Todd Gitlin Response to Jerry Lembcke

I beg to disagree with Jerry, though I’m an admirer of his book The Spitting Image. Now I have to say that I’ve seen only the first half of the series—the first 5 episodes. Thus I haven’t yet gotten to the returning GI SFO airport story Jerry leads with.  But in the first half I have seen no false balancing. Every frame shows, & virtually every line spoken says, that the war was atrocious, a calamity created by wrongheaded, often stupid, often vicious decisions. The evil is American evil. Not only are a number of American vets taken seriously as the film tracks their (mostly) disillusion, but the North Vietnamese and “Viet Cong” veterans are taken seriously—it’s quite amazing, I have to say, to see coverage of the same battle from both sides. (There are two such battles in early episodes.) The travails of the North Vietnamese and NLF are vividly and compellingly present (and informative: I for one didn’t know about big fights in NVN about Tet, leading essentially to the sidelining of Ho for a time). I don’t think anyone before has depicted the ways in which the US funded & otherwise backed the French colonial war. Ho Chi Minh is a hero. His POV is the dominant one in the French colonial episode.

I agree that many dimensions are scanted or missing—GI opposition to and resistance against the war; so many dimensions of the American convulsion & resistance; and overall, the immensity and range of the antiwar movement. (I wrote an essay on the movement’s impact for the companion volume, edited by Burns and Geoffrey Ward, but had nothing to do with the making of the film itself. I think it’s fair to say that my piece celebrates the movement.) There are a few words (but only a few) that are ill-chosen:  the one I’ve seen quoted is this, as in the morning NYT:  "It was, the narrator Peter Coyote says, 'begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.’” Decent people? Good faith? Well, if you thought the worst thing that could have happened after 1954 was reunification under Ho, then you could make a case for good faith but it was in the name of utter incomprehension. “Decent” goes way too far—as perhaps did our beloved Paul Potter in Washington, April, 17, 1965:  "I do not believe that the President or Mr. McNamara or Mr. Rusk or even McGeorge Bundy are particularly evil men. If asked to throw napalm on the back of a ten-year-old child they would shrink in horror–but their decisions have led to mutilation and death of thousands and thousands of people.

As did Carl Oglesby in his famous denunciation of Bundy, McNamara, at al. as liberals.” I would not say “decent." I would not have written those lines. But I don’t think there are many of them in the voice-over. And nothing is more overwhelmingly damning of the fucking war than the extended footage of US/ARVN viciousness, stupidity, damage, lies. It pounds into your head something like this: The ideas and people who made this war did great and systematic evil. 

After I watched one episode, at a public screening, with everything writ even larger across a big screen, I felt once again that I was standing at the brink of hell—which, I’m pretty confident (but who knows?) is exactly what most younger or neutral or uniformed viewers would feel and think; that this was was an abomination, it was unnecessary, it was intellectually crazy and criminally stupid, and nothing like it should ever be done again. This is what I would want a viewer to think about that hell of our youths.

As I was writing the above, I see Steve Goldsmith’s correct observation about the disproportionate damage done to the US and VN. He’s right, of course.   If I’d been writing the series I would have led and closed with Steve's observations. (Again, what gets said about the scale of the damage in the second half of the series, I don’t know.) And. This is a film with mainstream sponsorship that’s going to be seen by millions, or tens of millions (I hope) of Americans, who think of America First.  They are the people we live among, not necessarily the people we wish to live among. They will, I’m confident, come to the right conclusion:  In the words of the December 1964 SDS resolution deciding to March on Washington, “"SDS advocates that the United States get out of Vietnam for the following reasons: a) war hurts the Vietnamese people; b) war hurts the American people; c) SDS is concerned about Vietnamese and American people.”

I also agree with this assessment by our comrade Maurice Isserman (whom I’m taking the liberty of adding to this list), writing in Dissent (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/ken-burns-lynn-novick-vietnam-war-review):

The overwhelming impression given through their testimony is that the anti-communist South Vietnamese government was a corrupt, ramshackle travesty, dependent on U.S. patronage from its founding in 1954 to its collapse in 1975, without political legitimacy. Through the testimony of their witnesses, Burns and Novick portray the Vietnamese Communist Party, the determined opponent of the sham Saigon government, as brutal and ruthless, but suggest nevertheless that it represented a powerful and genuine wave of nationalist sentiment. They do not celebrate the eventual triumph of the Communists, but they make it clear that this outcome was all but inevitable. The United States professed to be fighting in defense of a heroic independent ally, but instead stood in the path of Vietnamese self-determination. And in doing so, conducted a war that proved an atrocious waste of human life, both American and Vietnamese.

Maurice goes on:

The bad news is that in their portrayal of the war’s opponents, Burns and Novick are, at best, inconsistent, at worst, intellectually lazy.

The narrator (the excellent Peter Coyote, formerly of the San Francisco Mime Troupe), says in the series’ final episode, “Meaning can be found in the individual stories of those who lived through [the war].” That is and has always been Burns’s credo as a documentary-maker. He is not primarily an idea guy—he’s a story-teller (which, of course, is key to his popularity). Story-tellers are necessarily selective—the stories they choose and the ways in which they decide to tell them determine the narrative’s larger purpose.

In the stories they tell in the series, Burns and Novick manage simultaneously to offer a thorough indictment of the war, and a dismissal of most of the people who were committed to ending it. It’s both antiwar and anti–antiwar movement. The one protest against the war the film truly admires is the October 1969 “Moratorium,” which turned out several million people in peaceful protest across the country, and was indeed an impressive achievement on the part of organizers and participants. But in the series, it is used to denigrate the rest of the movement. 

As I said, I haven’t gotten to the second half of the series yet. But Maurice is mistaken about one thing:  In the 1967 episode, #5, there’s an extended treatment of the March on the Pentagon, which is not at all dismissed. 

I don’t think the movement is so much denigrated as short-shrifted. Which is a fair criticism. But I’ll be thinking about this as I watch the second half.

Best to all,

Todd

Todd ix professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University.  He is the author of 16 books including The Sixties and of a chapter on the anti-war movement in the companion book for The Vietnam War.

Reply from Jerry

Friends:

Burns and Novick begin Episode #1 with Karl Marlantes’s claim that coming home was nearly as traumatic as the war itself. Episode #9 opens with Marlantes being driven away from his airport home-coming with snarling protesters assaulting the car—accompanied with visuals created by Burns and Novick resembling so closely those of “Bob’s” arrival home in the 1978 film Coming Home that Fonda and company could claim plagiarism. Then in the Episode #10 finale we have the Biberman lament of having called Vietnam veterans “baby killer.”

We know the technique: tell the readers/viewers what they are going to see and, at the end, tell them what they have seen.

As Todd Gitlin suggests, Burns and Novick have packed plenty in the middle. This is, after all, 18-hrs long, so there is plenty of middle. But the bulk of it is battle, after battle, after battle—the New York Times reporter counted 25. Some of which support a war-is-hell narrative. But war-is-hell has failed as an antiwar slogan a long time ago, especially when, here, we see troops, all 18-20 years old the film has us believe (in yet another of the many myths, clichés, and tropes strung together in this film) loading into those choppers with CCRs “Bad Moon Rising” thumping with the wop, wop, wop of the rotor blades. This was the rock-and-roll, lock-and-load war wasn’t it?

The US government comes off looking deplorable just as Todd says and there is merit in Burns and Novick telling that as it was. But what’s new? Admittedly, I’m not the expert historian on the matter (so I’m ready to listen), but what in the film about government lying and general malfeasance that cost millions of lives have we not known since the Pentagon Papers?

Make no mistake. This film uses Vietnam veterans, not so much as eyewitnesses to a war that we don’t know about—as they were, of course, during the war years—but as props for rewriting the lost-war story into a coming-home-to-the-war-at-home narrative, the story that the real war was the one lost at Columbia, in Ann Arbor, Madison, and Berkeley.   

Jerry Lembcke