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Ken Burns New Vietnam War Doc (1 Viewer)

Finally summoned up the resolve to start this series last night and now I'm really glad I did. Ep. 1 really fleshed out the historical background for me, all the way back to Ho's early years as an independence advocate, little of which I had known.

Yes, there was a fear of communist insurgency around the globe at the time, with some reasonableness to it, but from the safety of historical perspective, what an awful mistake our involvement there was. IndoChina could have resulted in some good relationships for us by now if we hadn't caved to that butthead DeGaulle 60 years ago.

Oh, 140 in the draft lotto, real time.

 
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roadkill1292 said:
Finally summoned up the resolve to start this series last night and now I'm really glad I did. Ep. 1 really fleshed out the historical background for me, all the way back to Ho's early years as an independence advocate, little of which I had known.

Yes, there was a fear of communist insurgency around the globe at the time, with some reasonableness to it, but from the safety of historical perspective, what an awful mistake our involvement there was. IndoChina could have resulted in some good relationships for us by now if we hadn't caved to that butthead DeGaulle 60 years ago.

Oh, 140 in the draft lotto, real time.
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Crazy, and I'm no commie ...but I'm getting to be a bit of a Ho Chi Mihn fan.

 
BigSteelThrill said:
I remember on these forums some conservative types saying how the Vietnam War would have been won if it wasn't for the protestors.  :doh: :doh: :doh:
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It's still a common theme.

"The protestors caused a drop in troop morale which prevented us from winning the war"

I'm sure the sneak attacks and the sniper fire had nothing to do with that morale...

 
Binky The Doormat said:
Crazy, and I'm no commie ...but I'm getting to be a bit of a Ho Chi Mihn fan.
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I always thought that the Vietnamese were commies of convenience, more like the Chinese, than they ever were true believers in the ideology. Had the French not long overstayed their welcome -- Indochina is hardly the only place where French colonialists were reviled for their poor treatment of the locals -- Ho may not have grabbed the stick offered to him by Mao and we might have a South Korea-like ally in a part of the world where we need some more of them.

 
There were a LOT of guys in the first 30 yrs after WW2 like Ho, Mossadegh, Allende who were nationalists before idealists but US/USSR made them choose. A leader pretty much had to decide which side to align with if only to have enough materials to resist the adventurism by the other side. USA strengthened international socialism by either propping up puppets because they were pro-oil or tearing down Fathers of Countries because they might nationalize oil, which has made us convenient devils to this day.

 
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Just finished the 5th episode - very powerful stuff.  I hope Westmoreland is rotting in hell somewhere and realizing his war of attrition was just throwing away lives. 

 
Finished 2 and 3 last night. Was anybody else struck by how happily the North Vietnamese/VC veterans recounted their opportunities to slaughter their opponents? In one of his Bob Lee Swagger books -- the series that inspired Marky Mark's Sniper -- author Stephen Hunter devised a scene based roughly on the Pleiku(?) battle, the one where a handful of Americans and South Vietnamese along with some local hill people held on to an outpost against very long odds (that was the one where the American CO praised the North Vietnamese troops and said he wished he had 200 of them). In Hunter's scenario, of course, Bob Lee was a couple of miles out in the bush disrupting an oncoming NV regiment with his fierce sniper fire. The Americans are listening to Swagger's firefight over the radio with an SV officer translating the action and the SV is just beside himself as he's relaying what's happening. "Oh oh, the major now he dead, too! O-ho-ho-ho-ho!"

Watching those IRL guys, I was thinking, we never really stood a chance against you cheerfully murderous little bastages. We were big and slow and scared (I would have been so scared out there that the army was lucky it never got me) and you were quick and tough and had decades of experience in beating superior firepower. Oof.

The final scene in 3 where the American vet is recounting how betrayed he felt later when he learned how Kennedy and Johnson knew we couldn't win over there two years before he was sent over really stuck with me. If Vietnam has a legacy in this country, it really is because it was the last time Americans felt that they could trust their government.

 
roadkill1292 said:
Finished 2 and 3 last night. Was anybody else struck by how happily the North Vietnamese/VC veterans recounted their opportunities to slaughter their opponents? In one of his Bob Lee Swagger books -- the series that inspired Marky Mark's Sniper -- author Stephen Hunter devised a scene based roughly on the Pleiku(?) battle, the one where a handful of Americans and South Vietnamese along with some local hill people held on to an outpost against very long odds (that was the one where the American CO praised the North Vietnamese troops and said he wished he had 200 of them). In Hunter's scenario, of course, Bob Lee was a couple of miles out in the bush disrupting an oncoming NV regiment with his fierce sniper fire. The Americans are listening to Swagger's firefight over the radio with an SV officer translating the action and the SV is just beside himself as he's relaying what's happening. "Oh oh, the major now he dead, too! O-ho-ho-ho-ho!"
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That's very Buddhist, actually. Many practice Buddhism but the Vietnamese i've known - the largest Asian community in Albq, where i was a poker boss (their favorite activity) so quite a few - live Buddhistly. Life is a continuum of nothingness & pain where the past only exists in ancestry. Today, this is all i have, whether taking my chances or telling you a story, so ima be lucky or nothing. This boiled rat is delicious because it's what's in front of me. If i cry, i cry. If i llaugh, i laugh. Laugh better than cry, maybe same. Make your big fuss, giant fool, i'm drawing inside to a straight and, if i dont hit, i'll draw to another one.

 
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wikkidpissah said:
That's very Buddhist, actually. Many practice Buddhism but the Vietnamese i've known - the largest Asian community in Albq, where i was a poker boss (their favorite activity) so quite a few - live Buddhistly. Life is a continuum of nothingness & pain where the past only exists in ancestry. Today, this is all i have, whether taking my chances or telling you a story, so ima be lucky or nothing. This boiled rat is delicious because it's what's in front of me. If i cry, i cry. If i llaugh, i laugh. Laugh better than cry, maybe same. Make your big fuss, giant fool, i'm drawing inside to a straight and, if i dont hit, i'll draw to another one.
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That's an interesting perspective which would never have occurred to me.

 
When the doc was discussing how the grunts were disproportionately poor and/or black in the early going and that middle and upper class kids were going to college or joining the reserves to avoid active duty in Nam, did anybody notice the picture of W flash up without comment?

I'm up through 6 now, which covered the early part of 1968. Tet, MLK and RFK are gunned down and protests growing increasingly violent. Next episode will cover the niceties of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I'm sure. A few parallels to today's cultural and political divisions, I think.

 
roadkill1292 said:
When the doc was discussing how the grunts were disproportionately poor and/or black in the early going and that middle and upper class kids were going to college or joining the reserves to avoid active duty in Nam, did anybody notice the picture of W flash up without comment?
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LOL, they showed Bill Clinton first when they were talking deferments then migrated to the National Guard discussion and W. Seemed to me they made it a point to represent both sides of the aisle, I thought it was very well done.Subtle yet not.

 
beer 30 said:
LOL, they showed Bill Clinton first when they were talking deferments then migrated to the National Guard discussion and W. Seemed to me they made it a point to represent both sides of the aisle, I thought it was very well done.Subtle yet not.
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Oh, I totally missed Slick Willy. That would have made me laugh, too. 

The bigger point the film was making was how anti-war sentiment ratcheted up as direct involvement edged ever higher up the economic spectrum. In spring of 1970, it wasn't hard to find plenty of kids in my HS in favor of the war (as far as HS kids even discuss politics, that is) but at my new college that September it was pretty hard to find someone who wasn't opposed to it.

 
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Both of my parents were officers in the army in Korea  ~1968. My father then spent a year in Vietnam a year later. After my father's year in Vietnam, they lived in San Francisco in the late 60's... the height of Haight-Ashbury.

My mother is a very smart woman. After watching the first episode, I asked my mother if she was aware of any of the background history of Vietnam, the French colonialism, etc. She answered with an emphatic NO! It wasn't until she returned to the US that she became educated and began to question the government. Not surprising, but something I hadn't known.

It has been mentioned in here, but my mother's most curious reaction to the doc was when the one guy said that this was the first time that we didn't trust our government.

 
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Tom Skerritt said:
It has been mentioned in here, but my mother's most curious reaction to the doc was when the one guy said that this was the first time that we didn't trust our government.
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Could you elaborate on this a little? What was her reaction?

I kinda think Vietnam was at the center of a whole lot of generational distrust that began around then, too. Some of the early volunteers recounted how they joined up because all the men in their lives were WWII and Korea veterans and to them they were heroes. But for much of the post-Vietnam era, there were values-based conflicts between those same vets, who were largely in charge of the nation's affairs, and lots of their boomer kids who thought that they had been fed a bunch of "truths" that weren't really true at all.

 
roadkill1292 said:
Oh, I totally missed Slick Willy. That would have made me laugh, too. 

The bigger point the film was making was how anti-war sentiment ratcheted up as direct involvement edged ever higher up the economic spectrum. In spring of 1970, it wasn't hard to find plenty of kids in my HS in favor of the war (as far as HS kids even discuss politics, that is) but at my new college that September it was pretty hard to find someone who wasn't opposed to it.
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Yea I thought it was a nice hat tip to both sides of the aisle. Subtle yet not.

I noticed @wikkidpissah was around during that period and it appears you were as well. How old? 18-19? Lends a great perspective to these discussions. I was born in 1964 so missed all the fun. There are two things I remember, well three but the two most prominent things was in the early 70's, watching TV and some suit was on saying they were ending the draft. I remember running upstairs screaming to my mom how I wouldn't be drafted. I was about 8 :rolleyes:

The other thing I remember was wondering how my brothers avoided Vietnam. There is a huge age disparity in my family. My next closest brother is 19 years older than me so it would have been right in wheelhouse. My oldest brother was 3 years older so he was a candidate as well. The younger one did enlist in the army when he was 19 and went to Colorado for training as a radio operator. He did his two years and never got deployed. About a month or two after he came home his unit deployed and they got decimated from what he told me. The older brother went into the AF right outta HS and spent his time in Europe as an MP playing baseball/football with the base team. He got out right before the escalation started.

The third memory was from Kent State although I wasn't that aware of it at the time as a 9 year old in school. We lived 3 miles away from campus, woulda heard the shots had anyone been home. Interesting times to be sure.

 
roadkill1292 said:
Could you elaborate on this a little? What was her reaction?

I kinda think Vietnam was at the center of a whole lot of generational distrust that began around then, too. Some of the early volunteers recounted how they joined up because all the men in their lives were WWII and Korea veterans and to them they were heroes. But for much of the post-Vietnam era, there were values-based conflicts between those same vets, who were largely in charge of the nation's affairs, and lots of their boomer kids who thought that they had been fed a bunch of "truths" that weren't really true at all.
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So many layers in answer to this.

WWII had a clear and evil enemy. War was straight-forward. The enemy was obvious. Vietnam (and to a lesser extent Korea, just a decade late) changed everything we knew.

I can understand why people were afraid of the idea of communism. But they were also being fed enormous amounts of fear by our own government. And up to this point, there was complete trust in that government. The US was just as active in propaganda as any enemy we opposed. Yet the history never goes into this detail. I think that a free press that was able to show the Vietnam war in every gruesome detail helped to usher in much of the distrust for the government. People were seeing death and hatred and the realities of war firsthand. It that was in direct opposition to what the government was telling them. A rebellious youth began to question all of this, and they stood up in defiance of a government sending young boys to die for a political war.

 
beer 30 said:
Yea I thought it was a nice hat tip to both sides of the aisle. Subtle yet not.

I noticed @wikkidpissah was around during that period and it appears you were as well. How old? 18-19? Lends a great perspective to these discussions. I was born in 1964 so missed all the fun. There are two things I remember, well three but the two most prominent things was in the early 70's, watching TV and some suit was on saying they were ending the draft. I remember running upstairs screaming to my mom how I wouldn't be drafted. I was about 8 :rolleyes:

The other thing I remember was wondering how my brothers avoided Vietnam. There is a huge age disparity in my family. My next closest brother is 19 years older than me so it would have been right in wheelhouse. My oldest brother was 3 years older so he was a candidate as well. The younger one did enlist in the army when he was 19 and went to Colorado for training as a radio operator. He did his two years and never got deployed. About a month or two after he came home his unit deployed and they got decimated from what he told me. The older brother went into the AF right outta HS and spent his time in Europe as an MP playing baseball/football with the base team. He got out right before the escalation started.

The third memory was from Kent State although I wasn't that aware of it at the time as a 9 year old in school. We lived 3 miles away from campus, woulda heard the shots had anyone been home. Interesting times to be sure.
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I was born in 1953 and until I turned draft age any political awareness I might have had was overwhelmed by my apparent desire to set a new world's record for masturbation frequency. (That was thought to be bad by some people in those days, a small footnote in the list of reasons why some boomer kids entered adulthood thinking they were being lied to on lots of issues)

But I did, from exposure perhaps, become more politically and socially aware in college. The anti-war people were a minority for some time. One of the interesting things about the Kent State shootings was how departing students (I think school shut down for a little while afterwards) were sometimes treated on their trips home, or after they arrived there. Sympathy was mostly for the Guardsmen, which is kind of a thing in this country, too. Some of us naturally identify with the underdogs, others with conventional authority. See: NFL fans mostly siding with the owners during the next labor stoppage.

 
Tom Skerritt said:
So many layers in answer to this.

WWII had a clear and evil enemy. War was straight-forward. The enemy was obvious. Vietnam (and to a lesser extent Korea, just a decade late) changed everything we knew.

I can understand why people were afraid of the idea of communism. But they were also being fed enormous amounts of fear by our own government. And up to this point, there was complete trust in that government. The US was just as active in propaganda as any enemy we opposed. Yet the history never goes into this detail. I think that a free press that was able to show the Vietnam war in every gruesome detail helped to usher in much of the distrust for the government. People were seeing death and hatred and the realities of war firsthand. It that was in direct opposition to what the government was telling them. A rebellious youth began to question all of this, and they stood up in defiance of a government sending young boys to die for a political war.
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Nice post. I got to thinking about Westmoreland, Kennedy, Johnson and all the others who pretty much knew that winning in Vietnam wasn't a probability but support from Middle America precluded them from saying so and still getting re-elected. That sounds awfully self-serving but if you're JFK, you might be thinking that you're still the better chance of extricating ourselves from that mess than a Republican president would be. Even if the GOP doesn't run Goldwater against JFK in an alternate history line (even Republican voters were mostly terrified of a man way too comfortable with using nukes), chances were that they would run someone who would promise military victory requiring a disastrous escalation. Hell, as it was, we had a military presence there for 12 years after Kennedy's death, the last six or seven under Nixon during which it was more clear than ever that we needed to be out.

 
roadkill1292 said:
One of the interesting things about the Kent State shootings was how departing students (I think school shut down for a little while afterwards) were sometimes treated on their trips home, or after they arrived there. Sympathy was mostly for the Guardsmen, which is kind of a thing in this country, too. Some of us naturally identify with the underdogs, others with conventional authority. See: NFL fans mostly siding with the owners during the next labor stoppage.
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Having lived there, there was always a pall over KSU. To the point where when I was deciding to go to college i ruled them out because they had lost their accreditation for the program I was in because of the shootings. This was in 1983. The college is finally back on the map but it wasn't until the 2000's that I think the stigma of the shootings finally faded away.

There was plenty of fault to go around for the whole incident but at the end of the day there was no reason for the Guard to fire on those kids. It will be forever debated about the order to fire but I was friends with one of the guys there that day and he said it was so confusing no one knew what was going on. He swears he held fire but only because he was too scared to pull the trigger seeing as he was about a month older than the kids they were aiming at. He did remember hearing the order to fire, some did, some didn't. Result was terrible and set the area back 20 years at least. Good bars though :thumbup:

 
The thing i was reminded of last nite is that this is where i came in. I'm right around roadkill's age, except i was accidentally paying attention (mostly cuz my older best friend's older sister was an OG peacenik & i adored her hippiedippieyippiewhippieass). i canvassed for McCarthy that spring (about which my neighbors were a LOT more tolerant than they should have been to this presumptuous cherub). i knew to say Tonkin, bombing helpless yellows in Hanoi, Laos & Cambodia etc etc but i didnt really knowitknowit. Did a week's worth of sighing, crying, jaw clenching and lip curling thru the watching of Week One of this and then realized last nite that ALLLLLLLL THAT happened before i came in. I'm an episode 6 guy.

'T'would be easy to say i'm saying this because JFK & LBJ were Dems & Nixon a Republican and, certainly, mostly because of JEdgar Hoover, LBJ crossed over into making dissent illegal, but at this point - with Daley & Humphrey then Nixon & Kissinger - the war abroad became nothing but cynicism and the war at home nothing but generational. If JFK had won Bay of Pigs he wouldnt have escalated SEAsia, so that's on him. LBJ was a results guy and he'd be damned if he wouldnt get results so he was damned but, with systems analyst McNamara & attritionist Wm Westmoreland, dragged our best & brightest down with em from American Dream to Jungle Hell.

But Nixon, maaaan. He knew it was all for nothing and went for it anyway. It was over, yet as many died after that realization as before that realization because Nixon wasn't going to let spoiled brats and whippersnappers be right or tell him what to do.

My generation's rare. It got to see it all - the rise of ordinary people from subsistence to success, the legacy of winning a worldwide war on two fronts for freedom's sake, a country with enough material & bravura to actually consider attacking problems like the rights of the individual & equal opportunity, the chance to be the first generation of economically & ideologically free people in the history of humankind, an explosion of cultural options & new ideas, the technological capacity to make anything possible.

And this needlenosed hemorrhoid with a persecution complex gains power and decides ungrateful, punk kids are going to be his Commies. I can kill em over in that ####hole, i can herd em when they come to my House, i can burn em if they aint my color. And America began to rot, and aint stopped yet. Ep 7, baby - it aint hell but we can see from there.

 
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Yes, the generation(s) who won WWII and fought in Korea had much to be admired for (and also much to be criticized for, e.g. racial equality). But the start of the conservative changeover to cultural meanness began with Nixon's demonization of "hippies" (the liberals of our Trump era) and insistence on social homogeneity. We had the first inkling of an America better equipped to handle new diversity of power and new freedoms for all and Nixon instead turned loose the worst instincts of the Silent Majority. Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have fit nicely in with the current administration.

 
roadkill1292 said:
Yes, the generation(s) who won WWII and fought in Korea had much to be admired for (and also much to be criticized for, e.g. racial equality). But the start of the conservative changeover to cultural meanness began with Nixon's demonization of "hippies" (the liberals of our Trump era) and insistence on social homogeneity. We had the first inkling of an America better equipped to handle new diversity of power and new freedoms for all and Nixon instead turned loose the worst instincts of the Silent Majority. Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have fit nicely in with the current administration.
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i lived down the street from Ehrlichman in his Santa Fe retirement. he went down Canyon Rd in a VW bus (usually wearing varying disguises - hats, wigs, beards, glasses) to get newspaper & coffee every morning around the same time. everytime i'd hear that engine rattle by, i'd think about ambushing him the next day, but would listen to my better angels and instead go look at the picture i had on my fridge for over a decade - Attorney General John Mitchell, supervising the herding of protesters (me included - confined on a softball field w 20,000 others for three days) @ the ginormous May '71 March on Washington from the balcony of his apartment......................................at the Watergate Hotel

 
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Well the middle of episode 6 is when we see how Nixon really screwed with things.   From pulling a power play just days before the election to start more bombing without telling even his own people.   

 
I'm part way through Ep 6, too. It's 1968, everyone but the most avid hawks knows the war is unwinnable yet we're still only about 40% into the final death toll. LBJ decides that Da Nang will be defended at all costs and then abandons the base the minute NV troops pull back. We reach the summit of Hill 875 (which I assume is the basis for Hamburger Hill) at terrible cost only to find the opposition gone and we just go away, never to return because the hill had pretty much zero value. Veterans are recounting how they notice they're covering the same ground over and over again on patrol. We risk lives to count VC bodies after a firefight. Strategy = send patrols out as ambush bait and then call in air and artillery. This country owes infantrymen in Vietnam a debt and an apology.

A moment that really got to me was that nice fellow from Missouri, who went on to survive a serious chest wound in a "brawl," telling the interviewer "My hatred for them was so pure. Just pure. I was so scared of them and I hated them for it."

I think I like this Burns doc even more than the one on Prohibition, in completely different ways.

 
Toward the end of episode one they seem to imply that The Domino Theory was bunk because China didn't want to participate in any more SE Asia conflict because of its 1 million casualties in Korea and that the USSR was striving for more normalized relations with the West.

I can maybe buy the former, but the latter part of that is bunk, isn't it? The Soviets were trying to play nice in the 50's & 60's?

(I can see the point that they're trying to make - that Vietnam was misinterpreted as not the end of colonialism it was, but rather the beginning of the Red menace.)

 
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Andy Dufresne said:
Toward the end of episode one they seem to imply that The Domino Theory was bunk because China didn't want to participate in any more SE Asia conflict because of its 1 million casualties in Korea and that the USSR was striving for more normalized relations with the West.

I can maybe buy the former, but the latter part of that is bunk, isn't it? The Soviets were trying to play nice in the 50's & 60's?

(I can see the point that they're trying to make - that Vietnam was misinterpreted as not the end of colonialism it was, but rather the beginning of the Red menace.)
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The Berlin Wall began construction in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis was in late 1962 so hostilities were still running pretty high as the first decisions to escalate in Vietnam were being made. In light of other events going on around the world and WWII ending just over 15 years prior (Korea only a decade before), the Domino Theory was kind of understandable. It required a nuanced perspective to get what was going on with Vietnam and how it marked a change in the way "global communism" was spreading and that wasn't easy even for the most experienced people at the top. 

But even if they didn't quite grasp the Vietnamese independence movement -- which they should have, it's not like we didn't have anyone not completely ignorant of French colonial history -- they still succumbed to public pressure to keep throwing bodies into an unwinnable situation, long after they knew the truth.

 
roadkill1292 said:
Thanks for the correction, I should have looked that up before posting. It just seemed eerily similar to the movie.
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No sweat roadkill I was thinking it (937) might be Hamburger Hill while watching as well.

I only knew because Ive been looking at maps and stories when at the computer since the show started.

 
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roadkill1292 said:
The Berlin Wall began construction in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis was in late 1962 so hostilities were still running pretty high as the first decisions to escalate in Vietnam were being made. In light of other events going on around the world and WWII ending just over 15 years prior (Korea only a decade before), the Domino Theory was kind of understandable. It required a nuanced perspective to get what was going on with Vietnam and how it marked a change in the way "global communism" was spreading and that wasn't easy even for the most experienced people at the top. 

But even if they didn't quite grasp the Vietnamese independence movement -- which they should have, it's not like we didn't have anyone not completely ignorant of French colonial history -- they still succumbed to public pressure to keep throwing bodies into an unwinnable situation, long after they knew the truth.
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It just seems odd that the documentary is positing that it was "this" not "that" (independence vs communism) when really it seems like it was both.

I found it fascinating that Ho Chi Minh sought out Wilson after WWI.

 
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Andy Dufresne said:
Toward the end of episode one they seem to imply that The Domino Theory was bunk because China didn't want to participate in any more SE Asia conflict because of its 1 million casualties in Korea and that the USSR was striving for more normalized relations with the West.

I can maybe buy the former, but the latter part of that is bunk, isn't it? The Soviets were trying to play nice in the 50's & 60's?

(I can see the point that they're trying to make - that Vietnam was misinterpreted as not the end of colonialism it was, but rather the beginning of the Red menace.)
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To an extent, yes. It's all relative.

It's a mistake to think of Soviet foreign policy as a unbending continuum from Lenin up until Gorbachev turns up in 1985 and changes the rules. It's just as simplistic as a Russian thinking US foreign policy goals and doctrines were exactly the same from Woodrow Wilson through to Bush Sr..

The USSR essentially shifted from the 1920s Leninist Global Revolution theory - communism will triumph through the internal revolutions in capitalist states, direct military expansion is unnecessary, the USSR should pursue a totally isolationist strategy in global affairs (except for funding foreign communist parties).

To Stalinist communist expansion post 1941 Nazi invasion - capitalism inherently cannot abide the existence of international socialism, therefore open armed conflict is inevitable and should be prepared for and, if necessary, pre-emptively engaged in when to our advantage.

That aggressive expansionist policy died with Stalin in 1953 and by the time Khrushchev came to power in 1956 he advocated the doctrine of 'peaceful coexistence' and that armed conflict was not inevitable, but that communism would defeat capitalism by outlasting it. Khrushchev's famous "We will bury you" speech was taken in the US as a direct threat, but the translation is poor and the intention was more like "We will still be alive at your funeral". Khrushchev came to the US on a state visit in 1959, Nixon went to Moscow. So whilst tensions were still obviously extremely high in the 1950s it was nowhere near the level it was at the end of the 40s/early 50s when war in Europe could've broken out at almost any time. 

 
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Andy Dufresne said:
It just seems odd that the documentary is positing that it was "this" not "that" (independence vs communism) when really it seems like it was both.

I found it fascinating that Ho Chi Minh sought out Wilson after WWI.
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Ho seeking American help in 1919 was new and fascinating stuff to me, too.

Pope Benedict XVI Fan said:
To an extent, yes. It's all relative.

It's a mistake to think of Soviet foreign policy as a unbending continuum from Lenin up until Gorbachev turns up in 1985 and changes the rules. It's just as simplistic as a Russian thinking US foreign policy goals and doctrines were exactly the same from Woodrow Wilson through to Bush Sr..

The USSR essentially shifted from the 1920s Leninist Global Revolution theory - communism will triumph through the internal revolutions in capitalist states, direct military expansion is unnecessary, the USSR should pursue a totally isolationist strategy in global affairs (except for funding foreign communist parties).

To Stalinist communist expansion post 1941 Nazi invasion - capitalism inherently cannot abide the existence of international socialism, therefore open armed conflict is inevitable and should be prepared for and, if necessary, pre-emptively engaged in when to our advantage.

That aggressive expansionist policy died with Stalin in 1953 and by the time Khrushchev came to power in 1956 he advocated the doctrine of 'peaceful coexistence' and that armed conflict was not inevitable, but that communism would defeat capitalism by outlasting it. Khrushchev's famous "We will bury you" speech was taken in the US as a direct threat, but the translation is poor and the intention was more like "We will still be alive at your funeral". Khrushchev came to the US on a state visit in 1959, Nixon went to Moscow. So whilst tensions were still obviously extremely high in the 1950s it was nowhere near the level it was at the end of the 40s/early 50s when war in Europe could've broken out at almost any time. 
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This is pretty thoughtful posting. How do you think the Sovs viewed/exploited the American involvement in Vietnam? Because I think they were very much in the back of JFK's/LBJ's minds with every decision they made re: Nam.

 
Pope Benedict XVI Fan said:
To an extent, yes. It's all relative.

It's a mistake to think of Soviet foreign policy as a unbending continuum from Lenin up until Gorbachev turns up in 1985 and changes the rules. It's just as simplistic as a Russian thinking US foreign policy goals and doctrines were exactly the same from Woodrow Wilson through to Bush Sr..

The USSR essentially shifted from the 1920s Leninist Global Revolution theory - communism will triumph through the internal revolutions in capitalist states, direct military expansion is unnecessary, the USSR should pursue a totally isolationist strategy in global affairs (except for funding foreign communist parties).

To Stalinist communist expansion post 1941 Nazi invasion - capitalism inherently cannot abide the existence of international socialism, therefore open armed conflict is inevitable and should be prepared for and, if necessary, pre-emptively engaged in when to our advantage.

That aggressive expansionist policy died with Stalin in 1953 and by the time Khrushchev came to power in 1956 he advocated the doctrine of 'peaceful coexistence' and that armed conflict was not inevitable, but that communism would defeat capitalism by outlasting it. Khrushchev's famous "We will bury you" speech was taken in the US as a direct threat, but the translation is poor and the intention was more like "We will still be alive at your funeral". Khrushchev came to the US on a state visit in 1959, Nixon went to Moscow. So whilst tensions were still obviously extremely high in the 1950s it was nowhere near the level it was at the end of the 40s/early 50s when war in Europe could've broken out at almost any time. 
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Combined with USSR's development of nuclear weapons, and you have a perfect storm of the new red enemy.

 
roadkill1292 said:
I think I like this Burns doc even more than the one on Prohibition, in completely different ways.
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Have to give Burns props for the even-handedess of his approach to this royal clusterhug. He's draft gen like you & me w leftie sensibilities and he's gone out of his way to keep the military-industrial complex - which is soooo much a part of escalation - out of this in the name of telling the human story of the war. This is what those who don't want to get it dont get - journalism, because it is a communication art, will draw liberally-minded folk, but that doesn't change the justice of their storytelling & never really has.

Andy Dufresne said:
Toward the end of episode one they seem to imply that The Domino Theory was bunk because China didn't want to participate in any more SE Asia conflict because of its 1 million casualties in Korea and that the USSR was striving for more normalized relations with the West.

I can maybe buy the former, but the latter part of that is bunk, isn't it? The Soviets were trying to play nice in the 50's & 60's?

(I can see the point that they're trying to make - that Vietnam was misinterpreted as not the end of colonialism it was, but rather the beginning of the Red menace.)
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China was not as expansionist as Soviet Union, nor as worried about legitimacy, so could have been as reluctant as committed after one war of attrition, but anyone who doubts that they would have gone the distance anywhere in the region is kidding themselves. The point - beyond colonialism v communism - may have been that no one was right on Domino because no one could know. The unfortunate inevitability of Vietnam is heart-breaking, though not as much so as how little we learned from it.

 
In retrospect, too, we know that the Soviets and Chinese both had serious economic difficulties at those times that tended to overwhelm the ideological desire to foment global communism. Again, that's something that wasn't altogether clear at the time. What the Russians had overcome in WWII and how damn many Chinese there were was kinda scary to think about, to put it simply (maybe too simply).

 
roadkill1292 said:
In retrospect, too, we know that the Soviets and Chinese both had serious economic difficulties at those times that tended to overwhelm the ideological desire to foment global communism. Again, that's something that wasn't altogether clear at the time. What the Russians had overcome in WWII and how damn many Chinese there were was kinda scary to think about, to put it simply (maybe too simply).
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I'm stuck on episode 3 right so forgive me not being caught up but I heard them mention a few times about the Chinese still licking their wounds from losing 1 mill in the Korean war and that being another inhibitor to getting fully involved in Vietnam. I know nothing about Korea so will probably start putting in some research into it. That is a large number of troops.

 
beer 30 said:
I'm stuck on episode 3 right so forgive me not being caught up but I heard them mention a few times about the Chinese still licking their wounds from losing 1 mill in the Korean war and that being another inhibitor to getting fully involved in Vietnam. I know nothing about Korea so will probably start putting in some research into it. That is a large number of troops.
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Also on PBS is an American Experience episode on the Chosin Reservoir that is very good.

 
I always thought "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young was one of the most powerful anti-war songs of the Vietnam era.  After watching the end of episode 8 with the Kent State shootings and hearing the returning vets anger and sorrow and hearing that 58% of the people supported the murder and the ROTC kid who killed by just standing there got death threats and then hearing that song on the credits, I got chills.   That last 10 minutes was easily the most angry I have been watching all of this.  

 
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