by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was the ninth and next-to-last
episode of the mega-documentary The Viet Nam War by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Geoffrey C. Ward, called “A
Disrespectful Loyalty” after a statement one of the interviewees, John
Musgrave, made about his evolution from front-line soldier in Viet Nam to
critic of the war and participant in the famous demonstration at which members
of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War organization threw their service
medals over a crudely erected wooden fence blocking themselves off from the
Capitol in Washington, D.C. Their original plan, Musgrave mentioned in his
interview, was to collect their medals in a body bag and deliver the lot of
them to Congress, but the barrier made that impossible, so they threw the
medals over the fence and each servicemember made a bitter little speech about
how these pieces of metal and cloth, which they had been told meant so much and
were such a major validation of their service to their country and their worth
as men (I’m saying “men” because the women who served the U.S. military in Viet
Nam did so as nurses and in the other traditional “support” category, and the
idea that someday American servicewomen would be permitted to see combat would
have been regarded as outrageous by people on both sides of the debate over whether the war was worth
supporting) now meant nothing, or even less, to them since they’d seen the war
as a futile enterprise. This episode took the story from the immediate
aftermath of the Kent State shootings in 1970 (which was overwhelming support for the National Guardsmen who had gunned down
students in cold blood — the polls registered 58 percent support for the Guard,
which as I pointed out in my comments on the previous episode tallied with the
56 percent support for the Chicago police actions against unarmed demonstrators
at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the 57 percent combined vote total for
Richard Nixon and George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential election) to the
final withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Viet Nam following the signing of
the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973.
One can’t watch The Viet Nam
War in the Trump era without realizing how
much Donald Trump is the modern face of the reaction that began with the 1968
Nixon and Wallace campaigns, particularly the use of “law and order” as a
slogan by both Nixon and Trump, who really meant the same thing by it: a
promise to white America to use the full force of law enforcement, backed if
necessary by military personnel, to keep Black America repressed, suppressed
and oppressed. What was different between Nixon and Trump was that what Nixon
said behind closed doors to his favorite advisers — Henry Kissinger, Bob
Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell — his vicious references to the “lying
media” and the “bums” who were demonstrating against the war, and also all the
social anxieties and racist animadversions — Trump has said openly and proudly
to rallies drawing tens of thousands of people. Indeed, one of the reasons
Trump’s fans love him so much is that he dares to say publicly what they really
think, but felt too ashamed of being considered “politically incorrect” to say
in public. (Few people know this — and when I tell it to them they’re
flabbergasted — but the phrase “politically correct” actually originated in the
late 1970’s on the American Left,
as a way for Leftists to criticize other Leftists for being too dogmatic in
their application of Leftist principles. I know that because I was there and heard the phrase many times before
the Right co-opted it and turned it into an attack on all Leftists.) The sheer length and scope of The
Viet Nam War has the consequence — intended
or not (and I suspect Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are good enough filmmakers that
they intended it) — of making the film seem as oppressively long and seemingly
endless as the war itself. The ninth episode does seem a bit rushed given all it has to cover — not
only in Viet Nam itself (the increasing sense that the people fighting the war
had of the pointlessness of it all and the ways they handled that — through heavy
use of drugs, particularly marijuana and heroin, and in some cases by
“fragging,” i.e. murdering, gung-ho officers who either still believed in the
mission or at least acted like it and ordered potentially deadly offensives
when the troops cared only about
surviving their tours with their lives and limbs intact and then going home)
but also at home, with the rising numbers of people demonstrating against the
war and the increasing desperation Nixon and Kissinger felt in their desire to
have the whole bloody business of Viet Nam over and done with before Nixon came
up for re-election in November 1972.
The film mentions the Pentagon Papers and
the Nixon administration’s prosecution/persecution of Daniel Ellsberg for
stealing them and leaking them to the media — and the almost unprecedented U.S.
court ruling enjoining the New York Times from publishing them until the U.S. Supreme Court reversed it 15 days
later: the very sort of “prior restraint” censorship the First Amendment was
designed to prevent. What it doesn’t
mention is that after Nixon organized the “plumbers” to gain information on
Ellsberg, including a bombing of the Brookings Institution (which never
happened) and a break-in at the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (which did,
but it didn’t find his files), and (not mentioned here) they tried to bribe the
judge in Ellsberg’s case by offering him the directorship of the FBI,
Ellsberg’s prosecution was finally thrown out of court due to government
misconduct. So were the charges against the Weather Underground, the offshoot
of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which had come full-circle from
opposing the Viet Nam war as an act of violence to plotting and carrying out
violent actions themselves, including homemade bombs (though they were such inept
terrorists the only people they killed with their bombs were three of their own
number in a townhouse in New York City where they were assembling bombs, and a
college student in Ann Arbor, Michigan who was studying at 2 a.m. in a library
the people bombing it thought would be closed). They also were involved in bank
robberies, in one of which a police officer was fatally shot, but for the most
part the Weather Underground were among the most incompetent terrorists of all
time. As luck would have it, I met and got a chance to interview Mark Rudd, one
of the leaders in the student strike at Columbia University in 1968, later a
founder of the Weather Underground and still later a fierce critic of domestic
terrorism whose advice, he told me, to would-be urban revolutionaries in the
2000’s who might want to follow the Weather Underground’s example was “don’t do
it again.” Like Ellsberg, Rudd and most of the Weather Underground members who
were arrested and prosecuted were ultimately freed because the government had
broken the law itself in gathering evidence against them — though I noted
grimly that all the government tactics, including entrapment and infiltration,
that had been illegal in the 1970’s were made legal when Congress passed, and President George W.
Bush signed, the USA PATRIOT Act in the wake of the terror attacks of September
11, 2001.
What also doesn’t get mentioned in this show is that the Watergate
break-in in June 1972 was not
just a scheme cooked up by Nixon’s “Plumbers” because after the failure of
their campaign against Ellsberg they had nothing better to do; rather, it was
literally the tip of the iceberg, the one part of a giant scheme Nixon and his
advisors had to rig the U.S. Presidential election of 1972 so that Nixon would
not only win, but be re-elected in such a landslide his legitimacy would no
longer be in doubt. Part of the Nixon strategy was to sabotage the campaigns of
the more electable potential opponents in the Democratic Party — Senator Ed
Muskie, Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and the early front-runner for
the 1972 Presidential nomination, in particular — so that George McGovern, whom
the Nixon people considered the Democrat easiest to beat, would be the party’s
nominee. One of the most fascinating clips in episode nine of The
Viet Nam War was the appearance of Valerie
Kushner, wife of Viet Cong prisoner Dr. Hal Kushner, on the podium of the 1972
Democratic convention giving a seconding speech for McGovern’s nomination; the
years without any contact between her and her husband had moved her to the Left
(while most of the POW’s wives remained staunch and public supporters of the
war and expressed nothing but confidence in Nixon’s tactics for winning the war
and bringing their menfolk home), while he had been kept so isolated, not being
allowed any contact with his
family until he was permitted to record a tape for them just a few months
before his release, that on that tape he refers to the child his wife was
pregnant with when he shipped out as “he or she” because he had no way of
knowing whether the kid was a boy or girl. (It was a boy.) The show covers the denouement of Viet Nam, at least as far as the American
involvement was concerned — the negotiators in Paris, Henry Kissinger
representing the U.S. and Le Duc Tho representing the North Viet Namese
government (both sides deliberately kept the two other parties to the talks —
the National Liberation Front and the South Viet Namese government of President
Nguyen Van Thieu — out of the loop), cut a deal in October, the North Viet
Namese government asked for time to review it, and Nixon responded by ordering
the worst bombings of the war on North Viet Nam’s key port city of Haiphong
(one person called it “the first bombing ever ordered by tantrum,” to which I
could only think, “If you think Nixon’s tantrums were bad, just wait until you
see Trump’s!”) as well as on Hanoi, which led to both sides ultimately agreeing
to the same deal they could have had in October with that last nasty fillip of
bloodshed.
The show also contained a fascinating digression on Jane Fonda — in
the middle of the blood and guts Burns and Novick suddenly cut to the opening
credits of Barbarella, the sci-fi
sexploitation film Fonda and her first husband, French director Roger Vadim,
had made in 1968 — and John Musgrave explains that though a number of
Left-leaning celebrities from the U.S. visited North Viet Nam during the war,
the GI reaction against Fonda was particularly nasty because she had been their
fantasy object, the personification of what they’d been fighting for. (What he really meant, of course, was that she’d been their jack-off
fantasy; it’s hard to imagine Jane Fonda being to the Viet Nam war what Betty
Grable had been to World War II, but that’s what Musgrave was basically
saying.) Burns, Novick and Ward also mention Joan Baez’s visit to Hanoi during
the war (she made amateur recordings while she was there during the Christmas
1972 bombing and wove snippets of them into a song called “Where Are You Now,
My Son?” that took up the entire second side of her album of that title) but do
not mention that, while Fonda’s
statements in Hanoi (in which she called the U.S. POW’s “war criminals” and
called for their trials and even their executions) followed their party line —
and, even more infuriatingly for many Viet Nam vets, she was photographed
taking a joy ride on an anti-aircraft gun turret that was used to shoot down
U.S. bombers — Baez took a different stand, calling the North Viet Namese
government out on its political repression and telling them to their faces that
just because she was opposed to the U.S. attack on their country, she was not an uncritical supporter of the North Viet Namese
Communist government either. Indeed, if there’s any message in The
Viet Nam War it’s one of the sheer evil of all war; the segment on episode eight detailing the way
North Viet Namese captors treated U.S. prisoners of war was followed by one in
which a North Viet Namese recalled how people on her side who were captured were tortured by Americans,
often in the same ways (especially electrocution and waterboarding) later used
at Abu Ghraib and other locations in which the U.S. held people in Iraq. Many
of us in the peace movement slowly reached the conclusion that since our
country had gone so wrong in Viet Nam, the side we were fighting must be
“right,” and that’s why people in the later peace marches carried North Viet
Namese and NLF flags and openly rooted for a North Viet Namese victory.
The
extent to which the political and cultural battles from the Viet Nam era are still being fought in the U.S. is exemplified by the
reviews on the imdb.com site of the various episodes in Burns’ film by someone
calling himself (or, much less likely I suspect, herself) “dncorp,” who’s
basically making the arguments supporters of the war have been making from then
till now: the U.S. should have deployed everything it had in Viet Nam (the fact
that a total war in Viet Nam would have amounted to genocide against the Viet
Namese people doesn’t seem to bother “dncorp”); the U.S. military won all the
battles in Viet Nam but were stabbed in the back by disloyal or incompetent
politicians (does “dncorp” even know
that that was also the argument Adolf Hitler used to gain power in Germany —
that the German military had won World War I but the disloyal politicians had
stabbed them in the back and given up, allowing Germany and its power to be
shackled by the Treaty of Versailles?), and that all the people protesting the
war should have been rounded up and dumped in the middle of the combat zone,
where they could either have taken up guns and found their courage at last or
met the brutal deaths he seems to think they deserved. So much of President
Trump’s support seems to go back to this atavistic demand for revenge — not
only “America, love it or leave it,” but “America, love it or die, and good
riddance” — even his recent tweets criticizing African-American players in the
National Football League for doing gestures of protest when the national anthem
is played before games hearken back to one of the most famous protests in the
1960’s, when Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their arms
in the clenched-fist Black Power salute during their medal ceremony — and got
roundly criticized, including the usual death threats, by the radical Rightists
of their time. I’m sure “dncorp” would bristle at being called a fascist, but
as Jesus Christ said, “By their fruits ye shall know them” — certainly his
ideology, which goes beyond even the usual defense of the war (there’s actually
something to the argument that so-called “limited war” is an oxymoron: if a war
is worth fighting at all, it’s worth fighting to the max and going all-out to
win) to a kind of outraged brutality that’s been at the center of a large part
of the American Right ever since and now, with Donald Trump as President and
Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, is essentially running the
country.
