Doctor Blake Mysteries: “Crossing the Line” (December Media, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ITC, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on a Doctor Blake Mysteries episode on PBS: “Crossing the Line” from 2014, set in 1958 and depicting a fire in the projection room of the local movie theatre (which is showing, of all films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo — not exactly a non-mainstream movie but still pretty recherché fare for a small-town theatre in the Australian outback) which kills its projectionist, Adam Summers (Ted Stryke). In an anachronistic mistake I red-flagged on imdb.com, a firefighter tries to revive Summers with CPR — which didn’t exist until the 1960’s. The cops initially suspect the owner of the theatre trying to burn the place down for the insurance, but eventually Dr. Lucien Blake (Craig McLachlan) deduces that the fire was actually started because Patrick Tyneman (John Wood), spoiled son of local land baron Edward Tyneman (Lee Beckhurst), had formed a ring to make and show pornographic movies, shooting them at a local estate his dad had given him and forcing people, like the usher at the theatre (who, in a touch that really dates this movie, is shown walking the aisles of the theatre selling cigarettes as well as popcorn!), to be his on-screen talent by blackmailing them. In her case, Patrick had loaned her brother a large sum of money to start a business which had failed, and Patrick offered to “forgive” the debt if she would agree to let herself get fucked before his cameras. Adam Summers was part of this gang because he owned a 16 mm projector and provided the expertise needed to show the films, and though they promised they wouldn’t show them outside of the town of Ballarat, where the Doctor Blake stories take place, in fact they exhibited them all over the country — and the reluctant porn star’s dad happened to see one of them at a stag party he went to and, while everyone else was laughing and having a great time, he was so ashamed at seeing his daughter doing it on screen he determined to have his revenge, first killing Summers and then Patrick. When Patrick’s dad finds out what he’s accused of he pulls the family attorney he’d assigned Patrick and essentially disowns his son, leaving him on his own to face the consequences of his actions for the first time in his life. This wasn’t the best Doctor Blake episode I’ve seen but the show remains reliably entertaining and has that odd reticence that makes British mysteries so appealing (and it’s revealing that the one murder that takes place is committed by rendering the victim unconscious and then locking him in a sealed room and starting a fire — no gunplay or literal bloodshed).

This Island Earth (Universal-International, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I managed to spend most of the morning in front of the TV set — watching the Superman serial and also the 1955 movie This Island Earth, produced at Universal and starring Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue and Rex Reason in a Technicolor science-fiction epic directed by Joseph M. Newman. I’ve already noted Newman’s deficiencies as a director in my comments on Kiss of Fire, which he made the same year (a movie which also suffered from casting deficiencies — Jack Palance and Barbara Rush in roles which cried out for Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth), but while This Island Earth wasn’t anywhere near as good as the other “serious” sci-fi movies of its period (The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers) — and certainly would have profited by the involvement of any of the auteurs of those films (Hawks, Wise or Siegel) — Newman was at least more in his element in this genre than he was in an historical costume romance. Morrow stars as Exeter, a scientist from the planet Metaluna, who seeks the intervention of Earth’s leading experts on atomic energy in order to restore the force-field that is protecting Metaluna from the attacks being launched, almost constantly, from a neighboring planet, Zagon. Reason and Domergue play two of the Earth scientists who are virtually kidnapped to work on Exeter’s project, recruited through a taste of Metalunan technology and the offer to work in a secret laboratory for an unnamed employer (given the 1950’s, and the fact that up until three-fifths of the way through the movie, the fact that Exeter is from another planet is kept carefully unspecified, one wonders why they don’t suspect they’re being recruited by the Soviets).

The main defect of this movie is the script by Franklin Coen and Edward G. O’Callaghan, which took an essentially interesting story (the basis was a novel by Raymond Jones, who presumably explained the title — something the movie never does) and managed to miss, or dramatize just at the most superficial level, all the potential conflicts that would have made it interesting. Still, the movie is absolutely ravishing to look at — thanks to the photography of Clifford Stine and the special-effects work (Stine and David Horsley were co-credited with the effects), as well as the uniquely 1950’s conception of what an alien planet would look like (art directors Alexander Golitzen and Richard Reidel — though Golitzen’s was probably just a department-head credit and it’s unlikely he did specific work on this film — and set decorators Russel Hausman and Julia Heron), dated but still visually appealing (it looks like one of the earlier “space rides” at Disneyland, actually). The cast is workmanlike — though, with all the advantages of Metalunan technology, it’s surprising that they couldn’t have come up with a more convincing wig for Morrow to wear as Exeter (and Lance Fuller, as another, more doctrinaire Metalunan who keeps pressuring Exeter to use the “thought transference” brainwashing machine on Our Hero and Heroine, despite Exeter’s protestations that it will make them less useful scientists, has to wear just as bad a wig as Morrow does) — and the color helps, though the story could stand a remake (maybe John Carpenter could do it — he’s done well by other 1950’s sci-fi classics in his underrated remake of The Thing from 1982 and his 1989 near-masterpiece, They Live, which made the powerful personal metaphor of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers into a political one) which would actually dramatize all the potential story points evaded or worked “around” in this version. — 10/31/94

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This Island Earth was a much better movie — a genuine, though flawed, sci-fi classic (and, at least judging from the excerpt published in the book They Came from Outer Space, a more exact transcription of Raymond F. Jones’ source novel than most sci-fi films of the time). The film could have done without that horrible mutant that emerges at the end, the makeups on the aliens from Metaluna could have been more convincing (“Why do aliens in sci-fi movies always have to wear really bad wigs?” Charles asked), and we could have been given some idea of what the war between Metaluna and its neighboring planet Zagon was all about — as it is, the ship bearing Exeter (the nice Metalunan) and the two scientists he’s brought back from Earth arrives just in time to witness the destruction of Metaluna and (in an interesting anticipation of Arthur C. Clarke) its conversion from a planet into a star (a special effect that remains convincing and incredibly beautiful), whereupon Exeter sacrifices his own life (a la The Last of the Mohicans — he’s the last of the Metalunans) to get Our Hero and Our Heroine back to earth. One could wish for a remake that would be more complex, more sensitively written and equipped with state-of-the-art effects, but the movie we have is moving and at times awesomely beautiful (as when we first see the skyline of Metaluna, a ravishingly colored matte painting, and realize how defenseless the planet really is against the ceaseless bombardment by the Zagonian energy weapons). — 6/6/97

•••••

I ran the science-fiction movie This Island Earth from 1955, which I’ve been curious about re-seeing since I recently read Raymond F. Jones’ source novel and found the first half of the movie tracked the novel surprisingly closely but the second half was radically different. Both book and film begin in the labs of Ryberg Electronics in Arizona, where principal scientist Dr. Cal Meacham (Rex Reason) is working on a machine to turn lead into uranium to create an inexhaustible source of atomic fuel for nuclear reactors. Only the capacitors available to him can’t take the sheer voltage level needed for the machine to work, so he orders new ones — but instead of what he was expecting he receives an envelope stating that he’s being sent a substitute which looks like a bunch of glass beads. He tests the beads along with his colleague Joe Wilson (Robert Nichols) and realizes they actually do work as condensers — and what’s more, they accommodate such high levels of voltage they’re clearly unlike any technology he’s ever heard of before. Then he gets a mysterious electronics catalog printed not on paper but on some sort of flexible metal, which offers a kit to manufacture a product called an “interocitor.” Naturally Meacham has no idea what an interocitor is or what it does, but he’s so curious he orders the kit (which comes with a solemn warning that if any part is lost, stolen or accidentally destroyed it will not be replaced — in the book Meacham and his crew actually do destroy a part by accident and the mystery firm that sent it to them sends back a note that they won’t replace it, which forces them to jury-rig something that will take its place), builds the interocitor and finds that the entire operation has been a recruitment and testing operation from a mysterious company that is recruiting engineers for a project in an underground lab. The catch is that the scientists working on it will have to live there and won’t be allowed contact with the outside world — though they will be given nice places to stay, fabulous meals and all the accoutrements they want. The project is run by a man named Exeter (Jeff Morrow), who looks like a normal human except for his shock of white hair, abnormally (for us, anyway) elongated head and crease in the middle of his forehead, and ultimately it turns out that he’s from another planet and he uses a spacecraft to fly Dr. Meacham and his assistant, Dr. Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue, who actually met and briefly dated Meacham three years earlier but can’t acknowledge him because their sinister employers want there to be no emotional contacts between their workers that might distract them from their tasks), to their home base for further work on the mysterious project. 

It’s at this point that Jones’ novel and the script by Franklin Coen and George Callahan diverge: in the book Exeter (who, if I recall correctly, is actually called something else) is the representative of a federation of planets that’s fighting an ongoing war against another federation, an evil one — the Cold War parallels between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the satellite countries on both sides, is quite obvious — and the reason for the title, which isn’t explained in the film, is that just like U.S. companies have outsourced much of their industrial production to Third World countries, many of them located on islands, because the labor is cheaper, so his federation has outsourced both production and R&D to “island” planets, located far away in the galaxy from the ones that are warring with each other, where labor and other costs will be cheaper. Only in Jones’ novel the existence of factories on Earth turning out goods to maintain the good federation’s military machine has been noticed by the bad federation, which determines to destroy Earth just to handicap the good federation’s war production — and in the end Meacham and Adams have to trick the representatives of both federations into leaving Earth alone and carrying out their battle somewhere else. Screenwriters Coen and Callahan changed much of that: in their version Exeter is the representative of a planet called Metaluna that has been fighting an extended war with a rival planet, Zagon. The reason they need Meacham and Adams is that they’ve shielded themselves from Zagon’s interstellar missiles by means of a force field powered by nuclear energy — only they’ve depleted their total supply of uranium and need someone who can supply them a new way to make atomic fuel. The problem is that by the time Exeter’s spacecraft arrives on his home planet, it’s too late: the Zagonite energy missiles are already breaching the Metalunan force field and it’s only a matter of time before the planet is utterly destroyed. 

Exeter, who in previous scenes has been depicted as a real S.O.B. whose only saving grace is that the other Metalunans we see — Exeter’s sidekick Brack (Lance Fuller) and “The Monitor” (Douglas Spencer), president of Metaluna’s governing council — are even worse (Exeter casually has two of the scientists he’s recruited to the project, Dr. Steve Carlson [Russell Johnson] and German-speaking Dr. Adolph Engelbord [Karl L. Lindt], killed for attempting to escape the Metalunan campus on earth) — becomes a tragic figure as he flees Metaluna in the spacecraft, taking Meacham and Adams with him, then essentially sacrifices his own life to make sure they get home safely. This Island Earth has acquired a bad reputation because the makers of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 chose it as their “target” when they decided to do a feature-film version of their TV show mocking old movies, and it does have its silly aspects: the high-tech gizmos and especially the spacecraft, no doubt impressive to 1955 audiences, look pretty fake today, and the writers couldn’t resist writing in a bug-eyed monster (a sort of mutant supposedly created by the Zagonite energy weapons tweaking Metalunan DNA, or whatever their genetic material is, in a tacky-looking costume under which is all-purpose Universal-International stunt double Edwin Parker, who’d previously filled in for Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. in their later Universal horror pics) to menace Our Heroes both on Metaluna and when it stows away on the spaceship. (Meacham and Adams are in large plastic cylinders that are supposed to adjust their bodies to the differences in air pressure between Earth and Metaluna when it starts menacing them from outside, and I couldn’t help but think that Coen and Callahan had seen the 1932 film Doctor “X” — though unlike the people in Doctor “X” Meacham and Adams are able to escape their plastic confinements and wait until the injuries Mr. Mutant suffered back on Metaluna do him in aboard the spaceship). It also doesn’t help that, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth has a line of abysmally clunky religious dialogue obviously put there to appease the Jesuits who were still in charge at the Production Code Administration, when Meacham tells his Metalunan captors, “Our true size is the size of our God!”

But all in all, This Island Earth is one of the better science-fiction movies of the 1950’s, at or just below the level of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Forbidden Planet (whose makers actually borrowed some sets and props from This Island Earth). Its morals and especially its politics are considerably more ambiguous than the straight Cold War propaganda of the source novel: one can read the conflict between Metaluna and Zagon as a Cold War metaphor (Zagon as the Soviet Union or the Communist bloc as a whole, Metaluna as the U.S. and its allies who thought they could handle the outside danger by “containing” it), or one can give it a more radical reading as a statement on the futility and wanton destructiveness of all war (especially since it came from the studio that had produced the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front a quarter-century earlier). Exeter’s emergence as a tragic figure and his well-wrought philosophical reaction to the destruction of his planet (one could make a case that This Island Earth essentially ends where the Superman mythos begins) alone gives This Island Earth more philosophical depth than the common run of 1950’s science-fiction movies and brings it closer to the sophistication of the best sci-fi writers of the time — which is a real surprise when one reads the novel, because Raymond F. Jones was not one of the best sci-fi writers of the time and the book is straightforward with virtually none of the hints of psychological or ethical complexity of the movie. This time I liked This Island Earth the film a good deal better than I had when I’d seen it before — though I still think it deserves a modern-day remake that would make explicit what the writers and director (Joseph M. Newman, a Universal-International contractee with a hacky reputation who acquits himself quite well here) could only hint at in 1955, with the Production Code Administration as well as the studio “suits” breathing down their necks. — 9/24/17

Live at the Belly Up: The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band, featuring Rick Vito (KPBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a quite good Live from the Belly Up episode featuring “The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band with Rick Vito.” Mick Fleetwood, you’ll recall, is the drummer for Fleetwood Mac and has had that gig since the band started in 1968 — it was named after him and the original bass player, John McVie, who met in the 1967 edition of John Mayall’s Blues Breakers with lead guitarist Peter Green and decided to form a blues band of their own. They added a young British musician named Jeremy Spencer and the four of them recorded the first Fleetwood Mac album, called simply Fleetwood Mac, at the CBS Studios in London in 1969 for Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon label. Blue Horizon was a label that specialized in reissuing American blues records, including quite a lot of Elmore James (they licensed the tapes of James’ last sessions in 1963 for Bobby Robinson’s Fire label — Fire was one of only a handful of labels recording African-American music in the 1950’s that was actually Black-owned — and so Elmore James became one of Blue Horizon’s most prolific artists even though he’d been dead for four years when the label was founded), and in recording British musicians who played in the American blues style. (Their biggest acts were Fleetwood Mac and the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, another band formed by an ex-Mayall drummer.) They made three albums with that four-piece lineup, one for Blue Horizon and two for Andrew Loog Oldham’s short-lived Immediate Records label, as well as a marvelous set of recordings, originally issued as Blues Jam in Chicago and later in the mid-1970’s as Fleetwood Mac in Chicago (an obvious attempt to cash in on the later success of a quite different, in both personnel and style, Fleetwood Mac, though anyone who bought Fleetwood Mac in Chicago expecting it to sound anything like Rumours would have been sorely disappointed!), in which the Macsters backed real Black blues musicians from the Windy City. (For me the high point of that album was the appearance of Elmore James’ surviving band, led by saxophonist J. T. Brown, backing Jeremy Spencer on great performances of some of James’ songs.) 

In the early days Fleetwood Mac’s material was almost all blues — either covers of Black blues songs or their own originals written in the same style — until the band in general and Peter Green in particular got to be more experimental and started sniffing around what would eventually become known as “progressive rock.” Green started writing and playing long, atmospheric songs, many of them either outright instrumentals or long jams with just bits of vocal. He also started taking a lot of LSD, and after one of his trips he announced to his fellow band members that from then on he wanted them to take just enough money for bare subsistence, and give the rest away to various charities. Needless to say, the other band members weren’t too thrilled about that, so they fired Green and hired another guitar player, Danny Kirwan, to take his place. Then, just as the new Fleetwood Mac was about to start a major U.S. tour, Jeremy Spencer suddenly became a born-again Christian and quit the group to join the Children of God cult. Since there was no time to break in another new musician and teach him all their material for their tour, the band had to go, hat in hand, to Peter Green and ask him to rejoin — which Green agreed to do, but only for that one tour. Over the next few years the band went through various personnel changes and morphed their music from blues to mainstream rock, and they added the other three members — McVie’s then-wife Christine, Lindsay Buckingham and his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks — recording another album simply called Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and then following it up with the 1977 mega-success Rumours. The “new Fleetwood Mac” hung together for a while, broke up more due to personal than musical issues, and periodically have re-formed for widely publicized and highly lucrative reunions. Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood decided to form a side project that would allow him to get back to his blues roots, and the result was the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band — though I couldn’t help but make the joke, when Charles arrived home early on while this show was on, that with his other band Mick Fleetwood gets to play stadia and with this band he gets to play bars. The Mick Fleetwood Blues Band is a solid band that puts on a good show and, like the original Fleetwood Mac, relies for material on a mix of Black blues covers (Elmore James in particular) and originals in blues style. 

If they have a weakness, it’s their front man, singer-guitarist Rick Vito, who’s a perfectly competent blues-rock player but one would think that someone with Mick Fleetwood’s prestige and money could get a stronger, more assertive, more charismatic musician. Through much of the show I wondered what this band would sound like with Joe Bonamassa fronting it; though Bonamassa’s e-mails get awfully strange at times he is an excellent player (in a review of one of his own performances on PBS I called him the best white blues guitarist to emerge since the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990 — has it really been that long?) and a collaboration between him and Mick Fleetwood would be considerably more exciting than the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band as it stands. Fleetwood himself remains an excellent drummer, though when the show opened I was struck by the sheer amount of equipment he had on stage — at least four tom-toms, two or three bass drums and three crash cymbals as well as a set of little bells and a gong that looks like Fleetwood bought it at J. Arthur Rank’s garage sale — and couldn’t help but reflect how much Gene Krupa got out of just a snare drum, two tom-toms, a bass drum, two crash cymbals and a hi-hat. Much of the material the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band played was from Fleetwood Mac’s first three albums — including the song “Black Magic Woman,” which Peter Green wrote for Fleetwood Mac’s second album (Vito mentioned that in the U.S. it bore the title English Rose and the cover shot was Mick Fleetwood in drag — Fleetwood was predictably embarrassed that his band’s front man was reminding people of this) but which didn’t become a huge international hit until Santana covered it (less effectively, I might add, mainly because Carlos Santana, a great technician, simply isn’t as creative or individualistic a guitarist as Peter Green). They began with a song called “Fleetwood Boogie” which I suspect was written especially for this band, then went into a cover of another Peter Green original for the first Fleetwood Mac, a minor hit called “Oh Well,” and then a cover of an Elmore James song called “My Baby’s Hot.” Then they did a medley of two blues songs, “Rollin’ Man” and “Voodoo Woman,” followed by their version of “Black Magic Woman” — which was quite good even though Vito probably didn’t relish having to compete with both Peter Green and Carlos Santana! Then they switched gears for a nice bit of New Orleanian funk called “Lucky Devil,” for which Mick Fleetwood got up from his huge drum set and played another set of drums, and the keyboard player, Mark Johnstone — whom I thought was the best musician in the band next to Fleetwood himself: though he was playing two stacked Roland electronic keyboards he had one set to sound like a real blues piano and the other like a Hammond B-3 organ, so the sounds were authentic and right for the music — doubled on harmonica. 

Later another percussionist, Paulinho Morelli (at least I think that’s the name — he’s not listed on the official Mick Fleetwood Blues Band Web site and I suspect he was a guest the Belly Up Tavern brought in for this gig), took over that second drum set for a long song that was a blend of an instrumental called “Passage East” (which I suspect was a Peter Green composition because it was strongly reminiscent of Green’s more atmospheric instrumentals, both with Mac and on the beautiful 1971 all-instrumental solo album The End of the Game he recorded right after he left the band for the last time) and a song called “World Turning.” The band’s final song (of nine; Live at the Belly Up is one of those TV shows where the number of songs the band is able to squeeze into the hour-long time slot says a lot about their musical style — I’ve seen progressive-rock acts play only four, five or six songs in the slot and pop and blues acts play 12) was the searing Elmore James blues “Shake Your Money Maker,” which Fleetwood Mac played (with Jeremy Spencer on lead vocal and slide guitar) on their first album; Vito was hardly in Spencer’s league, let alone James’, but the message still got through and it was one of the infectious things the band played all night. Live at the Belly Up is one of the most important local resources for live music on KPBS — as the Belly Up Tavern itself remains a huge asset to the local music scene as well as a favored venue for major acts (like Fleetwood and Joan Osborne), as well as their offspring (Willie Nelson’s son Lukas has played a Live at the Belly Up telecast with his band Promise of the Real), doing off-beat side projects. Though not a patch on the Black musicians who created these sounds — in the 1960’s, when I first started listening to British blues records, they sounded a lot better than they do now, when the American originals they were covering are readily available in reissues of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and others — the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band is a quite appealing blues-rock act, and the large, grey-haired, grey-bearded Mick Fleetwood himself has the look of an ancient sage behind all those drums, someone who has traveled the world to bring back wisdom in the form of a 12-bar blues.

The Viet Nam War, part 5: “This Is What We Do” (Florentine Films/PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched the fifth episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Geoffrey C. Ward documentary The Viet Nam War (incidentally Charles challenged my insistence on spelling “Viet Nam” as two words, unhyphenated, saying that the Viet Namese consulate in the U.S. uses the “Vietnam” spelling that was commonplace in the American media when the Viet Nam war was actually happening), which was called “This Is What We Do” — after the reminiscence of a soldier who fought in the war who when he complained, early on in his tour, about the inhumane things he was expected to do, was told by his commanding officer, “This is war. This is what we do.” The period covered in this episode was from July to December 1967, during which North Viet Namese Communist Party general secretary Le Duan (who according to this series was the real power running North Viet Nam; by that time, Ward’s script argues, Ho Chi Minh was just a figurehead) decided the North Viet Namese army and their allies, the National Liberation Front (so-called “Viet Cong”) in the south would launch a major offensive starting on the date of the Viet Namese lunar new year, Tet, on January 31, 1968. (Tet was a defeat for the North Viet Namese in military terms but a triumph for them politically: though they weren’t able to bring down the South Viet Namese government or conquer any major cities, they virtually destroyed the support base for the war among the American people, boosted the anti-war insurgent candidacies of Eugene McCarthy — who makes what amounts to a cameo appearance at the end of this show — and Robert Kennedy and brought down Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency. But then, as I’ve pointed out before, that’s how all successful guerrilla armies win: they wear down the will of the occupying country’s people to fight.) 

There were some fascinating stories, including one from Jim Musgraves (at least I think I’m recalling his name right), a quite personable (and attractive, even 50 years later) man from Missouri who like a lot of other boys from America’s heartland bought into the idea that the Viet Nam war was a) a noble struggle against Communism any right-thinking American male of military age would want to be part of, and b) his generation’s opportunity to serve the country the way World War II had been for his parents’ generation. He was so severely wounded in one firefight his chest was literally ripped open, and though he was evacuated by helicopter he was visited by about four or five doctors who gave up on him, saying there was nothing they could do for him — one even asked what religion he was so he could call the appropriate chaplain to give him last rites — until finally he lucked out with a doctor who said, “Why isn’t this man being treated?” Musgraves also said that after his first week in Viet Nam “I never killed another human being” — not because he stopped fatally shooting the people who were shooting at him, or trying to, or might have been there to do so, or even looked vaguely like people who might have been trying to do so, but because he started thinking of them as “dinks,” “slopes” and “gooks” (all terms of abuse that had come from previous U.S. war or racism against Asians — Ward’s narration includes a brief etymology for each) and he could therefore kill them with a clear conscience — just as people on the other side (one of the best aspects of this program is the fact that they extensively interviewed people who fought on the Northern side — even though between them and the South Viet Namese who were also interviewed, and Burns’ and Novick’s decision to give the translations via subtitles instead of voice-overs, leads to an awful lot of Viet Namese on the soundtrack) called Americans “puppets,” “imperialists” and “monsters.” 

The story of the part of the war covered in “This Is What We Do” (a title with an oddly fatalistic air) is one of a steady escalation on both sides, and President Johnson’s response to Robert McNamara’s series of secret memos explaining that the current strategy was not working and the war could not be won, which was to arrange for him to be appointed president of the World Bank and for long-time Democratic fixer Clark Clifford to replace McNamara as Secretary of Defense. It also covered the disputed 1967 election in South Viet Nam, in which the U.S. prevailed on the principal rivals in the government, Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, not to run against each other but instead to form a ticket with Thieu as President and Ky as Vice-President — and despite extensive election rigging and fraud the Thieu-Ky ticket only got 35 percent of the vote, though without provision for a runoff they were declared elected. (Shortly after the election, one of the rival candidates, General “Big” Minh — who’d also been a player in the period between November 1963 and June 1965 in which there were no fewer than eight South Viet Namese governments — “Musical Governments,” Mad magazine called it — asked for permission to leave the country, and instead was arrested. Some democracy.) The elections were held largely to placate opposition both in South Viet Nam and the U.S.; American critics of the war were wondering why we were being told we were fighting for “democracy” when the local government we were allied with was being run by military officers who’d taken power in coups, and Viet Namese Buddhists (which was about nine-tenths of the country) were once again mounting resistance actions and claiming that they were the victims of discrimination by the Roman Catholic minority who were actually running the South Viet Namese government and had been since the formation of the rump state of South Viet Nam and the installation of its first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1955. 

There is no doubt in my mind that the war in Viet Nam was a misguided misadventure that didn’t even make sense as an act of imperialism — Viet Nam had no resources to speak of (about all that could be said for it in terms of its value in international trade was it was a great place to grow rice), nor was it strategically located in terms of confronting China (as Korea was), and any value it could have had to the international capitalist ruling class was hardly worth the toll in human lives, financial resources and overall national energy the American elite put into it. It will be interesting to see how this series develops — even though, in one of the dorkiest decisions any American broadcasting network has ever made, they’re putting the series on pause for the next few days and won’t resume it until this Sunday night (with “Things Fall Apart,” the episode that will cover the Tet offensive); either way, the conflicts that drove U.S. politics and society apart over Viet Nam — and the other two big things that happened to America, politically and socially, in the 1960’s, the African-American civil rights struggle and the emergence of the counterculture (which in the 1960’s meant the hippies and today mostly means Queers) — still divide the country, and Donald Trump’s election as President was in large measure a triumph of the racist, pro-war and anti-counterculture movement that emerged in the 1960’s on the American Right to support the war in Viet Nam and drive — politically and, sometimes, physically — the war’s likely opponents out of any influence in what went on in American governance and society.

The Viet Nam War, part 4: “Resolve” (Florentine Films/PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I once again watched the new episode of the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary The Viet Nam War (Ken Burns gets all the credit but the two are listed as co-directors and Geoffrey C. Ward as writer, so it’s really a collaboration among the three of them), which was called “Resolve.” That brought back memories: I’m sure it was the use of that word as a noun during the Viet Nam war (as in, “We have to stay in Viet Nam because we must show our resolve”) that has given me a lifelong allergy to the word “resolve” as a noun. Usually, “we must show our resolve” means “we’re doing something incredibly stupid and pointless and wasteful, but by gad, we’re going to keep doing it!” Ironically, with this, its fourth episode, the Viet Nam War documentary is getting as repetitive as the Viet Nam war itself: a jumble of odd names of people and places, a battle here, a protest there, a student strike in South Viet Nam itself when a popular commander in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) was fired by dictator Nguyen Cao “I have only one hero — Hitler” Ky; he was also a Buddhist, and apparently Ky, like Ngo Dinh Diem, was a Roman Catholic and was giving Catholics (who, remember, had adopted the religion of Viet Nam’s former imperialist occupiers, the French) preferential treatment in both the government and the military. 

The open unrest in the streets of South Viet Nam’s two major cities, Saigon and Hue, made it even harder for the U.S. government and the war’s supporters to maintain the fiction that we were fighting to protect the South Viet Namese people’s right to “democracy” against the enslavement of Communism. (Historically, ironically enough, there had not been two Viet Nams but three: the country had long been divided into three provinces — Tonkin in the north, Annam in the center and Cochin-China in the south — and interestingly, when Ho Chi Minh first appealed for American aid after World War II he signed his letter not as the actual or would-be head of state of a united Viet Nam but specifically as Annamese.) The period of the war covered by “Resolve” was from January 1966 to June 1967, though it could have been just about any time between the introduction of U.S. ground troops in January 1965 and the Tet offensives launched by the North Viet Namese army in February-March 1968 — the first time they had risked a major conventional offensive instead of grinding the U.S. troops down in one guerrilla firefight after another. Tet went badly for the North Vietnamese militarily — the U.S. and their nominal Viet Namese allies were overwhelmed at first but quickly rallied and retook the territory they had lost — but it was a smashing success for them politically: it basically evaporated much of the support the U.S. population had previously shown for the war and was the final factor in Lyndon Johnson’s determination to bow out of the Presidency and abandon his 1968 re-election campaign. “Resolve” is at its best on the occasions Burns and his team are able to cast Viet Nam as the sort of war they had famously made films about before — the U.S. Civil War and the American involvement in World War II — and one of the most interesting points it made is that both the U.S. officers and the actual servicemembers doing the fighting had been conditioned in their expectations of what war was by World War II. 

The officers, including U.S. commanding general William Westmoreland (whose name I can recall the peace movement caricaturing as “Waste-More-Land”), had come through the ranks and had actually fought in World War II, and the grunt soldiers — especially the ones who volunteered rather than waiting to get drafted (Viet Nam was our last major conscript war and Burns and company really don’t go into the dynamics of the draft and how it actually operated as they should have — ironically, ending the draft has been one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-might-get-it moments for the American Left, since having a so-called “volunteer army” has actually made it easier, not harder, for more recent U.S. governments to get into and sustain endless wars, while the growing economic inequality of American society and the drying-up of alternative opportunities for upward mobility has meant that the “volunteers” of today’s U.S. military look a lot like the draftees of the previous one: largely working-class or below, and with a far greater concentration of people of color than the population as a whole) — had been conditioned on what “war” was by the memories of their parents and family members who had fought in World War II and how that war had been depicted in movies and on TV. The closest thing so far in this film to a typical “Ken Burns hero” — Denton “Mogie” Crocker, Jr. (his nickname came from his having been such an assertive child his parents called him “our little mogul”), a Midwestern boy (his mom and sister were interviewed for this show) who was so determined to fight in the war that he ran away from home at 17 and refused to return until his parents agreed to sign the exemption that would allow him to enlist before 18 — gets honored here with Burns’ trademarked sepulchral-voiced readings of his letters to his family back home (in which actor Ben Rappoport “played” Mogie) as well as interviews with his survivors. Once he went through basic training he was sent to Viet Nam, but at first he was only given desk work counting the casualties — a job he deliberately screwed up so he’d be fired and reassigned to do what he really wanted, which was actually to fight. Only as he saw what war in general and this war in particular were really like, he began to get disillusioned, and on June 23, 1966 (ironically, his 19^th birthday), he was killed when his unit was ambushed. 

One of the quirkier points made in the documentary was that since Viet Nam was basically a guerrilla war (even when the North Viet Namese “regulars” were sent into the country to fight alongside the National Liberation Front guerrillas, they still fought like guerrillas, luring their enemy into devastating ambushes and then slipping into the mountains and blending in with the local population), the usual metric by which commanders determine whether they are winning or losing — how much territory they are holding versus how much the enemy is holding — didn’t apply in Viet Nam. Instead Robert McNamara, who among other bad habits he’d picked up from his long career in the private sector (at Ford Motor Company, where he’d risen to president before taking the job as John F. Kennedy’s, and then Lyndon Johnson’s, secretary of defense) was an obsession with quantification and a sense that any problem could be reduced to a statistical analysis that would in turn generate the “right” solution, decided that the metric for success would be how many enemy fighters the U.S. killed. General Westmoreland regularly talked of the “crossover point,” meaning the point at which the U.S. were killing more North Viet Namese and National Liberation Front fighters than the other side could replace — and in early 1967 he was claiming he’d actually achieved the “crossover point” everywhere except in the northern end of South Viet Nam near the demilitarized zone the 1954 Geneva Agreements had set up to divide the country. As a number of people point out in the show, this emphasis on the sheer number of “enemy” dead as the metric of success led to some pretty distorted command decisions; not only did it mean that battlefield commanders, in their reports to their superiors, counted just about everyone they killed as “NVA” or “VC” whether they had been or not (which was also a convenient way to avoid criticism of killing civilians as “collateral damage” — just define the “enemy” so broadly that civilian deaths virtually ceased to exist), it also meant that in planning actual operations, battlefield commanders deliberately chose tactics that would maximize the body counts whether that made sense either in terms of human cost or simple military effectiveness. 

Another of the anecdotes concerned a young Marine who was shocked that when the U.S. captured NLF fighters who presumably had information as to where the enemy was waiting to ambush U.S. soldiers, they took them in on armored personnel carriers, tied them up and just pushed them off the carriers with no way to break their fall, resulting in a series of cracked ribs and other injuries. The Marine, Ben Earhardt (who was interviewed for the program and was the one who told this story), was about to protest when the superior officer he was going to protest to said that the U.S. spotters who had been responsible for detecting the ambushes had it in for these people because they could have told them where the ambushers were and didn’t, and if Earhardt spoke on their behalf they’d beat him up. (I couldn’t help but reflect, as I had also with regard to the counterproductiveness — never mind the morality, or lack of same — of the tortures inflicted by U.S. servicemembers on similarly detained “enemy fighters” in Iraq — of the lesson British commander John Masterman wrote in The Double-Cross System, his marvelous book about the British success in “turning” virtually the whole German espionage network in the U.K. during World War II, that the most important thing a country fighting a war can do to ensure its success is to treat its prisoners of war decently, respectfully and humanely. Apparently the old you-catch-more-flies-with-honey-than-with-vinegar principle had never occurred to those “spotters” — neither they nor the officers above them got it through their thick heads that they stood a better chance of “turning” the captives and finding where the NVA and NLF forces were by treating them respectfully than by torturing them.) 

One other point about “Resolve” was the way in which, by counterpointing anti-war and pro-war demonstrations in the U.S., it showed how the division of the American population into two strongly opposed camps and the resulting “polarization” of American politics really had its roots in Viet Nam (though I would argue that it was also due to the success of the African-American civil rights movement, which had the unforeseen consequence of dividing white America and giving the Republican Party and the U.S. Right in general the wedge through which they finally destroyed the New Deal coalition and made working-class whites a bulwark of the Republican Party by appealing to their racism and cultural prejudices). We’re still living in the America that was created in the 1960’s by the galvanic shocks of the civil rights movement and the Viet Nam war, and despite a few reversals, the Right is winning that racial and cultural war. Richard Nixon would win the White House through allying with white supremacists like Strom Thurmond and practicing the “Southern Strategy” that essentially flipped the two major U.S. political parties’ traditional positions on civil rights — the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, became the party of civil rights, and the Republicans, the “Party of Lincoln,” re-invented themselves as the party of racism and white supremacy — and though the Watergate scandal (which was merely the tip of the iceberg of an elaborate plan by Nixon and his campaign people to rig the 1972 election so he would not only win, but win in such a devastating way it would end all challenges to his legitimacy) temporarily derailed the Right-wing revolution in the U.S., it finally came to power under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and, even more forcefully and transformationally, under Donald Trump in 2016.

The Viet Nam War, part 3: “The River Styx” (Florentine Films/PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My “feature” last night was the third episode in Ken Burns’ 10-part mega-series The Viet Nam War, “The River Styx,” a title which seemed at first to be crossing his classical allusions — usually the river whose crossing is supposed to seal one’s fate is the Rubicon, not the Styx: the Rubicon was the real river outside Rome which Julius Caesar marched his legions across, thereby essentially declaring war against the Roman Republic, signaling his decision to take power as an absolute ruler, and thereby triggering his assassination — while the Styx was the river that led into the Greco-Roman underworld, Hades, and you usually didn’t cross it until you were already dead. As the show (two hours long instead of the 1 ½-hour length of each of the two previous episodes) wound on, the meaning of the title became more apparent: Burns and his collaborators, Lynn Novick and Geoffrey C. Ward, were clearly depicting the Viet Nam war as a sort of American descent into hell. They included actual tape recordings of President Lyndon Johnson talking to advisors like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and national security advisor McGeorge Bundy (one wonders what his parents were thinking giving him such a preposterous first name as “McGeorge,” especially since they gave his brother, also a member of the Johnson administration, a normal name, “William”) and his lifelong friend, Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia), whom Johnson remained close to even though they had fought fiercely on opposite sides over the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Johnson knew instinctively what hasn’t dawned on Donald Trump: you don’t personally insult your political adversaries because you may need their vote on the next big issue). 

All the Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon had recording equipment installed in the White House, and sometimes on the phones as well as in person, though all of them from FDR to Johnson had a switch by which they could control the system so they decided which conversations they would record and which they wouldn’t: Nixon seems to be the only President who made his taping system automatic, so it would record everything without his or anybody else’s human intervention. Johnson’s recordings indicate a President deeply frustrated by Viet Nam, not really believing that the U.S. had any business there but feeling hamstrung by the political imperatives of the Cold War not to show “weakness” in the face of self-proclaimed Communists anywhere in the world, no matter how unimportant the region might be by the usual criteria of rational imperialists (i.e., does it have exploitable natural resources, cheap labor pools or markets?). That’s why I’ve often said that my answer to the question often posed about Viet Nam while the war was still going on — was it a “mistake” of U.S. foreign policy or a deliberate act of U.S. imperialism — was it was both: it was certainly an act of imperialism, but at the same time the U.S. squandered far more blood and money on it than was merited by its usefulness as an imperialist possession. (What makes that even more ironic is that, though the U.S. lost the Viet Nam war, they finally won the peace: today nominally “Communist” Viet Nam has, like Bangladesh, become a source of ultra-cheap labor for multinational corporations who decide that even China’s workers are being overpaid.) This third episode finds Ken Burns and his collaborators in more familiar and comfortable territory than the previous two: they can focus on individual battles and even individual soldiers (this is the first Viet Nam War episode that featured what’s become one of the hallmarks of the Ken Burns style: an actor reading, in a sepulchral voice, surviving letters from a participant in the war), where they can get out of discussing the political motives behind the war and focus on acts of individual heroism and bravery … on both sides, for one of the nicest things about this show is the sheer number of Viet Namese Burns, Novick and Ward scored interviews with, on the Northern as well as the Southern side. 

The show has also introduced me to a figure in the North Viet Namese government I’d frankly never heard of before: Le Duan (whose name narrator Peter Coyote pronounces “Lay Zwan”), who was the general secretary of the Viet Namese Communist Party and, Burns, Novick and Ward argue, was the real ruler of North Viet Nam during the mid-1960’s, having relegated the ostensible head of state, Ho Chi Minh, to figurehead status. Le Duan also, it’s argued here, pursued a much harder-line policy than Ho and was more willing to resist direct involvement by the North Viet Namese military instead of keeping up the pretense that the so-called “Viet Cong” (a derisive term coined by their enemies; their official name was “National Liberation Front,” a nomenclature that would be copied by revolutionary movements around the world). Mostly “The River Styx” is an account of the big battles in the war during 1965, including some at places I’d heard of (like the U.S. Marine base at Pleiku, where the first American ground troops landed and from which they operated), others I hadn’t — including Bin Ja, where U.S. troops fought for the first time in Viet Nam under their own command instead of supposedly just “advising” the South Viet Namese. The show concludes with an in-depth account of the fighting in the valley of the Ia Drang River in November 1965 — the first time it was definitively established that North Viet Nam was sending in regular troops from their army to fight alongside the NLF — and it depicted such interesting American characters as Major Charles Beckwith, who asked about the capabilities of the NLF’s fighters said, “I’d like to have 200 of them under my command”; Lt. Col. Hal Moore, who commanded the U.S. forces in the Ia Drang battle and was shown in an archival TV interview; and Joe Galloway, who was ostensibly an Associated Press reporter but got pressed into service when the unit he was covering came under attack and Moore gave him a machine gun and a quick course on how to use it to fight back. 

Interestingly, U.S. reporters in Viet Nam were probably less censored than in any other war, before or since; they didn’t have to submit their copy to military censors before they dispatched it, and all they were told not to do was write about ongoing troop movements or give their exact locations. Indeed, it was precisely because a lot of the reporters in Viet Nam used that freedom to portray the war in strongly unflattering terms that in later U.S. wars reporters were virtually locked in boxes, “embedded” in individual units and forbidden from traveling through the countryside looking for stories. One of the most chilling moments in the film was its inclusion of a famous CBS news report from late 1965 showing U.S. troops invading a Viet Namese village, supposedly in search of caches of equipment and food being used by the NLF, and literally burning down the entire village, setting fire to the thatched roofs with Zippo lighters and destroying the entire food supply on which the villagers were relying. The reporter, a young Morley Safer, concluded his report that with tactics like these “it will be difficult to convince the villagers that we are on their side” — words I remember hearing when I saw the story as it first aired, and which vividly stuck in my mind as endemic of the blinders with which the U.S. fought the entire war. It never seemed to occur to anyone in the U.S. government that if we were really serious about winning the “hearts and minds” of the Viet Namese people the last thing we should be doing was destroying their homes and food supplies; we were so convinced that we knew what was best for them, that anything was better than the presumed horror of living under a Communist government, that they’d just accept us as heroes and liberators. It was an illusion we tragically did not abandon when it turned out so badly in Viet Nam: I can remember President George W. Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, telling the Iraqi people, “We come as liberators, not conquerators” [sic] — a gaffe that led me to joke that Fleischer had been working for Bush so long he was beginning to sound like him. 

This idea that no matter how many unspeakable atrocities we commit against a civilian population, in the end they’re going to love us for it, has haunted us again and again in various military misadventures, including Iraq and Afghanistan (which has now surpassed the American Revolution and Viet Nam as the longest war the U.S. has ever been involved in — 16 years and counting), also places we’ve gone into blessedly ignorant of the local language and culture, and contemptuous of the idea that that might even be a problem. If anything, President Trump’s recent fulmination at the United Nations that he will “totally destroy” North Korea if Kim Jong “Rocket Man” Un keeps acting up is at least being honest — if your leader gets out of line, Trump is telling all 25 million North Koreans, we’re just going to kill you all and we’re not even going to pretend we’re fighting a war of liberation on your behalf. The show also parallels the rise of the U.S. anti-war movement — and the hopes of the North Viet Namese and the NLF that the U.S. anti-war movement would eventually sap the war-fighting spirit of the U.S. and help them defeat us — which is actually how all guerrilla movements work: keep the war going on for so long that ultimately your enemies get tired of it, their populations can’t sustain the effort any longer and therefore they withdraw and let you have your country back. (This was also one of the two things the Confederacy was counting on in the U.S. Civil War: there were two ways the South could have won — either by engendering enough war-weariness in the North that Lincoln would either have been forced to settle or have been defeated in his 1864 re-election bid, or by getting foreign intervention from Britain and/or France the way the U.S. revolutionaries had got from France to win their war in the 1770’s. Indeed, they came closer than a lot of people realize; George McClellan, the Civil War general turned anti-war Presidential candidate, was leading in the 1864 election by such a margin that in August Lincoln was convinced he was going to lose — until Grant and Sherman won such smashing victories on the battlefield in October 1864 that Northern voters realized the victorious end of the war was in sight and decided to stay the course.)

Interestingly, when I looked up episode three of The Viet Nam War on imdb.com the user review that came up was from someone or something named “ducorp” who took the “Democrat” President Lyndon Johnson to task for not having launched an all-out war, including the total destruction of Hanoi and Haiphong, mining the North Viet Namese harbors and committing half a million troops immediately instead of dribbling them in a few at a time — this was a common view among Americans at the time and in 1968 pollsters reported that what a lot of people they surveyed liked least about the war in Viet Nam was the deliberate strategy of fighting a “limited war” — they got people who said, “We should go all out to win in Viet Nam, and if we’re not willing to do that we should get out,” and other people who said, “We should get out of Viet Nam, but if we’re not willing to do that we should go all out to win.” Though the military commanders in the 1990’s proclaimed the (first) Persian Gulf War as the end of what they called the “Viet Nam Syndrome” in the U.S. — the gun-shy unwillingness of the U.S. population to support a war elsewhere in the world for unclear goals and aims — and then-U.S. Army chief Colin Powell proclaimed the “Powell Doctrine” that the U.S. should never again intervene and fight without a clear set of war aims and a willingness to end the war as soon as those aims were achieved, the national trauma of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 changed all that and led us back into the quagmire business in Afghanistan, Iraq (where bringing down Saddam Hussein’s repressive but secular government brought about the formation of ISIS and created more, not less, of a terrorism threat than had existed previously) and now quite likely North Korea, Venezuela, Iran or wherever else the dyspeptic President currently in the White House decides his ego has been bruised so badly he needs to use American lives and treasure to take the miscreants down a few pegs.

The Viet Nam War, part 2: “Riding the Dragon” (Florentine Films/PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night KPBS ran the second episode of Ken Burns’ latest magnum opus, The Viet Nam War: “Riding the Dragon,” dealing with the administration of President John F. Kennedy and his role in deepening the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. No one who watches this show is going to think that Ken Burns is depicting the Viet Nam War and especially the U.S.’s involvement in it as morally ambiguous or even heroic: for Burns and his collaborators Lynn Novick and Geoffrey C. Ward, Viet Nam was a disaster from start to finish. About the only difference between the case being made against the war while it was still going on (from a peace movement I was proud, even at a tender age, to be part of: my growing up, physically and politically, is so intertwined with Viet Nam and the lessons it taught me about my country and its bias towards imperialism, as well as how badly it does imperialism I can hardly separate my views on more recent American military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq from the Viet Nam debacle) and the one presented on this series is that Burns takes a pox-on-both-your-houses attitude to the governments of the two Viet Nams created by the 1954 Geneva Agreements, the People’s Republic of Viet Nam in the north and the Republic of Viet Nam in the south. 

There was a tendency, especially as the war wore on, for peaceniks to whitewash the North Viet Namese and see them as “freedom fighters,” ignoring their atrocities and repression against so-called “political enemies” — while at the same time supporters of the war tried to present the Republic of Viet Nam as a democracy when it wasn’t. It was ruled first by Ngo Dinh Diem (and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and Mrs. Nhu, who made both figuratively and literally incendiary comments that only worsened the situation: not only did she respond to the immolation suicides of Buddhist monks in protest against Diem’s Catholic regime by saying she rejoiced at the “barbecues,” which is in Burns’ film, she publicly called on New York Times reporter David Halberstam, who had angered her with his dispatches criticizing the Diem government and the U.S. involvement, would follow the monks’ example), then after Diem was overthrown and assassinated by Viet Namese generals on November 1, 1963 (three weeks to the day before JFK’s own assassination) by a round-robin series of coups and counter-coups involving the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN)’s top generals, and finally after 1965 by Nguyen Cao Ky (who became infamous in the peace movement for allegedly having said, “I have only one hero — Hitler”) and later by Nguyen Van Thieu (about half of all Viet Namese seem to be named “Nguyen,” just as half of all Koreans seem to be named “Kim” — recently, when Charles and I were watching a PBS program and one of the donors was the Park Foundation, Charles joked, “That’s the foundation dedicated to building awareness of Koreans not named Kim”), who took over the Viet Namese presidency in 1967 and made Ky his vice-president; they ruled, sort of, until the entire South Viet Namese government fell in 1975. 

The story of Viet Nam as told in this documentary is a grim tale of Americans blundering their way into a country whose language they did not speak, whose history and culture they did not understand, and which they saw through the illogic of the Cold War, which, in a theory Henry Kissinger called “linkage,” was based on the idea that every struggle anywhere in the world was ultimately part of the fight to the death between American capitalism and Soviet communism. The U.S. ignored Ho Chi Minh’s overtures immediately after World War II because he was a communist, and to U.S. policy-makers at the time (notably President Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and special advisor George Kennan, author of the “containment” policy by which Communism would be allowed to rule where it had already taken root but the U.S. would fight tooth and nail against its expansion, especially in western Europe and southeastern Asia) that invalidated all his claims to being an independent nationalist. The U.S. got further and further into the war — by the end of the Kennedy administration it had several thousand “advisors” in the country, supposedly there just to train the ARVN and its commanders on how to fight, but they were flying helicopters, bombing suspected enemy positions and actively participating in conflict even though they weren’t yet going into battle on the ground. (That would come later, under Lyndon Johnson.) I remember in my teens and early 20’s having long arguments with friends over whether Kennedy would have cut the U.S.’s losses in Viet Nam and withdrawn if he’d lived: the Burns documentary mentions that there was a plan on the table when Kennedy died to withdraw the U.S. “advisors” gradually until January 1965, but that was predicated on the belief that by then the ARVN would have turned the corner and started winning the war. Those hopes were dashed in January 1963 at the Battle of Ap Bac, one of the “strategic hamlets” the South Viet Namese government built (and drafted forced labor from the Viet Namese peasants to build them) to isolate the rural Viet Namese population behind barbed wire and stakes to keep the National Liberation Front (NLF) recruiters from getting to them and signing them up for the other side. 

What Burns’ documentary doesn’t mention was that this was an idea with an already long and dishonorable history: the first foreign invaders in a Third World country who hit on this strategy were the British during the Boer War in South Africa in the late 1890’s. Only instead of calling them “strategic hamlets,” they called them “concentration camps” — a bit of nomenclature that became decidedly politically incorrect when Nazi Germany appropriated the term (though they meant something rather different by it — first forced-labor camps and then extermination centers). The French had tried something similar in their failed attempt to reconquer Viet Nam between 1946 and 1954, only they called it “pacification” — a word spelled identically (though pronounced somewhat differently) in English and French and which the U.S. used as an alternate name for the program — either way it didn’t freaking work. It only gave Viet Namese peasants even more reason to hate the South Viet Namese government and concentrated the peasantry so NLF recruiters had an easier, not harder, time winning converts. One of the heroes (sort of) mentioned in this program was John Paul Vann, an American military advisor to the ARVN who later became the hero of Neil Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie about the early days of the Viet Nam involvement (he published a book in 1972 about Vann’s role and it was filmed by HBO in 1978, with Bill Paxton playing Vann; the movie got savaged by people who still believed in the cause the U.S. had been fighting for in Viet Nam, whatever it was); Sheehan was extensively interviewed for this program and made the point that Ap Bac was the first time the NLF (or “Viet Cong,” short for “Viet Namese Communists,” as their enemies derisively termed them) staged a full-scale battle instead of just a raid, inflicted heavy casualties and had enough military supplies and modern arms (which came mostly from the Soviet Union and only secondarily from the Chinese — one thing the American war plotters didn’t understand about Viet Nam was that for a thousand years it had been under Chinese “suzerainty,” which meant they basically got to run their own country but had to acknowledge the Chinese as their ultimate overlords and pay them heavy taxes, which had given the Viet Namese a long-term hatred of the Chinese, reason enough that when the Sino-Soviet split occurred the Viet Namese took the Soviet rather than the Chinese side) to be able to fight and win a full-fledged battle and not just a raid. 

Anyway, getting back to my arguments with my friends in the early 1970’s over whether there would have been a Viet Nam War — or at least a major U.S. involvement in it — if JFK had lived a normal span and served two terms as President, it’s always seemed to me that Kennedy would have pursued pretty much the same policies as Lyndon Johnson. By removing Diem in a coup (or at least green-lighting the efforts of Viet Namese generals to do that — JFK had given his O.K. to the coup as long as Diem and Nhu were allowed to leave the country alive, and when they weren’t he was not a happy camper but he regarded himself as stuck with the Viet Namese leadership, even a bunch of generals who had double-crossed him) Kennedy had doubled down on the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. It’s hard to figure out what Diem was doing in his last months in power, when having already lost the peasantry he went after the urban masses, most of whom were Buddhist and resented the way Diem’s policies were blatantly favoring his own religion, Roman Catholicism — but then it’s often hard to figure out the counterproductive policies authoritarians of all stripes (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chávez, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un and, arguably, Donald Trump) fall into when they see their absolute power as being threatened. The important point is that Diem’s fall left South Viet Nam a mess and would have made it even harder for any U.S. President to withdraw — and Kennedy, who was obsessed with China and regarded the Chinese (with some reason) as being on an expansionist tear by which they hoped to conquer and/or bring under their influence all of Asia (including India, with whom they fought at least two border wars during Kennedy’s Presidency), would no more have withdrawn from Viet Nam as he would have patted the East German leaders on their backs and said, “No problem with that wall … ”