What Can America Learn from the Vietnam War?

September 22, 2017
Submitted by: Love Knowledge
Category: Politics

Thuong Duc, Vietnam. A Viet Cong prisoner is interrogated at the A-109 Special Forces Detachment in Thuong Duc, 25 km west of Da Nang. Photo credit: US Army / Wikimedia

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The post What Can America Learn from the Vietnam War? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Ten years ago, when Ken Burns and Lynn Novick started working on their epic documentary about America’s war in Vietnam, that conflict could still rouse bitter passions — as evidenced by the “swift boating” of Vietnam vet John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

Now, in 2017, as viewers turn from Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow to the shared experience of this ten-part film series, can an unsparing look at a historical tragedy have the unifying power that Burns originally thought it might?

The Vietnam War, not unlike Burns and Novick’s Civil War documentary, which was watched by over 40 million Americans, is an event that transcends its time.

In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks to Washington Post opinion writer Alyssa Rosenberg, who covered Burns and Novick and The Vietnam War project for over five years. She had broad access during the making of the documentary and has written extensively about it.

Schechtman and Rosenberg talk about whether the lessons of history have value in a time of “alternative facts.” Can the convergence of movie and moment help America survive its current divisions, as the series shows we survived another time of deep discord? And will it help young Americans, who know little if anything about the Vietnam war, to better understand their country?

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman:	Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. For those us that were alive and aware in the ’60s and ’70s, there was no greater division than Vietnam. Perhaps other than the Civil War, it was America’s greatest divide. Isn’t it ironic, then, that for the past several nights after folks have been watching Maddow or Hannity, reading Drudge or The New York Times, that we’ve come together in a unity of watching Ken Burns’ “Vietnam“? When Ken Burns set out on this project he might’ve had a sense of, but certainly could not have known, exactly how divided we’d be today, and yet his Vietnam documentary can be a kind of shock therapy as it takes us back to the events that previously tore us apart.
	Thousands of words have been written about Burns’ documentary, but some of the most profound and wise have come from Alyssa Rosenberg at The Washington Post. She had access to Burns in the process of his making this film, she has interviewed Burns and co-creator Lynn Novick, and she has written extensively on the project. Before joining The Post, Alyssa was the culture editor at ThinkProgress. She was the television columnist at Women and Hollywood, a columnist at Slate, and a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. And it is my pleasure to welcome Alyssa Rosenberg here to Radio WhoWhatWhy. Alyssa, thanks so much for joining us.
Alyssa Rosenberg:	Well, it’s my pleasure to be here, so I guess we’ll have to compete for who is more grateful to the other.
Jeff Schechtman:	It’s great to have you. It’s so interesting with respect to this series in terms of the context and the time through which we’re viewing it. You’ve interviewed Burns, you’ve written about, as others have, the fact that it took him 10, 11 years to do this project, and yet the context of understanding it for the country has changed so dramatically in those 10 or 11 years. Talk a little bit about your thoughts on that first.
Alyssa Rosenberg:	Well, this is something that was really interesting to me when I was reporting about the project. I’ve known Burns since 2012, so I wasn’t … I didn’t know him and Lynn Novick when they decided to make the movie in 2006 as they were finishing up “The War“. Lynn said that one of the things that sort of was on her mind when they were making the decision to make the movie was the role that the Vietnam War had played in the 2004 Presidential election, when this group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth kind of challenged John Kerry’s narrative of his service in the Vietnam War.
	And that was something that sort of burbled up in 2004 and then dissipated a little bit, but as they were editing the movie last year, which those were the sessions I was sitting in on, you saw Vietnam begin to sort of bubble again, and the person it was coming from was then-candidate Donald Trump, who seemed to litigate the war in the really personal terms. I mean, he had himself gotten five deferments. He referred to his sex life as “my personal Vietnam” because of the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. He attacked John McCain saying that he liked people who “hadn’t been captured” in Vietnam, and so everything seemed to be coming back as the series was nearing completion.
	And it wasn’t simply that Trump was talking about Vietnam a lot, but the country’s division started to feel as raw and as irreconcilable as it had during Vietnam. And so the convergence of movie and moment are of course completely accidentally, but I think that it makes the movie feel sort of eerily relevant and, if it achieves Burns’ and Novick’s stated goal of giving people a common experience, I think amazingly useful in a way that they hadn’t anticipated.
Jeff Schechtman:	Mm-hmm (affirmative). The other part of it for Burns is how he juxtaposes it with his previous project about the Civil War, which is the other great American divide.
Alyssa Rosenberg:	Well, and I think that part of what was important to Burns and Novick in this movie is that many Vietnamese people experienced the Vietnam War as a civil war in which another country had decided to intervene.

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from The Vietnam War (Florentine Films and WETA, PBS) and Vietnamese troops (Department of Defence / Wikimedia).

Last modified on Monday, 25 September 2017 18:19

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