands of opponents in 1946 is mentioned, but the North Vietnamese late 1950s murder (via mini-Great Leap Forward) of hundreds of thousands or more Vietnamese peasants was minimized with a single sentence about “thousands” dying as a result.
There was also a lack of women interviewees, with only one Vietnamese woman included. No Buddhist critics of either the Diem or Ho Chi Minh regimes was interviewed in this first episode. There were no US anti-war critics of the US policies of the 1940s and 1950s included in the first episode.
Overall, I found the first episode an extremely mixed bag. Especially in the interviews with Vietnamese survivors, at its best it offers the prospect of helping the US reexamine the war, our moral culpability for the war crimes committed by the US, and prospects for anti-war movements to better prevent future such atrocities. At its worst, it will paper over these topics and become reduced to the too-easy formula of “war is hell for all sides but the troops were brave.” I hope, as future episodes focus on only a year or two, that some of the failures I describe above will be attenuated, though I fear that the ideological blinkers evident in the first episode might fore-doom the series.