Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War Will Change the Way You Think of America

The legendary filmmakers talk to GQ about their incredibly ambitious 18-hour documentary and how the war was a failure of human behavior on every level.
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“The veneer of civilization is very thin.” Those are the words of one veteran interviewed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for The Vietnam War, a new 18-hour PBS documentary, attempting to explain what he saw young men doing to each other after they’d been shipped off to fight a war that many didn’t believe was worth dying for. It could also be applied to what Twitter has been like recently, and the events in Charlottesville a few months ago. At least, that’s where my mind went.

But Burns and Novick are reticent to draw cheap comparisons between the Vietnam War and our present moment. It’s not that they don’t see the parallels—asymmetrical warfare in a distant land, a lying president, public unrest—they obviously do. It’s because they’re sick of how hasty everyone is to make sense of everything. The duo lived through the war and the protests and everything after, and they waited 40 years to even start to try to understand what happened. That was 2006. $30 million dollars and ten years later and they’ve got a massive, prickly, painful buffet all laid out for us. It’s time, they seem to be saying, for Americans to slow down and take a long, hard look at one of the darkest passages of the 20th century.

Burns and Novick also don’t want your reviews. And they certainly don’t want your takes. You see, their idea, which was both brilliant and laboriously dutiful, was to tackle the magnitude of the task of making sense of all that madness by covering every possible angle. They got North Vietnamese and Viet Cong veterans. They got peaceniks. They got South Vietnamese civilians and unrepentant hawks. They sourced their funding from literally everywhere—David H. Koch, The Ford Foundation, Bank of America, and the government alike. They conspicuously left out interviews with big heads like John Kerry and John McCain and Jane Fonda, preferring to tell those stories with original footage. Those people have an agenda. So do many historians and Vietnam experts who were consulted, but remained largely off camera.

The result is undeniable. You literally can’t deny it because it’s simply the recollections of the people who lived through it. I got Burns and Novick on the phone to talk about how they did it, and to ask if there’s any hope for us now. (There is.)


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GQ: The anti-war movement is a big part of this film. There’s an amazing moment when a woman expresses remorse for calling veterans “baby-killers” to their faces. What about the hardliners who haven’t learned or softened over the years? Why is it important to include their perspectives?

Ken Burns: You realize that most of us are in our hardened silos whatever we think our position is, and the best thing to do is be open and listen together. What we try to do in the film is create a space where all of these diverse perspectives could be represented and feel in some ways that they could be safe. That we didn’t have a political agenda, we didn’t have an axe to grind, but we were umpires calling balls and strikes however they fell.

We just didn’t have a party line. And it made the film, I think, that much more generous, and made it possible for the film to communicate lots of diverse points of view that then we just throw it back to the listener the viewer and say, Well, what do you think?

This film brings things up to the surface that I didn’t know, especially in hearing from the Vietnamese perspective, North and South, civilian and military. Hearing directly from Viet Cong veterans is astonishing. What do you think Americans misunderstand about the war?

Lynn Novick: Just the other day we were on the stage with John Musgrave, [an American vet] who’s featured prominently in the film. He was asked, “What did you learn from watching the film?” And he said that for the first time he appreciated the humanity of the men he was trying to kill.

One of the lasting domestic repercussions of the Vietnam War was the dramatic decline of Americans trust in their government. Now that trust is lower than ever. Do you think that will ever be recovered?

One veteran said the two most significant lessons of the war were: you have to know your enemy, and be mindful of the limits of military power. Those were two things that we had to learn the hard way.

KB: Yes, I do. I think Vietnam proves that whatever we think about the current moment, it’s not as bad as it was then. As much as we are disposed to see the present calamities as a the-sky-is-falling type moment, American history proves to have moments many, many more times worse in which our republic was threatened.

There’s a valuable lesson to be learned for us, here. A kind of patience. A tolerance. Perhaps even an optimism. That may be my own rose-colored glasses. But as one of our North Vietnamese soldiers was saying, he thought [at the time that] the [anti-war] protests were a sign of weakness, but now saw it as a kind of strength in us. Sometimes what might appear in the moment to be negative might turn out to be in the end a different thing.

LN: There was a naive faith in our government and in our leaders to do the right thing and to be good people and to not act out of self interest and to know what to do. Maybe that loss of trust is righteous because they didn’t know what to do and they weren’t necessarily acting in the best interests of the country all the time and they weren’t telling people the truth. And maybe the skepticism that came out of that is a healthy thing. When it morphs into metastatic cynicism, that’s corrosive and just eats away at our sense of civic connection. But we think the healthy skepticism that came out of this experience was ultimately a good thing.

That ties back to the first episode when you talk about how the war was started “in good faith by decent people.” One of the big questions for me is, what was going on with the men in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who were probably good people but had these horrible, horrible things going on under their watch? One of the things I like about this film is that it doesn’t deal in “what ifs,” but I definitely wonder if the war would have been worse if certain people in leadership today had been in power then. Like, how did it go so wrong with essentially decent people?

KB: Well that’s the whole thing with the best and the brightest. To just dismiss them as wholly malevolent and evil from the beginning is to miss the elements of tragedy that adorn the whole arc of this story. But also in hindsight, it’s very easy to make these kinds of judgements. People plowed forward with the simple binary dynamics of communism versus democracy or the good guys who’d won the second World War versus the forces of repression that now seemed to be threatening Southeast Asia.

This idea that you could have limited wars or proxy wars to avoid a nuclear armageddon, that can corrupt the best of intentions. The apprehension of that corruption can only come in hindsight. And it is really foolhardy to do as so many binary folks do and say, “Okay these are all bad people,” how can you possibly say they’re “decent people in good faith.” But I have no problem saying that.

LN: One veteran said the two most significant lessons of the war were: you have to know your enemy, and be mindful of the limits of military power. Those were two things that we had to learn the hard way. The people that got us into this really didn’t have a framework to know that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And we paid a terrible price and the Vietnamese paid a much worse price for that.

Will I get re-elected?—informed a lot of decision-making with regard to Vietnam across five presidential administrations.

One of the things I keep going back to is that, okay, none of the guys in the Kennedy and Johnson cabinets were specialists on Southeast Asia. (Those people had largely been wiped out of government in the fallout from the McCarthy era paranoia.) But that’s not to say that they didn’t have a lot of the information on the table. They knew what happened to the French.

KB: That’s what the Pentagon Papers revealed to us. I think part of why many people reduce it to evil and perfidy on the part of these of these leaders is that we aren’t willing to extend to them the mitigating circumstances that we extend to people who are of our ilk. These guys made decisions knowing that it might not work out. And a lot of it had to do with saving face. If anyone thinks they don’t understand what saving face is, they’re lying. If anyone thinks they haven’t said something that saved them from embarrassment, they’re lying, or else they haven’t lived, or else they’re a saint.

What we have here is very understandable human behavior. At the end of the day one of the great aspects of the tragedy is that domestic political considerations—i.e. Will I get re-elected?—informed a lot of decision-making with regard to Vietnam across five presidential administrations. It went counter to the experience of the French and counter to our own developing anxiety that this might have been a foolhardy enterprise.

LN: I don’t know but maybe it’s fair to say that some of the responsibility lies with the American people and not just on the leaders. The leaders felt that the people wouldn’t be able to handle giving them another chance if they lost the war. So that says something about us at the time. Who we thought we were and what we thought our destiny was.

As historians with a unique talent for making sense of the biggest stories in our history, what are your perspectives on the history that’s happening right now?

KB: Lynn will kill me in a second, but I’ll go through my stump speech about this. This film that we’ve completed is about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration. It’s about the White House West Wing in disarray, obsessed with leaks. About a president sure that the press is lying, making up stories about him. It’s about asymmetrical warfare, and the problems the United States military has with it. It’s about big huge document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilizes our conversation. It's about accusations that a political campaign during a national election contacted a foreign power to influence that election. These are six of but hundreds of things that resonate in this moment.

But this was true of Vietnam when we began the project in 2006. And we were never in the business of pointing arrows as we were making this. We certainly didn’t know the kind of presidency we would inherit once the film was completely done. 99% of the editorial work was completed by the end of 2015 before Donald Trump even entered into the Iowa Caucuses, which conventional wisdom said he would be destroyed in.

What happens is, with all history, but maybe especially this because so much of the divisions and disunion that we experience today had its seeds sown in Vietnam, is that we have an opportunity once the film is done to understand what an extraordinary teacher history is. How much it can arm us to deal with the frailties and the tensions of the current situation and at the same time offer the kind of perspective to understand that this is not unique. Look at terrorism in the United States. A guy tries to explode a bomb in Times Square and it doesn’t work and he gets caught. There were hundreds, hundreds of bombings in the Vietnam War period. And now in our 24/7 mass media news cycle we can’t tolerate anything. It would be like saying, Is there a hurricane happening right now? I mean, where is a hurricane not happening right now? History has, as Mark Twain was supposed to have said, a way of rhyming.

The Vietnam War premieres tonight on PBS.


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