The debate and unrest over the wisdom or folly of the Vietnam War occurred almost continuously from the mid-1960s through the war’s end in 1975. Those who did not live through that time cannot really imagine how divided American society became over the war. In some respects, it foreshadowed the divisiveness of American society in the following decades.
Today, nearly a half century later, it is difficult to find many Americans who feel the war was worth the human, financial, political, or military effort expended on trying to “win” it. It will be even harder to find such Americans after they have viewed The Vietnam War or listened to Ken talk about the film.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): What made you think the timing was right to do Vietnam? It’s been a very controversial subject.
KEN BURNS (KB): I’ve never really considered timing in the choice of it. I’ve been drawn to stories that reveal us to ourselves. Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? What does an investigation of that moment tell us about not only where we were, but where we are and, most importantly, where we may be going?
In late 2006, I was finishing up our World War II film. I turned to Lynn Novick, my codirector on that, and I said, “We have to do Vietnam.”
A good deal of the cultural, political, social, sexual wars that we find ourselves afflicted with today seem to me to have their seeds in Vietnam. So Vietnam explains a lot about who we were, not only then but now.
DR: Did you have trouble getting Americans and Vietnamese to talk about the war?
KB: It was surprisingly easy. There were, of course, people who said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” I wish they had. They probably would have made the film better.
But we had a critical mass of Americans, more than fifty, of every possible stripe—from people who protested the war to people who were valiantly climbing up mountains in Vietnam and sacrificing, often, limb and almost life. And then people who came back from doing that and protested the war, and people who changed in every way.
We felt it was necessary to go deep into the war’s meaning; for too long Americans have not talked about Vietnam and, when we have, we’ve abstracted it. One of the ways we’ve abstracted it is by only talking about ourselves.
DR: What was the biggest surprise you uncovered in the research you did?
KB: The surprise of my own arrogance. I thought, having lived through the period, growing up in a college town where Vietnam was on everyone’s minds and lips all the time, that I knew something about it. I learned that I knew nothing about it, nothing about it. Making the film was a process of unlearning—and a daily humiliation.
DR: If there is one message you would want to convey to the American people about Vietnam, what would you like them to take away?
KB: It’s complicated. That’s the message. When you’re a filmmaker, when things are neat and the scene is working, the last thing you want to do is open it up and perhaps make it less “interesting.” Time magazine had a famous internal joke, “That’s a fact too good to check,” meaning the story is just too good.
Wynton Marsalis, in our Jazz series, said something to me that has stuck with me forever. He said, “Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing can be true at the same time.”
DR: Vietnam was controlled in the early ’50s by the French. Then they lost control in 1954?
KB: They lost an epic battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. They’d been there since 1858.
DR: Did President Eisenhower ever think of sending American troops in to help the French?
KB: Very much so, as did President Truman. Charles de Gaulle had threatened that unless we supported the restoration of France’s colonies in the post–World War II environment, he might be forced to go into the Soviet orbit. The American people had no idea about that.
DR: After Dien Bien Phu, did Eisenhower consider sending American troops in?
KB: Yes. And he, fairly wisely, didn’t. He upped the number of what we called, euphemistically, “military advisors” there. He had inherited, I think, three dozen. By the time he left office, there were seven hundred.
But he was one of those promoting the falling-domino principle, the idea that if you lost Vietnam, then you would lose Laos and Cambodia and Malaysia and Thailand and Burma and Indonesia.
DR: When President Kennedy came into office, there were roughly seven hundred American advisors there. What was his decision—to support the Vietnamese government?
KB: Kennedy saw things in the same sort of light. We’re all being guided by George Kennan’s notion of containment and that, in a nuclear world, one doesn’t want to fight World War III. You want to fight a “limited war,” as Kennedy called it, a “proxy war,” as others were calling it.
And so he was gradually escalating the number of advisors. What we discovered from the printed record and from the audio records of Johnson and Nixon is that every single president involved, including Gerald Ford, presidents of both parties, made decisions with regard to national security and Vietnam and foreign policy based on domestic political considerations, i.e., “Will I get reelected?”
Kennedy had been humiliated at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. He’d been humiliated by [Nikita] Khrushchev in Vienna. He had not been able to stop the Soviets from building the Berlin Wall. Eisenhower had asked him to intervene in an anticommunist insurgency in Laos and he’d refused. He said, “We have to draw the line in Vietnam or I do not stand a chance of being reelected.”
DR: So he appointed Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to be his ambassador there. Lodge was the person that Kennedy had defeated in the 1952 Senate election. There was a government run by President Ngo Dinh Diem. Did Kennedy support him?
KB: He had been our boy. The Geneva Accords that followed the peace talks after the battle of Dien Bien Phu divided Vietnam in half and agreed that there would be elections in two years. Everyone in the South and everyone in the North knew that Ho Chi Minh would be elected.
He had declared Vietnamese independence on September 2, 1945. When the Japanese were formally surrendering on the USS Missouri, he quoted Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”
Eisenhower supported Ngo Dinh Diem, and Kennedy supported him until the chaos in South Vietnam became so great that the State Department and many factions within the government became undecided about Diem. When Kennedy was away from Washington, an undersecretary at the State Department, Roger Hillsman, drafted a cable that basically supported a nascent coup. Kennedy gave tacit approval to it while on vacation at Hyannis Port [in Massachusetts]. Other members of his administration signed on when they learned the president had.
DR: Kennedy didn’t anticipate that Diem would be assassinated?
KB: Diem and his brother Nhu, who was a shadowy, strange, very dangerous man, took sanctuary in a church and surrendered, and were given assurances that they were going to get safe passage out of Vietnam. They were shot by the members of the coup.
Kennedy records this incredibly rueful Dictaphone entry in which he says, “I take full responsibility for the decision to go with the coup.” He was very upset with the brutality with which Diem and his brother Nhu had been dispatched.
DR: Many people who supported President Kennedy have said that had he lived, he intended after reelection in ’64 to pull all the American troops out of Vietnam. Is there any evidence for that?
KB: I’m in the business of what happened. Speculation’s really fun: What if the Confederacy had won? What if the Germans had won? That’s the province of fiction, and perhaps the fantasies of people.
What happened was that, when Kennedy was assassinated, less than three weeks after the coup, there were now eighteen thousand American advisors in Vietnam. His successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had an ambitious domestic agenda. He kept every single one of Kennedy’s foreign policy hierarchy. And they, along with Johnson, plowed further into Vietnam.
DR: As you noted, when Johnson came into office, there were ro
ughly eighteen thousand Americans there. When did he begin to increase dramatically the number of soldiers?
KB: He felt he could not act with any confidence until he had been elected in his own right. Barry Goldwater, who would be his opponent, was criticizing him for not being very clear-cut.
The Gulf of Tonkin event happens in the summer of ’64. Johnson is decisive in his response. His already overwhelming poll numbers increase more. It took away one of the main arguments that Goldwater had.
Johnson had a landslide victory that fall, and by March of ’65, he put boots on the ground. But he confided to Senator Richard Russell, his good friend, “I don’t see any daylight here.” Time and again we find, with all of the presidents from Truman on, that they and their closest associates know some hard and difficult truths, but they act as if the opposite is true.
DR: How many troops did Johnson authorize?
KB: Eventually we reach a peak of more than 540,000 ground troops in Vietnam.
DR: The antiwar movement grew, and ultimately in 1968 Johnson decided not to seek reelection. He tried to get a peace agreement, or at least a truce. What kept that from happening?
KB: There are a lot of reasons. In some ways, the Vietnam War had starved his ambitious domestic agenda, which had been hugely successful, second only to FDR’s in terms of a successful legislative agenda that transformed American society. But then you had the Tet Offensive of 1968, which had been a terrible defeat for North Vietnam and the Viet Cong.
DR: Explain the Tet Offensive.
KB: The Tet is the Lunar New Year celebration, kind of like a New Year’s Day celebration. There was a truce in the country, as there usually was. But for many, many months, Le Duan, the man who was actually running North Vietnam, had been building up troops to attack the major cities, the provincial capitals, and dozens and dozens of bases—more than 150 places simultaneously.
It was called the General Uprising and General Offensive. They presumed erroneously that the army of South Vietnam would collapse. It did not. They presumed that the people, weary of the corrupt South Vietnamese government, would rise up. They did not. And that their revolution would be triumphant. It wasn’t. At least then….
They were defeated within twenty-six days in every single one of the places they attacked, usually within a few hours, a couple of days, with the horrific exception of Hue.
DR: If the Tet Offensive militarily worked so well for South Vietnam, why was it a public relations disaster?
KB: The U.S. government had been painting a rosier-than-accurate scenario for the American people, that there was light at the end of the tunnel. There clearly was not.
Americans saw images of the assassination of a North Vietnamese spy named Nguyen Van Lem by the head of the South Vietnamese police on the streets of Saigon. The war came into our living rooms with the Tet Offensive—not instantaneously, not live, but it was a huge public relations disaster. Walter Cronkite came back and said, in essence, victory in a military sense is not possible.
Johnson didn’t do well in the New Hampshire primary. Upstart Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota had gotten 40 percent of the vote when he had expected to poll far worse.
DR: I skipped over something very important—the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. What was that, and why were we misled?
KB: A resolution giving the president far-ranging latitude to prosecute the war was something that LBJ and his staff had drawn up and prepared to send to Capitol Hill when they had the right sort of provocation. It gave the president more or less unlimited power to wage war without the congressional approval that you would normally have, as the Constitution would dictate.
He used a very murky event that took place in August of 1964. The United States military had been supporting South Vietnamese actions against North Vietnamese islands, in direct violation of the Geneva Accords. The tiny North Vietnamese navy came out to attack them. Two American destroyers were in the area in support of these clandestine operations that the South Vietnamese were launching. The North Vietnamese fired. Nothing hit. We fired. We missed them. Then carrier-based fighter planes destroyed the North Vietnamese ships.
We basically told them, “Don’t do anything like that again,” but anxious American sonar operators mistook routine North Vietnamese traffic chatter for an imminent attack. The attack never came, but because it was declared imminent, it must have happened, so Johnson ordered a retaliatory strike, and a few days later went up to Congress and got nearly 100 percent support on the Hill for his Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Only two senators voted against him.
I needed to do that preamble. So [in 1968] there had been peace negotiations [in Paris] that had gone nowhere, and in late August, with Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, comfortably ahead of his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey, with a very fractured Democratic Party coming out of a disastrous convention in Chicago, suddenly there’s some real progress being made at the peace talks. Johnson sees that progress and he announces it, and Humphrey’s numbers go up overnight.
It’s decided to expand the talks to include the South Vietnamese and potentially even the Viet Cong, a four-way talk. Then Nixon personally intervenes and tells the South Vietnamese through intermediaries that, even though he knows that the U.S. has to get out of Vietnam, South Vietnam will get better terms if Nixon wins. So South Vietnamese President [Nguyen Van] Thieu announces that he is going to boycott the talks.
Johnson has picked this up through CIA intercepts and FBI wiretaps on the Presidential Palace in Saigon and the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington. He calls up Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, and says, “This is treason.” Dirksen said, “Yes, it is.” Then Nixon calls up LBJ and says, “I would never do anything like that.” And Johnson says, “Okay, Dick.”
To this day one of the great mysteries of the war is why Johnson didn’t use the information to Humphrey’s benefit. Let’s remember that in the vote—there was a third-party candidate, George Wallace—Nixon got 43.4 percent and Humphrey got 42.7 percent, a 0.7 percent difference. That bombshell happened on the eve of the election. If Johnson or Humphrey had released that information, it would have been an entirely different situation.
DR: In campaigning, Nixon said, “I have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam,” but he never revealed what it was. What was the secret plan?
KB: I don’t really know what it was. But you have to understand that all of these presidents, worried about history and worried about domestic political considerations, didn’t want to be the first president to lose a war. I think Nixon’s “secret plan” was to keep the war going and then slowly change its course to be more about getting our POWs back than about “winning.”
If you just said, “Quick, who’s the president that lost a war?” Nixon doesn’t come to mind. But he lost a war. A lot of it had to do with that interval of time between his election and his inauguration. If he’d walked into Paris on January 21, 1969, and basically accepted the terms then available, he would have gotten more or less what we ultimately got and there’d be 25,000 or 30,000 more Americans alive.
DR: At the peak of the war, how many American soldiers were there in Vietnam?
KB: Just over 540,000.
DR: How many men and women were being killed a week at the peak?
KB: It varied widely depending on the time of year and what would happen. I think the worst week was well above 2,000 killed.
DR: How many Americans were killed total?
KB: It’s over 58,000 names on the wall at the Vietnam Memorial, and, we believe, 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and one million—it’s impossible to know for sure—North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas, and two million civilians, mostly in South Vietnam and North Vietnam, and tens of thousands, again unknowable, in Laos and Cambodia.
DR: Henry Kissinger is asked by Richard Nixon to start negotiating a peace agreement. Before the ’72 election, Kissinger goes into the White House Press Room and says, “Peace is at hand.” What was he talking about? Was
there peace at hand?
KB: There were negotiations going on. Nixon worked shrewdly to check the antiwar movement by making the draft much fairer, with the lottery system rather than the deferments that placed the burden unnecessarily on poor, minority working-class Americans—Black and brown as well as white.
In August of ’69 Kissinger went out on his own. I don’t think William Rogers, the secretary of state, knew. Kissinger began meeting with Vietnamese diplomats secretly, apart from the peace talks where things had been stalled for months and months and months. In February of ’70, he begins meeting with Le Duc Tho. They make some real progress, so that on the eve of the election, Kissinger can say, “I believe I’ve got a good deal here.”
And he does have a pretty good deal. The problem is that we’ve got an issue with our allies, the South Vietnamese. They don’t want to go along with the things that Kissinger has agreed to, including allowing the North Vietnamese to stay in South Vietnam. And the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese allies, are unhappy because they’re not being consulted.
But Le Duc Tho and Kissinger feel they have something. It falls apart after the reelection of President Nixon.
DR: Ultimately it’s renegotiated. What is the ultimate agreement?
KB: It essentially permits North Vietnamese troops to not have to leave the South, and permits us to get our prisoners of war back. As one journalist joked, “It looked as if half a million Americans went to South Vietnam to get 650 prisoners out.” It was a good way to distract attention, as John Negroponte said in our film, from “how we bombed them into accepting our concessions.”
The American Experiment Page 13
