Ken Burns' Vietnam

ex-khobar Andy · Post by **ex-khobar Andy** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:28 am

Worth watching at least based on Episode 1. I did find myself watching Nixon explaining something (the domino effect) and thinking - although I disagree with this man I can respect his obvious thoughtfulness and understanding. How the hell did that happen? I don't recall a positive thought about Nixon in 40 years, although around about 2001 I might have thought that he wasn't so bad after all. Clearly context is all.

RayThom · Post by **RayThom** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 3:41 am

ex-khobar Andy wrote:Worth watching at least based on Episode 1. I did find myself watching Nixon explaining something (the domino effect) and thinking - although I disagree with this man I can respect his obvious thoughtfulness and understanding. How the hell did that happen? I don't recall a positive thought about Nixon in 40 years, although around about 2001 I might have thought that he wasn't so bad after all. Clearly context is all.

WAR... the first, and biggest casualty will always be the truth, however, its biggest battle will always be hindsight.

Burns' "Vietnam War" -- so far -- really kept me interested, and 'Déjà vu" seemed appropriate for its first episode. It was the most documented, made-for-broadcast war until its end in '75, and almost every 'in country' scene clear in my memory.

As usual, any PBS doc with Peter Coyote's commanding voice-over work is almost bound to keep you watching. I'm sure I'll be good for all eighteen hours of it regardless of Burns' directorial vision. I enjoyed his "Civil War" so I'm sure this Nam doc will not disappoint.

BoSoxGal · Post by **BoSoxGal** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 8:52 am

Working evenings now so will be watching on PBS streaming when I can fit it in. No spoilers! (Ha ha.)

Guinevere · Post by **Guinevere** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 12:19 pm

Not impressed with night 1.

"It was begun in good faith, by decent people." Um, really? Did you listen to your own show, Ken?

"Was it all worth it?" Taking down Nazi Germany was worth it. But not this war. Not at all.

Burning Petard · Post by **Burning Petard** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 12:59 pm

No good people? Ho Chi Minh looks pretty good to me in this presentation. The comment from a participant that there are no winners-- only destruction, in war, made sense to me. I did know about Ho's citation from the American Declaration of Independence. I did not know he tried to communicate with President Wilson in the negotiations after the Great War to End All Wars.

But I was put off by the frequent out-of-time conflict between what is said and the visual shown. Too frequently for me the event discussed was paired with pictures of things ten or 15 years later. This did not seem to be artistic fore-shadowing, just confused.

snailgate.

MajGenl.Meade · Post by **MajGenl.Meade** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:36 pm

Guinevere wrote:"It was begun in good faith, by decent people." Um, really? Did you listen to your own show, Ken?

Don't be so harsh

With Shelby Foote deceased, Ken needs to make up his own history this time around - good people on both sides....

BoSoxGal · Post by **BoSoxGal** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:59 pm

There are good people on both sides in every war. Beyond the universal truth that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, many very good people get caught up in war and have to make the best of a terrible situation.

Big RR · Post by **Big RR** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:42 pm

True, but then there are also those who seek to profit personally or use the war(s) to pursue their own agendas, and others who will not even think that they might be wrong, and pursue the same path long after it is pretty much acknowledged that they are. The Vietnam war has all of those.

ex-khobar Andy · Post by **ex-khobar Andy** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 9:09 pm

MajGenl.Meade wrote:
Don't be so harsh With Shelby Foote deceased, Ken needs to make up his own history this time around - good people on both sides....

Yes I am looking for a Shelby Foote character who, in my view, made the Civil War series so good. Michael Herr (Dispatches) died last year; David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest) was killed in a car accident ten years ago; and Neil Sheehan (A Bright Shining Lie) is 80 now according to Wikipedia. I hope that Burns does not believe his own reviews and thinks he can carry this off without that sort of contextual help.

Jay Ungar's music Ashokan Farewell absolutely fitted the Civil War series. Many people believed that the tune was of the period.

RayThom · Post by **RayThom** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 10:00 pm

Now here is a great period soundtrack.

MGMcAnick · Post by **MGMcAnick** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 11:33 pm

Guinevere wrote:Not impressed with night 1.

"It was begun in good faith, by decent people." Um, really? Did you listen to your own show, Ken?

"Was it all worth it?" Taking down Nazi Germany was worth it. But not this war. Not at all.

We set the DVR to record the series, but have not watched night 1 yet.
With a father and stepfather who were super patriots who fought WWII, I was not allowed to think that the Viet Nam war was bad. It was not a subject we were allowed to discuss at home. My stepfather was on the local draft board for Pete's sake. Probably sent several Petes to meet St Peter.

MajGenl.Meade · Post by **MajGenl.Meade** » Mon Sep 18, 2017 11:51 pm

Shelby Foote never provided contextual help that didn't exonerate the Confederate slavocracy.

Shelby Foote died in 2005, at the age of 88. In their obituary of him, The Guardian noted this about his three volume set Civil War: A Narrative:

There has, perhaps, never been a history, even a popular history, so devoid of ideas, or economic forces. Few historians today share Foote’s blindness toward the considerable role of blacks in the war. He scorns northern extremists, blames the abolitionists for provoking the war, and has a fondness for the murderous cavalry exploits of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose granddaughter he met as a boy, and who permitted him to swing Forrest’s sabre above his head. He did not mention that the notoriously racist Confederate general became one of the founding fathers of the Ku Klux Klan.

In fact, he outright lied - and often. Such as when he credited Jefferson Davis as being probably the best Secretary of War the U.S. ever had. And yet Davis engaged in no war as Secretary and when he did, he turned out to be crappy at it.

In episode 1 of Burn's movie, Foote declared that the Civil War happened “because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise.”

Compromise on slavery... give 'em Saturdays off perhaps? The history of the USA up until 1861 was nothing but compromise on slavery; a consistent kowtowing to southern demands for protection of slavery. And he has that story of the brave but tattered southern soldier who wasn't fighting for slavery but "because you'uns is down here". Foote never bothers to point out that they were "down there" because the SOUTH declared war on the United States; fired on the US flag and property in more than one place (altho' Sumter is the key); and was responsible for the entire shebang.

Perhaps Burns found a Donald Trump to do the analysis for Vietnam as efficiently as Foote, a noted novelist, did for the Civil War. That "good people on both sides" sure sounds familiar.

Burning Petard · Post by **Burning Petard** » Tue Sep 19, 2017 12:42 am

Episode 2.

" The more you know about American strategy in Viet Nam, the more you know the Americans cannot win.:

So have we learned anything? Are we doing any better in Afghanistan?

snailgate

RayThom · Post by **RayThom** » Tue Sep 19, 2017 12:53 am

Burning Petard wrote:Episode 2... So have we learned anything? Are we doing any better in Afghanistan?
snailgate

Class, this is what we have learned so far today, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Our military-industrial complex depends upon it.

God bless America.

ex-khobar Andy · Post by **ex-khobar Andy** » Tue Sep 19, 2017 1:58 am

MajGenl.Meade wrote:Shelby Foote never provided contextual help that didn't exonerate the Confederate slavocracy.

There is an excellent article (which your comment prompted me to rediscover) in The Atlantic: in which he says, in part: I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar. I read that when it came out - I really had not seen that (his support for the South) in his participation in the series. I wouldn't mind watching it again with that knowledge in mind.

Your comment reminds me of something else: I first read Catch-22 when I was 16 (1966) and thought of it as a series of yarns, often funny, about WW2. I read it again maybe 10 years later when of course we had gone through Vietnam, and I realized how much it was an anti-war polemic. Life experience changes how you see things.

MajGenl.Meade · Post by **MajGenl.Meade** » Tue Sep 19, 2017 2:50 am

Well yeah - he'd fight to preserve slavery which was the sole declared cause of the south. He advised blacks who were offended by the Confederate battle flag to read the Confederate Constitution. To get a better idea, you know. The constitution that declared slavery to be perpetual; from the government that denied the US government the right to mandate on slavery but imposed that restriction on its own states.

The man was wrong. Plain wrong and plain ignorant.
But he told stories that made white folks feel folksy

Econoline · Post by **Econoline** » Tue Sep 19, 2017 4:12 am

Guinevere wrote:Not impressed with night 1.

"It was begun in good faith, by decent people." Um, really? Did you listen to your own show, Ken?

Um, really? If that was your only take-away from the whole 1½ hours you must have seen a different show than I did. (And if after seeing it you then asked the question "Did you listen to your own show, Ken?" I suspect you must have seen or heard something during the course of the episode that demonstrated that no, it was *NOT* "begun in good faith, by decent people.")

Guinevere wrote:"Was it all worth it?" Taking down Nazi Germany was worth it. But not this war. Not at all.

Of course you and I (and many others) already knew the answer to that question, but I see nothing wrong with posing a rhetorical question and then letting it hang in the air for the next 18 hours until any intelligent viewer can see the obvious answer.

I was pretty impressed, myself, at the way he went way back to the beginning of the French colonial period to set the stage for what eventually happened more than a century later, and that he told so much about the life and travels of Nguyễn Tất Thành, who later became Nguyễn Ái Quốc, and eventually became Hồ Chí Minh. Oh, and also that so many of the "talking heads" were Vietnamese.

The title of the episode was "Déjà vu"—and as someone who came of age in the 1960s I can already see how Burns is setting the stage for showing how so many of the mistakes made by the U.S. were completely avoidable repeats of the same mistakes made earlier by the French.

RayThom wrote:Class, this is what we have learned so far today, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Yes, indeed. Also too: "Those who DO remember the past are condemned to watch others repeat it."

Guinevere · Post by **Guinevere** » Thu Sep 21, 2017 5:30 pm

The last two nights have been incredibly sad, not sure if I will watch more tonight.

I'm also still not impressed with the film structure or production quality. The talking heads are often out of synch with their voices, and on day 1 (but not since that I have noticed) the titles were cut off. Plus the skipping around is jarring. I'm not finding any good narrative line to follow or one that seems compelling.

Burning Petard · Post by **Burning Petard** » Thu Sep 21, 2017 7:36 pm

Reality is like that most of the time. But then again, I know Fairmont Missouri and knew the owner of the insurance office on that calendar he carried last night.

snailgate

RayThom · Post by **RayThom** » Thu Sep 21, 2017 7:57 pm

I'm not learning much that's new so my expectations are low. However, I have no problems seeing all this from a different POV and, so far, no major complaints.

Remember, it's a documentary... not "Apocalypse Now."

Check it out. Burns was on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross earlier tonight. I felt he defended his work quite well.
http://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=552704896:552704902

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