It was the first war fought on TV – and now documentary master Ken Burns brings the most extraordinary look at Vietnam ever to the small screen. And from guerrilla truths to dead people’s testimonies, it will rock history
It’s rare for someone who makes TV documentaries to become the subject of one. But earlier this year, Tom Hanks hosted a tribute show called Ken Burns: America’s Storyteller. Colleagues, historians and even presidents praised the work of a film-maker who has consistently encouraged Americans to look to their past.
Burns made his name with The Civil War in 1990, analysing historical divisions in the US from 1861-65. Now, he burnishes his supremacy among factual film-makers by tackling the second great nation-splitting conflict that occurred exactly a century later.
The Vietnam War – co-directed by Burns and his regular collaborator, Lynn Novick – has the advantage over The Civil War of being able to feature personal testimony and TV news footage but otherwise repeats the virtues of his earlier series: authoritative commentary, exhaustive research and scrupulous negotiation of disputed facts.
Even so, the US’s intervention on behalf of south Vietnam against the communist regime in the north created rifts in US society – between left and right, young and old – that still affect politics and culture today, making this the most contentious project Burns has ever attempted.
Such is the breadth of analysis here that Burns suggests the roots of the conflict began even before the story he told in The Civil War: the opening episode (of 10) is date-stamped “1858-1961”. Viewers’ double-take at that number 18 is soothed by a typically erudite explanation of the way French colonial ambitions in south-east Asia established faultlines that shaped the US’s later intervention.
A key insight in the opening episode comes from a retired CIA operative who argues that, when the US initially intervened on behalf of the French, it fatally assumed an overlap between De Gaulle’s imperialist ambition and the US’s anti-communist paranoia. Vietnamese resistance to French interests, the old spook says, should in retrospect have been seen “as the end of the colonial era, not the start of a cold war”.
The early programmes could have done more (especially for an international audience) to explain the toxin of anti-communism in the US at the time: there is no mention of the red-hunts of Senator McCarthy, which surely did as much to create the context for the US’s misjudgment as a mistaken solidarity with French aims.
Burns and Novick are noted for the even-handedness of their histories and here, the impartiality crucially extends to Vietnamese testimony. During a sequence on a surprise US military setback early in the conflict, a former north Vietnamese guerrilla fighter remembers: “From that moment, we were no longer scared of the enemy.”
As always in Burns’s work, there’s a sense of days of conversations edited down to killer lines. A diplomat recalls US commander General Westmoreland boasting that he was killing 10 Vietnamese for every one American casualty, and being told: “But Westy, Americans don’t care about the 10, they care about the one.”
The speakers are captioned with their roles at the time: “Neil Sheehan, journalist”; “Karl Marlantes, marine.” Those intros omit to say that these witnesses went on to write definitive accounts of the war – Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, Marlantes’ Matterhorn – but this literary hinterland explains the high quality of their contributions. “We thought we were an exception to history: the Americans,” says Sheehan. “We thought we would never fight a wrong war.”