Ken Burns, Faux "Storyteller"
albertcory50.substack.com
albertcory50.substack.com
I don't know of other hit pieces -- that memo must not have gone to me.
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?
1) In hindsight. Usually the truth/details eventually become available. This reqires them to be observant/curious enough to notice.
2) By bring close enough to the news item to have the story contradict your knowledge. This is how it worked for me, and made me dig deeper.
Working against both of these is Gell-Mann amnesia and a general lack of attention.
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.
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.
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.
yonder comes Father Coughlin wearing the silver chain, cash in his stomach and Hitler on the brain.
Ken Burns, Faux Storyteller
Ken Burns, “Storyteller”