PBS's chronicle of the sorrow and the pity of Viet Nam
For years it seemed like the war that dared not speak its name. There were few parades or movies to celebrate the 2.5 million Americans who served in Viet Nam or the 58,000 who died there, few political postmortems, even to apportion the blame for defeat. There was only a prolonged consensus for forgetting.
Of late, however, American scholars and the American public seem more ready for a reckoning. The reappraisal with perhaps the greatest potential for emotional impact is a 13-hour documentary series, Viet Nam: A Television History, to air starting next week on the Public Broadcasting Service. (One episode will also be shown this Friday by ABC News, which donated $50,000 to the project in 1978.) The ambitious series was produced by PBS's Boston affiliate, WGBH, in conjunction with Britain's Central Independent Television and France's Antenne 2. Assembled by a multinational team that focused on America but gained access to Communist Viet Nam, the 13-part report is fair and generally balanced. It speaks more in sorrow than in anger, without accusations or the smug wisdom of hindsight and with sensitivity to the tragedy of what started as a noble cause.
Viet Nam was a televised war, a "livingroom war," in the phrase of Critic Michael Arlen. The camera still conveys, more immediately than almost anything in print, the imagery and texture of war: whirring helicopters, cascades of bombs from the bellies of B-52s, the devastation wrought by battle. As used in the series, the camera is also a neutral observer: it provides a forum to participants ranging from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong and from Americans who considered the war honorable to those who believed it immoral. Conclusions about right and wrong are left to the viewer.
There are not many revelations in this television history, nor were there likely to be: the footage was drawn chiefly from public records and from the recollections of figures whose views are well known. The intent is to tell why the U.S. went to Viet Nam, how it lost a sense of purpose in being there, and how and why it left. The scope of the six-year, $4.6 million project is impressive: the production team obtained 94 hours of film—200,000 feet—from archives in eleven countries and conducted 5,000 transcript pages' worth of interviews. The principal reporter, Stanley Karnow, 58, first went to Viet Nam in 1950, when it was still part of French Indochina, and later became a foreign correspondent for TIME, the Washington Post and NBC. Executive Producer Richard Ellison, 59, formerly headed overseas production for TIME-LIFE Films.