filbet 'The Vietnam War' Co-director Lynn Novick: 'We Have To Hold Our Leaders Accountable'

Updated:2025-01-04 13:19 Views:126

The Mirror of Reality: Ken Burns and Lynn Novick The Mirror of Reality: Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War released in 2017, after being in production for almost a decade. The result was one of the most comprehensive and exhausting pieces of war films ever made. Interviewing veterans from both sides of the war, and consciously staying away from historians and academics—the ten-part series (with a cumulative runtime of nearly 18 hours) mimics the long, arduous nature of the war fought by the Americans actively for nearly two decades. The series—made on a budget of around $30 million—played on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in America. Seven years after The Vietnam War came out and was hailed for its thoroughness, Lynn Novick reflects on the documentary. In an interview with Tatsam Mukherjee, she also touches upon the recognisable patterns that emerged from Vietnam, which were repeated in the USA’s entanglements in Iraq, Afghanistan; the fraught nature of truth these days and the responsibility on documentary filmmakers and journalists; and the burden on war documentaries to be cautionary tales for us. The hour-long conversation has been edited for clarity. Excerpts:

Do you think it’s possible for a documentary series to articulate an objective, multi-faceted truth? Or can we only hope for an approximation?

That’s a deep question. The assumption of the question is, there is some truth that we can all agree exists. For certain things, I would say there is an objective truth that America did not win the Vietnam War. There are people who think that we were winning when we pulled out. That, to me, objectively, is not true. In other words, there is a realm in which there are facts, and those facts must be understood to help us get to the truth of what happened, as best as we can figure them out right now.

We also understand that in the future, maybe more information, than what we have now, will come to light, which will help us understand what happened. What we try to do when making such films is to get as close as we can to the truth. We try to be objective—in the sense that we are not trying to put our thumb on the scale and make things turn out the way we wish they had or assign responsibilities where we think it appropriate. We try to excavate the best possible information, bring in experts who know this in much more depth than we ever will, bring in opposing points of view or people with different perspectives. Then we leave it up to the viewers to integrate all this information in a way that gets to the truth.

Stills from The Vietnam War Stills from The Vietnam War Q

I think it was somewhere in the late 2000s, when you began researching the series …

We began working on it around 2008-2009. It was about a 10-year process. But what happens is, we already have commitments for other projects. So, we might be in the middle of two other films and decide when those are done, we’re going to work on the Vietnam War. So, we start to do the reading. But we didn’t really start to work full-time on it until about 2011-2012. It was really a five-year, very intensive period of working on it.

I’m assuming you saw conflicts that were going on across the world around 2012. Did it disappoint you to see the patterns being replicated from the ones in a war 60 years ago?

On one hand, every situation is different and yet the patterns do tend to be the same. It’s disappointing, to say the least. In the last 25 years, America’s foreign wars and entanglements have been devastating—from Iraq to Afghanistan to the Middle East. Generally, we seem unable to learn the lessons.

The generation of leaders that came of age during the Vietnam War was very clear that it was not a good idea for the military of America to fight. But 25 years later, it’s different people. That lesson only lasts one generation. Then you have new people coming along. Whoever thinks ‘Yeah, we can do it’—they weren’t in Vietnam. They might have read about it in books and written papers, but they don’t have that visceral first-hand experience of what a war like that really is.

What I’m saying is, the forces that would propel a nation like ours into a war are always being regenerated. The wisdom that should have come from Vietnam got lost rather completely. When you saw the evacuation from Afghanistan at the last minute, [it was] the same exact thing. It was obvious. It was on the wall from day one. We didn’t help the people who we promised to help. And we just left. After all that, for what?

[There was also] a lot of lying to the American public all this time about what we were really doing over there and why. There was a lot of corruption. It was eerie and very stressful to see the same tropes happening again in a different context and those lessons, obviously. It’s very upsetting to see how deluded our leaders can be or how willing [they are] to lie to the American people, whichever way you want to put it. They’re either delusional or they’re lying.

Stills from The Vietnam War Stills from The Vietnam War Q

You touch upon that in the series as well—a veteran says: “JFK was the last president where we actually thought that politicians were good people, and we actually could trust them to run the country on our behalf and since then it’s just been downhill.” Did you at any point feel vulnerable about how fallible and corruptible we are as a race?

I was born in the early 1960s. So, I really came of age politically—as a sentient being [with] a little bit understanding about government, politics, etc.—as the Vietnam war was winding down and the Watergate was revving up. So, those are seminal moments for me. It goes without saying that political leaders lie to us and that they have their own agenda; that they can’t be trusted and that there’s cynicism and corruption. That’s just part of the system. I didn’t have that idealism as a human being. But I find it very moving that the young men who fought in Vietnam and the ones who protested the war really did grow up with this in the50s, into-the-JFK-era belief that our leaders were good people; that America was a good country, that we stood for something important in the world; that if we were doing it, it must be right.

The Vietnam War was the beginning of the end of that [ideology]. Some people still believe it. There are many ways in which America is still a great country. We do a lot of things that are very helpful to people around the world. I don’t want to say that everything America does is bad—that’s certainly not true. But it’s healthy, I would say, for citizens in a democracy to challenge and question the leaders and not just give them a free pass or a blank cheque that because they are in charge, they must know what they are doing and be doing the right thing. We have to hold them accountable. We have to try. I think that’s a great lesson from Vietnam.

“It’s very upsetting to see how deluded our leaders can be or how willing [they are] to lie to the American people, whichever way you want to put it. They’re either delusional or they’re lying.”Q

Primarily focusing on war documentaries, I’ve always believed that they are cautionary tales, so we don’t repeat our mistakes. Do you think it’s too heavy a responsibility for any film or any story to bear?

No, it’s not. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable responsibility to bear. If I understand the question, the responsibility is to educate people, so we don’t make the same mistake again?

Yes.

I’d say the first responsibility is to tell a story that people can understand. In the case of Vietnam, that’s at the level of semi-conscious trauma—something that has been worked through, where you understand what happened and why it happened and who’s responsible and all the different impacts of this event on different people, including the millions of Vietnamese who were killed. You certainly can’t hope to avoid making that mistake if you don’t even know what happened. So that’s the first step.

I’d like to hope that a film like ours, or any other film that tells a story like that, can have an effect both at the level of just regular people and the people who make the decisions and have the power, who may not know this history either. We have seen in some small ways that our films do make a difference. But that would be asking a lot because these decisions get made for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes, people decide to do it even though they know the history and they know that we should be learning different lessons. But for other reasons, they still feel it’s good or advantageous to themselves or they feel they have to do something. So, they don’t always want to learn the lessons of history.

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Do you remember an example of where you think the series moved the needle, something you saw first-hand?

One of the most profound experiences we had was, in the film, we tell the story of a man named Jack Todd, who was drafted late in the war. He believed the war was wrong, so he went to Canada—he deserted. He then wrote a book about it, became a journalist. He was able to come back to the US after there was a blanket pardon many years later. He came back and forth, but he lived in Canada. He never really came back to live here again. One of our advisors on the film was an Army colonel named Greg Daddis, who was a professor at West Point and now teaches at Chapman University in California. He read Todd’s book, and he saw the film’s rough cut and said: “You know, I would love for my cadets to meet Todd and talk to him about this incredibly difficult moral and ethical decision; what do you do when you think a war is wrong? So, we brought Todd to West Point. Professor Daddis had the students read the book.

When he walked in, [they were] pretty hostile, I would say. The questions were tough: how could you do that? How is that patriotic? If you love your country, you have to serve. He talked through the responsibilities of citizenship, questioning authority—if the authority is doing something catastrophic. By the end, they were wanting to shake his hand, thanking him for coming and saying: “This is really helpful to me because when I’m leading men, if they’re having doubts, how am I going to talk to them?” Because, he said: “I was having these existential doubts and there was no one I could talk to and so I just left.” Certainly, plenty of soldiers have doubts about the mission, so it was just a very profound experience to see that contact with him helped those young leaders think differently about their responsibility and how they’re going to do their job. The film itself can do that even if we can’t bring Todd everywhere.

So, I do like to think that on a micro level, the stories we tell, the way we tell them have a huge effect on some people and can percolate in a culture in deep ways.

“There’s a lot of potential for really beautiful filmmaking and stories that are humanistic and give the audience a chance to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes”.Q

On a personal level, did it make you reconsider your relationship with ideology and the conflicts triggered by it? I mean, they were both well-intentioned groups in Vietnam.

Well, that’s a great point. There are two or three different things happening here. One is, how do you get young men to go somewhere and kill someone they don’t know? Or die in a foreign country? For the North Vietnamese, going to the South was like going to a foreign country, too. It’s a really fascinating question. And nationalism is definitely a part of it from the earliest days of nation states— this is not a 20th-century phenomenon. And it’s become more and more useful for people who are in charge of different nations to mobilise that. But at least, from what I understand, when you’re running a military operation, the way you get young men to do anything is by bonding them with each other in their unit. And they’re really doing whatever is asked [of them] for the other guys in their unit. And for survival. The ideals of what they’re fighting for or what they’re sacrificing for definitely matter. It’s really loyalty to the people around you. And nationalism is kind of there, or whatever is the goal.

And I thought, Americans have propaganda too. We’re fighting for democracy and to liberate people and to make the world safe and for whatever reasons we were told when we’re going to Vietnam. I think the people that have the biggest problem with that ideology are the South Vietnamese. They did not have a compelling enough story to mobilise their soldiers because the government itself was so corrupt.

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Do you see documentaries becoming more redundant or significant in the post-truth era?

What you are describing is one of the more terrifying aspects of our current reality and I don’t have a good answer.

For the rule of documentary, I think it’s quite fraught. There’s a lot of potential for really beautiful filmmaking and well told stories that are humanistic and give the audience a chance to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes. These are profound experiences. It could be through a documentary, it could be through scripted cinema, it could be through a novel—any number of different ways that we tell stories. But I still do believe—I have hope—that these kinds of stories, if well told, can break down some of these silos and polarities that we find ourselves in. But it’s very difficult. There’s no denying it’s extremely difficult to get someone to even pay attention to a story that they might not want to hear.

(This appeared in the print as 'Night Sky With Exit Wounds - Tatsam')filbet