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| 1 |
ID:
159674
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| Summary/Abstract |
To a serious student of Vietnamese history, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War is both refreshing and maddeningly unimaginative. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the mini-series is the inclusion of politically diverse Vietnamese voices. The film boasts a rich tapestry of interviews with North and South Vietnamese veterans, communist guerilla fighters, and Vietnamese refugees. Their stories are interwoven with more familiar accounts of American soldiers, protestors, and government officials. Although the filmmakers give more airtime to American perspectives, The Vietnam War does a far better job of acknowledging competing Vietnamese viewpoints than most documentaries. Burns and Novick hoped that this “many sides” approach would convey the multifaceted complexity of the war. As they write in the companion volume to the documentary, “From the start, we vowed to each other that we would avoid the limits of a binary political perspective and the shortcuts of conventional wisdom and superficial history. This was a war of many perspectives, a Rashomon of equally plausible ‘stories,’ of secrets, lies, and distortions at every turn.”1
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| 2 |
ID:
159679
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| Summary/Abstract |
The early stages of Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territories were reversible. To avoid pressure, Israel practiced deception regarding the civilian nature of settlements. The Johnson administration, distracted by Vietnam and lacking foresight, was unaware of Israeli deception until well into its “lame duck” period.
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| 3 |
ID:
159669
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| Summary/Abstract |
It is not surprising that the recent generation of intellectuals, who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is “image-making” and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery, should almost automatically fall back on the older adages of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for “theory.” To them, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people with whom carrot-and-stick methods do not work either.1
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| 4 |
ID:
159671
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| Summary/Abstract |
For the five Vietnamese students who traveled the United States on a State Department tour in the fall of 1965, it must have been nerve-wracking, if not downright terrifying, to stand before a group of students at the University of California-Berkeley and plead the Republic of Vietnam’s case. At some stops on the trip, American antiwar student groups accused the Vietnamese delegates of being “stooges” of South Vietnam’s government. Other antiwar groups refused to meet with the delegation. A State Department evaluation of the tour concluded that while the students were more effective than Vietnamese or American government officials in conveying the political situation in South Vietnam to American students, the most receptive audiences consisted of those who already supported the U.S. alliance with South Vietnam. It was not as though most Americans were uninterested in the students’ perspectives; the State Department received more booking requests than the delegation could fill.1 Yet by speaking primarily to like-minded listeners, the Vietnamese students remained out of earshot of the skeptics and those who believed that Vietnamese who supported the Saigon government or opposed Hanoi and the National Liberation Front were puppets of the authorities or the Americans.
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| 5 |
ID:
159672
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 1989, I began my doctoral studies at the University of Kentucky. Soon, I discovered that I was an outlier as the vast majority of my colleagues studied some aspect of the Vietnam War, which was not surprising given our primary advisor was George Herring. While I continued focusing on Latin America, I never escaped the pull of the Vietnam War. It always lingered in discussions of modern U.S.–Central American relations, particularly in the 1980s. But more importantly, my own research interests pulled me in that direction (I think subconsciously George played a role also).
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| 6 |
ID:
159677
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| Summary/Abstract |
Twelve hours into The Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick cut from a carefully crafted segment on American prisoners in Vietnam and their contested place in the war’s politics and diplomacy to something less familiar to American viewers: the plight of 200,000 Vietnamese civilians and 40,000 communist combatants detained in South Vietnam's squalid prisons. As images of Con Son’s subterranean “tiger cages” appear on screen a Vietnamese man recounts how “puppet intelligence officers tortured me on the orders of the CIA … They used electricity from the wall outlet to shock me. They poured water in my mouth and held my mouth shut, so the water couldn’t come out. When I stopped breathing they had to stop.” At the mention of waterboarding, the directors cut from these subtitled words to their speaker, identified as “Nguyen Tai, N. Vietnamese Spy.” We look into his eyes and note his slight tremor as he concludes, “I still feel pain. The pain was unbelievably deep.”
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| 7 |
ID:
159667
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| Summary/Abstract |
I will begin with a declaration that might once have been provocative but may today be received as a statement of simple fact: the American World Order is collapsing.
The symptoms of crisis are unavoidable. Let’s start with the most obvious. Last November, the American people elected Donald Trump. Trump is a longstanding critic of international commitments. As long ago as 1987, he published in The New York Times a paid advertisement, in which he disparaged America’s military alliances as a waste of money.
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| 8 |
ID:
159673
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| Summary/Abstract |
I’ll admit it. I have never been a fan of Ken Burns. While sympathetic to his clear passion for history, and to his desire to bring his stories to a wide audience, I have consistently found his films and series to be watered-down, formulaic, and ultimately uninteresting. For all of these reasons, I go into any Burns documentary with fairly low expectations; I’m usually hoping at most for a couple sequences that I can use in my courses, that can help communicate important ideas and events powerfully to reach students in ways that other formats cannot or do not. And use them I have. There are some sequences in The Civil War, The West, and, in particular, New York, that have been staples of my undergraduate surveys for years. Situational pedagogical usefulness, of course, does not validate the film as a work of historical explanation. Those larger films suffered from the same repetitive, over-simplified approach as his works on baseball and jazz, which my sport and music historian colleagues almost universally revile. So, given all of the above, and the fact that I write and teach about the American War in Vietnam for a living, I went into the viewing of Burns’s PBS documentary The Vietnam War with appropriately low expectations.
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| 9 |
ID:
159678
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines South Vietnam’s global diplomacy after constitutional government was restored in 1967. Far from an American puppet, the Saigon government showed considerable initiative spanning the globe for prospective allies. But its bid for international legitimacy ended in failure, with increased global exposure only underscoring its collapsing domestic support.
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| 10 |
ID:
159675
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Vietnam War, a new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is one of the filmmakers’ most ambitious projects. The ten-episode series aired on PBS last fall and seeks to be a definitive and comprehensive narrative history of the war. Burns and Novick focus on the period from 1965 to 1973, when American ground troops fought alongside the South Vietnamese. In an effort to explain how the war has profoundly affected American society and culture, they also cover the anti-war movement and political developments in the United States. The filmmakers interviewed dozens of American and Vietnamese participants, whose voices and stories personalize this complicated history. The series requires a significant time commitment from viewers—together the episodes are eighteen hours long—but offers a stunning visual account of one of the most controversial and complex events in the twentieth century. The documentary is accessible to general audiences and poses many questions about the causes of the war in Vietnam, how and why the United States became involved, and the legacies of the conflict. Ultimately, however, the documentary raises more questions than it answers.
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| 11 |
ID:
159668
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| Summary/Abstract |
When The Vietnam War premiered on PBS in September 2017 it heralded, as with all Ken Burns, Lynn Novick productions, a moment of national reflection on the past. Ten years in the making, it was designed in its scale (ten episodes, eighteen hours), its soundtrack rich with Big Chill-generation standards, and its production values to resonate with as wide an audience as possible and to stand as a monument of the documentarian's art. Viewers could order a companion volume authored by Geoffrey Ward and online they could view it in Spanish, Vietnamese, or Explicit Language versions. PBS offered teachers free DVDs along with lesson plans and discussion.
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| 12 |
ID:
159676
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| Summary/Abstract |
“What is a war story, and what makes a good one?”1 These questions, articulated by Viet Thanh Nguyen in his masterful treatise on war and memory, Nothing Ever Dies, reverberated in my mind as I watched the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick ten-part series, The Vietnam War.2 Over the course of eighteen plus hours, Burns and Novick tell a complex story of the war through historic footage as well as intimate interviews. They introduce viewers to a diverse range of people: men and women, whites and people of color, grunts and those in leadership, those in the midst of battle and those further removed, soldiers and civilians, those who fought in the war and those who refused service, those who supported the war and those in the antiwar movement. As the series unfolds, Burns and Novick reveal how some of these dichotomies break down; people with doubts about the war nevertheless chose to fight, and those who fought also protested the war. Notably, Burns and Novick seek to tell not just a U.S. story, but also one that features the memories and perspectives of Vietnamese allies and enemies. As the tagline for the series emphasizes, “There is no single truth in war.” Instead, the series reveals and juxtaposes a range of conflicting emotions, memories, interpretations, and political beliefs.
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| 13 |
ID:
159670
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| Summary/Abstract |
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick bookend their documentary series, The Vietnam War, with several haunting images of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Two of those images show portions of panels 1W and 53W, each of which includes a name that might have surprised many viewers: Mary T. Klinker and Pamela D. Donovan. Klinker, an Air Force nurse from Lafayette, Indiana, died on April 4, 1975, in a plane crash during Operation Babylift, an ill-fated attempt to evacuate South Vietnamese orphans in the war’s final days. Donovan, an Irish immigrant who became an American citizen to join the Army Nurse Corps and serve in Vietnam, succumbed to pneumonia on July 8, 1968. Surely, the filmmakers’ inclusion of two of the eight women listed on the Wall was not accidental, likely intended to reflect the diversity of Americans who lost their lives during the war. Viewers had to be paying careful attention to notice, however. If one did not read the women’s names on the panels, only the brief inclusion of Army nurse Joan Furey in episode eight would have indicated that American women served in any capacity during the war.
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