A whole lot of scattershot criticism without actually saying or claiming much. If anything this increases my faith in Burns, if that's the best you can come up with against him.
I remember watching Walter Cronkite on TV. Most people thought he was pretty even-handed in presenting the news.
But I wonder. The problem was, he was pretty much the only source of news for an awful lot of people, so how could people tell if he was even-handed or not?
Ken Burns take on the Vietnam War was establishment liberal in nature, and this article is establishment conservative in nature, and neither really comes close to understanding the roots of the conflict.
Fundamentally, the United States had two options at the end of World War II after the Japanese surrender related to Vietnam - support the Vietnamese nationalist independence movement (at the time not communist in nature, indeed they cited the Declaration of Independence when asking Truman for support), or allow the French to come back in and try to reclaim their imperial holdings. Disastrously, Truman chose to back the French ambitions and history rolled on from there. This was a huge break from the policies of FDR, who really had no patience with European imperialism (which is one reason he forced Churchill into the “Destroyers for Bases” agreement in 1940, where the U.S. provided destroyers to Britain in exchange for 99-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean).
Almost certainly, FDR would have sided with Vietnamese nationalists and opposed the return of European imperialism to SE Asia (which he noted was used by the Japanese as justification for their aggression). FDR's relationship with the Saudi king Ibn Saud (which opened the door to American oil industry exploration in Saudi Arabia) is more evidence that FDR would not have backed the French as Truman did, but instead would have pursued a semi-exclusive relationship with Vietnam's native leaders, thus avoiding two decades of violent conflict and the deaths of several million Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian civilians and 50,000+ US soldiers.
Another undeniable fact about Vietnam that Burns grossly neglected was the disproportionate representation of African-American soldiers in front-line combat units and thus higher casualty rates in that group, particular in the early years of the war (pre 1970) - but Apocalypse Now got that right, with the last outpost being mostly African-American before they cross over into Cambodia.
The only conclusion is, you can't trust the liberal or conservative establishment to honestly report on the causes and characteristics of the American War (as the Vietnamese call it) in today's corporate media environment - all you'll get is self-serving historical revisionism.
One of my favorites is: President Grover Cleveland, after leaving office, went to Princeton as a trustee. While there, he had a very, very bitter feud with Woodrow Wilson over a trivial matter (like most academic feuds). Wilson was so angry he left academia and entered politics.
You're making the same mistake as the article, which is assuming that Ken Burns gives a shit about politics. He will give a "facts-on-the-ground" overview of events at the time, but his films famously have a myopic focus on individuals, their actions and written experiences, sometimes to a fault.
Just like he doesn't really care to put Elliot Ness on an even larger pedestal than the one upon which he currently sits, he doesn't care to delve into the post-war geopolitical situation in SE Asia, because no one wrote about it at the time and it did not matter to front-line soldiers, news reporters, or the American public.
If you want a historiographical survey, read Wikipedia. That's just not the point of a Burns film, and that's okay that you and the author find faults in what he omits.
He certainly does care about politics. Just watch his interviews on YouTube, where he describes himself as a "yellow dog Democrat."
> put Elliot Ness on an even larger pedestal than the one upon which he currently sits
That's not at all what I said about Ness. It was that he did play an important role and that was recognized even at the time. The fact that Hollywood made him into a mythic hero after he was dead doesn't mean he was really nothing at all.
> The only thing that’s missing is that they don’t call the Prohibition supporters a basket of deplorables.
Which reminds me... one of my fave historical factoids is that the KKK supported votes for women, because women supported prohibition, which allowed protestant KKK to demonise and attack Catholic Irish immigrants, a target of thiers during that incarnation.
Looks like the doco and the article missed a giant personality of the time, anti-prohibition, an entire deplorable basket all of his own, and champion of a prior failed attempt to overthrow the US federal government.
yonder comes Father Coughlin wearing the silver chain, cash in his stomach and Hitler on the brain.
I certainly noticed that David Koch was a prominent funder of Vietnam. One of my great disappointments in it was it never seriously asked the question, who profited from the war. As I saw the napalm flames, I couldn't help but think of all the suppliers who made out handsomely.
