Ken Burns - The Modern American Historian

This week, hundreds of Washington insiders gathered in the Kennedy Center Opera House for an advance screening of Ken Burns’ new documentary on Vietnam. Before Burns showed half a dozen choice clips from his 10-part, 18-hour film, he asked everyone who served in the military during the war to stand so they could be recognized. John McCain and John Kerry were among those who rose. Burns then asked anyone who protested Vietnam to also stand. Dozens did. “I couldn’t tell the difference,” Burns remarked, referring to both groups. The veterans, including McCain, joined the audience in applauding the anti-war demonstrators. So, has Vietnam ceased to be a running sore like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion?

I first heard of Ken Burns some twenty years ago when I watched his opus, the documentary series on the American Civil War. He wrote the script, he sewed together the history with the use of maps, biographies, newspapers, paintings and especially original photographs and letters from combatants and non-combatants read by professional actors. He produced a masterpiece. Having read the three volume Civil War history by Shelby Foote, I found Burns’ approach so much more digestible.

Burns followed the treatment of the Civil War by television histories of, amongst others, The Dust Bowl, Baseball, Prohibition, The Roosevelts and now Vietnam. He is painstaking in the way he clarifies and knits history together. Sure there are dates, places and events but the analysis he brings shines a torch on his topics. I look forward to watching the latest epic whose story will, I’m sure, cover not only the history and events in south-east Asia but also the turmoil and politics at home. It is undoubtedly one of the darkest and most divisive chapters in American history.

From 1954, when the French were humiliated by North Vietnamese guerrillas at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam was the Achilles heel of American foreign policy. I cannot prove that Vietnam ruined the Eisenhower presidency but it was a major element of a failed Cold War policy, the domino theory: if one nation falls to communism others will follow. Likewise, I cannot be certain that Vietnam, rather than Cuba, was the underlying reason for Kennedy’s assassination but three weeks before his death he announced a potential removal from Vietnam, to the shock of the Joint Chiefs and others.

What cannot be denied is that two giant Presidents, Johnson and Nixon, were defeated by their Vietnam policies. Johnson decided to escalate the conflict, aided by his mastery of a weak Congress who, by passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, gave LBJ carte blanche for the escalation. Two points: first, there was an alleged attack on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin which fired up the executive and legislative branches of the US government and the nation alike. The trouble is the attack did not happen. Second, the conflict was an undeclared war, the longest in American history. Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to declare war but it never did. The War Powers Act of 1973 sought to control the executive in this regard.

Despite some 200,000 American soldiers fighting for the South at any one time and more than three million overall, the war never looked like being won. Huge demonstrations against the war in DC, New York and other big cities divided the country. In truth, Johnson never had control of the war either in Vietnam or at home.

Nixon never expected to win the war. In 1968, the eminent television journalist, Walter Cronkite, declared the Tet offensive a loss when, in military terms, it was a win. Cronkite forecast a stalemate in Vietnam. That year Nixon sought election on a Vietnamese peace with honour platform. He accepted Cronkite’s assessment.  By 1972, Nixon’s re-election year, peace was still far away. Too many government leaks, as well as the publication of The Pentagon Papers, caused Nixon to introduce an anti-leak policy, operated from the White House by The Plumbers. There is a direct line to the June, 1972, Watergate break-in and impeachment.

The American withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1974 was soon followed by the hasty departure and emergency evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon. President Gerald Ford was no challenge for Jimmy Carter that year.

I am certain that Ken Burns will cover all these events in far greater detail and, perhaps with an analysis different from mine. If so, I will not object. He is a zealous researcher without an axe to grind. I commend you all to his histories.