One redeeming thing about PBS’s documentary ‘The Vietnam War’ is its acknowledgment of how Richard Nixon treasonously prolonged the criminal violence.
After reading and hearing wildly contradictory accounts of Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War documentary on PBS, I decided I had to watch the thing. I agree with some of the criticism and some of the praise.
The documentary begins with the ludicrous idea that the U.S. government had good intentions. It ends with praise for the memorial in DC and its tragic list of names, without mention of the greater number of U.S. veterans of that war who have since died from suicide, much less the vastly greater number of Vietnamese who were killed. The size of a memorial for all the dead would dwarf the current wall. The film treats “war criminal” as a nasty insult uttered only by enemies or immature peaceniks who come to regret it — but never actually addresses the question of the legality of war. The ongoing horrors of Agent Orange birth defects are almost brushed aside as controversial. The toll of the war on soldiers is given tremendously disproportionate space in comparison with the much larger actual toll on civilians. Truly wise voices that opposed the war on moral and legal grounds from start to finish are missing, thereby allowing a narrative in which people make mistakes and learn from them. Alternative proposals of what might have been done instead of the war don’t arise. No coverage is given to those who profited financially from the war. The lying of Secretary of “Defense” Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson at the time that the Gulf of Tonkin incident did not happen is minimized. Etc.
All of that being said, the film benefitted from including many voices I disagree with or whose opinions I find reprehensible — it’s an account of people’s points of views, and we should hear lots of them, and we learn from hearing lots of them. The 10-part movie also reports very openly and clearly how much the U.S. government lied about its motivations and its prospects of “success” during the course of the war — including by showing footage of network TV journalists reporting on the evil of war in a manner that they simply could not do today and keep their jobs (admittedly, often with a focus on the problem of U.S. deaths, which remains the one problem U.S. audiences are still told to care about today). The film does report on the deaths of Vietnamese, albeit with rigorous adherence to the orthodox practice of always reporting the relatively tiny number of U.S. deaths first. It does report on particular atrocities and even on their illegality. It does frame the Gulf of Tonkin incidents as provoked by the United States off the coast of Vietnam. In short, it does an adequate enough job so that any sane viewer would demand that there never again be a war like that one. However, the pretense that some other war could be totally justifiable is carefully left standing.
I want to call particular, and grateful, attention to one item that the PBS film does include, namely Richard Nixon’s treason. Five years ago, this story showed up in an article by Ken Hughes, and others by Robert Parry. Four years ago it made it into The Smithsonian, among other places. Three years ago it gained notice in a corporate-media-approved book by Ken Hughes. At that time, George Will mentioned Nixon’s treason in passing in the Washington Post, quite as if everyone knew all about it. In the new PBS documentary, Burns and Novick actually come out and state clearly what happened, in a manner that Will did not. As a result, a great many more people may indeed actually hear what happened.
What happened was this. President Johnson’s staff engaged in peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Presidential candidate Richard Nixon secretly told the North Vietnamese that they would get a better deal if they waited. Johnson learned of this and privately called it treason but publicly said nothing. Nixon campaigned promising that he could end the war. But, unlike Reagan who later sabotaged negotiations to free hostages from Iran, Nixon didn’t actually deliver what he had secretly delayed. Instead, as a president elected on the basis of fraud, he continued and escalated the war (just as Johnson had before him). He once again campaigned on the promise to finally end the war when he sought re-election four years later — the public still having no idea that the war might have been ended at the negotiating table before Nixon had ever moved into the White House if only Nixon hadn’t illegally interfered (or might have been ended at any point since its beginning simply by ending it).
The fact that this crime existed and that Nixon wanted it kept secret sheds light on lesser crimes generally lumped under the heading “Watergate.” The PBS documentary does point out that Nixon’s desire to break into a safe in the Brookings Institution was probably part of the effort to cover up his original treason. Burns and Novick fail to mention that Nixon thug Charles Colson also plotted to bomb the Brookings Institution.
I cannot answer what the U.S. public would have done had Nixon’s sabotage of peace negotiations been known at the time it happened. I can answer what the U.S. public would do if the current U.S. president sabotaged peace negotiations with North Korea, had the Secretary of State call him a moron, and had the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declare that he had hurt the United States, was risking World War III, and lacked a grasp on reality. Basically, people would kick back and watch — at best — a movie about Vietnam from way back in the day when there were things to worry about.
This article was originally published at DavidSwanson.org.
Back in “the day” Canadians demonstrated their opposition to the War in Viet Nam. Today Canadians are proud to stand in for the Americans in their immoral and illegal wars. Never forget that Canadian air force resources flew cover over the nastiness that was happening in Libya and other places. Canadian troops are often eager to “blood” themselves in NATO (read: “Anglo-Zionist”) wars, and sport “support the troops” (not “oppose the war”, which any intelligent person would be proud to sport) on their cars and refrigerators full of beer. The sixties era draft dodgers contributed immensely to Canada. I would suggest that Canadians who support Americas overseas wars move to the U.S. Canada has become just as immoral as the U.S.
David Swanson, the “promises” allegedly made by Nixon’s surrogates to “North Vietnamese negotiators” and which became a Nixon campaign “promise” may be wrong in that it may have caused the NV to expect something and thus prolonged the negotiations w/ the LBJ negotiators. And, after the refusal of LBJ to run for a second term, and Nixon subsequently elected, he extended and increased the bombing was duplicitous and self-serving, but it is not treason.
Where is the ‘treason,” Nixon “assurances” to the NV is meaningless, and certainly Nixon’s election is something they cannot control. Further following Nixon’s election and the “stalling” of ongoing negotiations originally by LBJs administration is also not treason. Nor is it treason to fail to live up to campaign promises when the reasons given were bring the NV to the negation table. None of the above are treason in any sense of the word as a prosecutable offense.
You should cease using this canard as a sales tool for your book or speeches as it is patently false. It may be malicious, selfish and self-serving of the Nixon campaign and administration, but it ‘s not treason. IMHO your claim of “treason” is a libel and you may well be sued for this malicious distortion of Nixon’s intent and character.
Do the liberal apologists for US empire mention kissinger in this or do they just malign the dead?