Turning Point: The Vietnam War (2025) s01e01 Episode Script
America Goes To War
1
[spacey music plays]
[man 1] I was born in Brooklyn, New York,
May 19th, 1946,
and when I was about four,
we moved to Florida.
My stepfather was a policeman,
and he was in an organization
called the John Birch Society,
which was a right-wing organization.
[spokesman 1] We're proud members
of the John Birch Society.
We're all engaged along with the society
in an epic undertaking.
We have got to defeat
the international Communist
world control conspiracy.
[Camil] His job for the John Birch Society
was making telephone tapes.
People would dial
the word "freedom" on the telephone,
and they would get a recorded message.
[spokesman 2]
The road to tyranny was enacted
in the form of the Civil Rights Bill
[Camil] Most of those recorded messages
were about how bad the Communists were.
[spokesman 2] The goal
of the international Communist conspiracy
is world domination.
[Camil] I didn't know
what a Communist was,
but I knew they were bad,
and that they were
the enemy of the United States,
and that it would be my job
to go in the military
when I graduate high school
and stop the commies
before they got over here.
Three days after I graduated,
I was at Parris Island.
Boot camp, that's where they basically
take the civilian out of you
and put the military in you.
They take all your personal belongings
away from you,
and they put you in a rack, a bed.
[bugle plays "Reveille"]
[Camil] And then the next morning,
the lights come on,
people are running up and down
the barrack halls,
making a lot of noise,
and they're pushing over the bunk beds
and knocking people out of their beds.
I woke up, and I thought
I was having a bad dream,
but it was real. [laughs]
They give you impossible tasks,
and then they punish you
for not doing those impossible tasks.
For instance, I was asked to jump.
So I jumped.
And the drill instructor said,
"Private Camil, who gave you
permission to come down?"
[recruits yelling]
[Camil] There's a lot
of dehumanization in the training.
[soldiers sing]
[Camil] You run,
and you sing songs with a cadence.
One of the songs was
I'm gonna go to Vietnam ♪
I'm gonna kill some Việt Cộng ♪
With a knife or with a gun ♪
[swallows and sniffles]
Either way, it will be fun ♪
- [soldiers chanting indistinctly]
- [pensive music playing]
- [music fades]
- [static crackling]
[helicopter blades chopping in distance]
[woman 1] I cannot think
of a more cataclysmic event
than the Vietnam War.
[droning anxious music plays]
[woman 1] For Vietnamese people,
the events that took place
were life-defining.
And in terms of the United States,
Vietnam shaped their understanding
of their place in the world.
[protestors drum and sing]
And do all this, and do it right
[man 2] The Vietnam War caused
a great loss of faith in presidents
and their top foreign policy advisors
because we saw things just not work out
the way they were presented,
and the way they were sold to us.
[inaudible]
[woman 1] Prior to the Vietnam War,
for the most part, Americans believed
their leaders in Washington, D.C.
After Vietnam,
you had the first decline
of what we call the imperial presidency.
This was really when
the American people understood
that, you know,
our leaders in Washington, D.C.
aren't always doing
what we think they're doing.
They don't always tell us
the decision-making
that was taking place behind closed doors.
And during the Vietnam War era,
the American people saw that leaders
for the first time lied to them.
From a political standpoint,
we could've flushed it
down the drain three years ago.
Blame Johnson and Kennedy.
[man 3] Many of the things
that plague our society today,
resentment, alienation, cynicism,
a tendency to mistrust one another,
to question one another's motives,
a breakdown in civic institutions,
they have complex causes, no question,
but I think many of them
have their roots in the Vietnam era.
[protestors shout indistinctly]
[man 4] America's changing.
Did Vietnam cause it?
It was one of the causes.
It let loose a torrent of emotion
in American society.
[protestors] No more war! No more war!
This was a shredding
of the innocence of this country,
the revelation of that.
[man 5] It was transformative,
not only that,
but it-- the anti-war movement woke up
a lot of other communities
like, "Hey, we need representation here."
"We need to be heard."
[Muhammad Ali] My conscience won't let me
go shoot my brother,
or some darker people,
or some poor, hungry people in the mud
for big, powerful America.
And shoot them for what?
They never called me "nigger."
[protestors chant]
I was angry, and I wanted to make sure
when I threw the rock through the window
of the Army recruitment office,
I was willing to go to jail for that.
[man 6] What was happening to us,
our image of ourselves
as the last best hope on earth
was shaken.
And if it wasn't shaken,
if it was still strong
to millions and millions of Americans,
by the end of the war in Vietnam,
it was shattered.
[man] Watch out!
[Weiner] Because viewed a certain way,
the United States in Vietnam
was not the last best hope on earth.
It was a violent,
militaristic, imperial power.
[man 7] We all live
under the shadow of Vietnam.
We all live
with the consequences of Vietnam.
The memory of that war is something
that a lot of people are spending
a lot of time trying to erase.
But we can't forget Vietnam.
It's with us today.
- [soldier shouts]
- [gun fires]
[droning anxious music continues]
[ethereal music plays]
[man 8] When I was a very young boy,
perhaps ten,
plucking hairs from my mother's head
She must have been in her fifties
or late forties at that point
in San Jose, California.
And out of nowhere,
she tells me that in Vietnam,
she saw a dead child
on a doorstep in her neighborhood.
And that child had died
because of the famine.
So that was one of the ways
by which I started to understand
that the history of the country
where I had come from was complicated
terrible
unspoken of in so many ways.
Certainly among Americans,
but also to a certain extent
among the Vietnamese too.
There's history in the sense of facts.
But there's also history
as stories, as narratives.
With the war in Vietnam,
the histories we tell about that
are really, really crucial.
For me, as someone
who's Vietnamese and American,
I'm deeply aware
that in both of these countries,
there are deeply conflicting histories.
That's part of what led
to the war in Vietnam.
In the United States, early on,
the American mindset
was certainly this Cold War mindset.
There was communism,
and there was capitalism,
and there was totalitarianism,
and there was democracy.
Either or, us or them,
everybody had to choose.
That was the American perspective.
Only a few generations
have been granted the role
of defending freedom
in its hour of maximum danger.
I do not shrink from this responsibility.
I welcome it.
[Logevall] John F. Kennedy,
the 35th President of the United States,
is an extraordinary figure
in American political history.
He was a Cold War president.
To some degree,
I would say he was a cold warrior.
Kennedy obviously inspired Americans,
through his idealism,
through his rhetoric,
to support, fundamentally,
his vision for the nation's future.
[announcer] From the Office
of the White House in Washington, D.C.,
NBC Radio now presents an address
by the President of the United States,
John F. Kennedy.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the President of the United States.
We preach freedom around the world,
and we mean it,
and we cherish our freedom here at home.
[Logevall] But he's a very key figure
on the Vietnam story.
It's fair to say, uh,
it's not his best chapter.
[ominous music plays]
[man 9] So when Kennedy comes in,
he believes that he inherits
a very, very dangerous
geopolitical situation.
You have these two great power centers
that are emerging in the Communist world,
the Soviet Union,
as well as the People's Republic of China.
[newscaster] What we oppose,
fundamentally,
is the aggressive nature
of the Communist state,
its unceasing effort
to expand wherever it can,
to grow bigger, to take over, to supplant.
[Logevall] It's hard today to recapture
the degree to which ordinary Americans,
as well as their leaders,
were concerned about the threat
that Communism represented
to the American way of life.
[Selverstone] In 1961, the Communists
decide to build a wall in Berlin.
- [people screaming]
- [dark music playing]
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
[Selverstone] At the same time,
Cuban leader Fidel Castro
and his Communist brethren
had taken over Cuba.
It looks like the Soviets,
the Communists, have a beachhead
in the Western Hemisphere.
And Kennedy inherits a plan
to take down Castro.
[weapons firing]
[Selverstone] The Bay of Pigs affair
is a disaster for the United States.
It ends in catastrophe.
There are hundreds of deaths.
It's a real black eye for Kennedy.
[somber music plays]
[machine clicks]
This is essentially a political war,
because it's a war for men's minds.
And, uh, if we lose the minds
of these people,
we lose the minds of the officer corps
and of the civil servants,
we will have lost the war.
[Selverstone] The reason
that Kennedy starts recording?
It's unclear.
[Hughes] He was the first president
to tape extensively.
He recorded about 260 hours
of White House conversations.
He got the Secret Service
to install it on the QT.
The tape recorder was hidden
in the White House basement.
It is a time machine.
[chuckles] It's like if you could
just dial up the past
and be a kind of a fly on the wall
as people are making
incredibly important decisions.
There are increasing reports, uh,
in Saigon and in Huế, as well,
that students are talking
of moving over to the Việt Cộng side.
[Selverstone] Kennedy can see
that the world is changing.
Who is JFK? Is he really going to be
a leader to contend with or not?
Kennedy recognizes the danger of that.
So that's one of the reasons why,
by the end of the year,
he recognizes that Vietnam
may be the place he needs to take a stand.
[mournful orchestral music plays]
[crowd cheers and applauds]
[boots stomp]
[Weiner] I think most Americans,
certainly most white
middle-class Americans,
had an idealistic view of their country.
The United States stood
for good in the world
against the evil empire
of the Soviet Union.
Nobody knew anything about Vietnam.
Nobody knew where it was.
[Viet] By then, North Vietnam
had become completely identified
as a Communist state
with a Communist revolution,
supported by China and the Soviet Union.
South Vietnam was going to be
a capitalist democracy
modeled on something
like the United States
and what it had to offer.
[Selverstone] The Democratic Republic
of Vietnam was the Communists
led by Hồ Chí Minh.
[Logevall] He believed sincerely
in the Communist cause,
but it's always his country.
The nationalist fervor is
what really drives Hồ Chí Minh.
A non-Communist government
is in power in Saigon,
led by Ngô Đình Diệm.
A dedicated nationalist,
very courageous figure personally,
a Catholic,
who feels strongly that he knows
what's best for South Vietnam,
but he is a dedicated anti-Communist.
And he becomes a very important ally
of the United States.
[pensive music playing]
[Viet] There was a war being carried out
mostly by the North Vietnamese.
[reporter 1] These are films
of South Vietnam
after the destruction of a village
by the North Vietnamese.
To those in command
of North Vietnam and the Việt Cộng,
the pursuit was a united Vietnam
under Hanoi with a Communist government.
To those in South Vietnam,
the pursuit was to be left alone.
But they were not left alone.
[reporter 2] By 1960, every area of life
in the South has become a combat zone.
[dramatic music plays on news broadcast]
[automatic weapons firing]
[Veith] The state of Vietnam,
when Kennedy comes into office,
is that the insurrection in South Vietnam
had grown very rapidly.
[explosion]
[weapons firing]
By January of '61,
Kennedy was facing a country
that had already lost
much of the control of the countryside.
[automatic weapons firing]
[Veith] And the Communists
were on the move.
There was concern that if Vietnam fell,
then the others would fall also,
you know, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, etc.
I think that was quite generally believed.
[intriguing music plays]
[Lien-Hang] This is the domino theory.
If you had one country in Asia
fall to Communism,
that it would set off falling dominoes
that would lead
all the way to San Francisco.
[reporter] Mr. President, have you
ever had any reason to doubt
this so-called domino theory,
that if South Vietnam falls, the rest
of Southeast Asia will go along behind it?
No, I-I believe it. I believe it.
I think that, uh, the struggle
is close enough.
China is so large, looms so high
on the-- just beyond the frontiers.
If South Vietnam went,
it would not only give them
an improved geographic position
for a guerrilla assault on Malaya,
but would also give the impression
that the wave of the future
in Southeast Asia
was China and the Communists.
[tense percussive music plays]
[Logevall] Kennedy's top
foreign policy advisors,
Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy,
that trio, along, I think,
with senior military brass,
are convinced that South Vietnam's future
may depend on increased US involvement.
Top aides who are basically saying,
"Mr. President, we think you need to put
American troops into South Vietnam."
They even come up with various schemes
that can be used to introduce
American forces sort of under the radar.
In the past year, we've doubled
the rate of building Polaris submarines.
[Logevall] The Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara
must be central to this story.
[brooding music plays]
[man 10] Robert McNamara grew up
in California,
went to Berkeley,
and then got an MBA at Harvard.
During World War II,
he worked in the units
that did bomb spotting.
After he came out of the Army,
he went to work at Ford.
I'm Bob McNamara,
Group Vice President in charge of the car
and truck divisions of the company.
[Logevall] He was
a very imposing figure in Washington
in terms of his persona
and the degree
to which he intimidated people
with his forceful personality
and his intelligence.
And he's an architect of the Vietnam War,
of the Americanization of the Vietnam War.
[Selverstone] The United States is not
at war with the Communists,
but American military advisors
are going over to work
with the South Vietnamese military.
[intriguing music plays]
[Selverstone] Kennedy's advisors tell him
that Vietnam is actually in grave danger.
The Communists have made inroads
all throughout South Vietnam.
It doesn't look like Diệm's forces
are able to really withstand the tide.
While I can report, Mr. President,
definite progress and increasing strength
in the government forces,
the progress is slow.
And it's very, very slow,
slower than we would like to see.
[speaks Vietnamese]
[Selverstone] When Kennedy comes
into office,
there are less than 700
US military advisors in South Vietnam.
Keep your eye on the man ahead of you.
Keep him in that gun sight at all times.
[Selverstone] But now Kennedy decides
to put in more military advisors
to help the South Vietnamese learn
how to fight the war better
against the Communists.
[guns firing]
[Barry] I grew up in central New York
in the Finger Lakes area
near Ithaca, New York.
I only had a tiny idea
that something was going on in Vietnam.
[bells ringing]
[Barry] I wanted to go to West Point.
So I decided to just walk downtown,
go to an Army recruiter,
and join the Army.
[officers shout indistinctly]
[Barry] That was, uh,
in the spring of 1962,
and I was in Vietnam
by the end of the year.
[indistinct]
[Barry] I got the sense that the military
had no idea what they were doing.
There had been
an assistant secretary of defense
who said, "We need a cover story
for what we're doing in South Vietnam."
They were sending in advisors.
What that really meant was they would take
a group of South Vietnamese troops,
put them on a helicopter
or otherwise transport them to some place,
and push them into a firefight.
Sometimes they turned around
and shot at the American helicopters.
So that wasn't working out so well,
turning somebody else into the army
that we would direct.
[tense sparse music plays]
[Barry] And that's why
they kept bringing in
more and more of our own advisors.
[man 11] But this is not going to be
like World War II.
This is an insurgency fight.
This is a war without front lines,
where war is fought in and among
the population, not separate from it.
This is the only way that you can be sure
that you always have
the equipment which you need
in order to go out and fight the Việt Cộng
and win the battle against the Việt Cộng.
[Lien-Hang] "Việt Cộng" is a contraction
between "Vietnam Cộng Sản,"
or Vietnamese Communism.
"Việt Cộng," it would be used
in a derogatory way
to describe any Communist enemy
in South Vietnam.
So it would be called "VC" for short.
They would become known officially
as the National Liberation Front.
[Daddis] And what you see
is an escalation of US advisors,
an escalation of military aid,
economic aid.
[Selverstone] By the end of 1961,
there are roughly 3,000
American military advisors
embedded with the South Vietnamese.
By the end of 1962,
I've seen figures upwards of 11,000.
And by 1963,
there are well over 16,000
US military advisors
in South Vietnam.
This is a dramatic increase.
[pastor] Almighty God,
we stand before thee
as thy children should, acknowledging
[man 12] We didn't know much
about this operation that was developing.
Kennedy did not allow
much information to emerge
of the kind of support
that he was sending to Vietnam.
[Bass] The Vietnam War is a turning point
in United States history.
There's a stark difference
between the before and the after
when it comes to the Vietnam War.
And one of those turning points is
this thing called the credibility gap.
That's a gap between
what the government is telling you
and what is actually happening
on the ground.
[reporter] And you feel
that you have told the American people
as much as can be told
because of the sensitivity
of the-- of the subject? Is that?
[Kennedy] Well, I-- I think
I've just indicated what our role is.
We have increased our assistance
to the government, its logistics.
We have not sent combat troops there,
though the training missions
that we have there,
uh, have been instructed,
if they are fired upon, to, uh
They, uh, would, of course, fire back.
[Arnett] He didn't say
that they were reinforcing
the South Vietnamese military
with heavy weapons and aircraft.
[speaks Vietnamese]
[tense music continues playing]
[Arnett] He didn't say
that American so-called "advisors"
would fly the planes
going out on bombing missions.
[Selverstone] The advisors are not
supposed to be fighting the war.
They're only supposed to be assisting,
but they're actually fighting as well.
And dying too.
[priest] continue to bless this world
with men such as these.
[Arnett] We also learned in that period
that the Kennedy administration had sent
guidelines out to the American mission
not to cooperate with the Western press.
The important question
was what was really happening
on the ground in South Vietnam.
[motorcycle engine revs]
[people chatter]
[Arnett] I arrived in Saigon in June 1962
as a correspondent
for the Associated Press.
The roadblocks we encountered
were enormous.
The South Vietnamese government
enforced strict censorship.
So any story we sent out,
we had to send through the post office.
[South Vietnamese national anthem plays]
[Arnett] They did not allow
any critical references
or anything that would suggest
the inadequacies of the government.
And the US diplomatic
and military missions
were totally uncooperative
with the media in Saigon.
One of the solutions we found
to get information
of what was really going on
was we would simply
drive out in the mornings
along the main highways out of Saigon,
looking for any action,
say, helicopter traffic.
We would follow the helicopters
along the main roads.
And when we saw dead bodies
on the road or wounded people,
we knew we'd found
the battle and the action.
[guns fire, bombs explode]
[Bass] To be a great journalist,
you gotta get close to the action.
You got to be there.
And Arnett is famous
for the stories that he covered
where he was just on top of the action.
[droning, disturbing music plays]
[Arnett] It was dangerous,
but getting a story was the main thing.
And that's how we got
the story about Ấp Bắc.
We didn't know anything
about this operation.
The helicopter contacts
at the Tân Sơn Nhứt airport called us
and said they're really worried
because they've lost
several of their helicopters
in this place, Ấp Bắc.
And we're given a helicopter ride
around the battlefield.
And we went pretty close.
You could see bodies on the ground.
And at that point, there'd been
five American helicopters shot down,
three American dead.
There were eight or nine injured,
50, 60 South Vietnamese casualties.
It was just a complete mess.
The Battle of Ấp Bắc
is extremely important.
[guns fire]
[Bass] US helicopter pilots
and US soldiers are directly involved
and noticeably directly involved
for the first time in the war.
It is evident
that they're flying the helicopters.
So the pretense
that the United States is only there
in the capacity of advising Vietnam
can no longer be maintained
at the Battle of Ấp Bắc.
[Arnett] General Paul D. Harkins arrived.
He was the chief
of the American military mission.
And we walked over to him.
We said, "General, how does it look?"
And he said, "Boys
it was a great victory."
"We've got the VC on the run,
and we're moving in
on them right now. Bye."
That was the senseless optimism
that prevailed
amongst the senior-most Americans
in Saigon.
[reporter] Most of the Red guerrilla band
was wiped out.
American observers counted
at least 80 bodies.
They added that it was the best action
Vietnam's 7th Division has yet executed.
US training seems to be paying off.
[Selverstone] The military painted
the Ấp Bắc engagement as a victory.
But it's a real black eye
for the Americans,
as reported in the American media,
back home, to the country
as well as to Kennedy.
When Kennedy sees a picture
of an American helicopter on the ground,
you know, "What's going on here?
I-- I thought we were doing well."
[trumpets play military call]
[Selverstone] It's impossible
to divorce American politics
from American policy abroad.
Politics is always going to be
part of the mix
because that's just baked into the system.
[Hughes] John F. Kennedy is hoping
that he can keep this all
on the back burner
through the '64 election.
But that hope is dashed
when the Buddhist crisis erupts.
[solemn music plays]
[Arnett] Buddhists were a big part
of Vietnam's 15 million or so population.
[ominous music plays]
[Viet] The United States supported
South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm.
He was a Vietnamese Catholic.
And of course he received
a lot of support,
I think, from Vietnamese Catholics.
Vietnamese Catholics are a minority
throughout Vietnam.
Their Catholicism owes
to the French and Portuguese presence
throughout the past few centuries
of Vietnamese history.
South Vietnam, under Ngô Đình Diệm,
did not have a policy against Buddhism.
He supported the building,
the construction of many Buddhist temples.
But by the 1960s,
Diệm's older brother, Ngô Đình Thục,
who was a Catholic archbishop,
was clearly promoting Catholicism
in South Vietnam.
That gave people the impression
that Diệm was discriminating
against Buddhism and Buddhists.
As Mr. Diệm consolidated his power,
he became more autocratic.
[reporter] Among Diệm's people,
there is no genuine political opposition.
It is simply not permitted.
[Nhã] He has his brother, Mr. Nhu,
who ran the secret police.
[Vu] Ngô Đình Nhu is younger brother
of Ngô Đình Diệm.
Madame Nhu, his wife,
was much younger than he was.
She was well-educated under the French.
She became the first lady
because Diệm was not married.
[reporter] Madame Nhu
and her husband, Diệm's brother,
live in the presidential palace.
[Mike Wallace] What do you think
that the United States can do most now
to help Vietnam?
I think that the most urgent
is to decide not to be intoxicated anymore
by the propaganda, uh, plot
directed by the Communists.
[marching band plays]
[Lien-Hang] One of the things you see
in Diệm's administration
is a concerted campaign
to kill off all of the VC in the region.
[somber music plays]
[Lien-Hang] Việt Cộng
and anyone who disagrees with him is a VC.
[inaudible]
[Lien-Hang] The Buddhist political
opposition would fall under this category
as enemy of the state.
[Vu] There were factions
in the Buddhist church.
There was the more militant faction
who wanted Buddhism to play
a bigger political role
in the life of the nation.
And they did not like the idea of having
a Catholic president for the country.
[woman] Ngô Đình Nhu, who is a policeman,
only thing in his mind
is torture and kill.
When the South Vietnamese
came in our village,
they put a big Ngô Đình Diệm photo
and a cross
right inside our temple, or our altar.
They made us bow to Ngô Đình Diệm,
and they talking about him
as just like a god.
Like he is somebody
that's so important to us.
We don't care.
We just want to be peaceful.
We want to worship our ancestors,
hang up the Buddhist flag.
But the next thing we know that,
everybody's killed.
[foreboding music plays]
[Hayslip] They killed the leaders
in the village.
They killed the monks.
They buried them alive.
So they killed
whoever they think that's Việt Cộng.
[sniffles]
And so, more them doing that,
the more our family
and 90% of the villagers,
yeah, we join the Việt Cộng,
we stand up and we fight.
And so daytime,
we praise the Ngô Đình Diệm.
The nighttime, we praise Hồ Chí Minh.
[Lien-Hang] By 1963, you had all-out war
between the Catholic leadership
and their Buddhist majority.
[tense classical music plays]
[Nho] In South Vietnam,
I demonstrated against the government.
Not to overthrow the-- the system
of government that we have,
but to establish
a constitutional order for the country.
[Arnett] In Huế, the decision was made
by the security forces
to push the protesters back.
[sirens wail]
[Arnett] And in that melee,
several grenades were thrown.
Eight Buddhists were killed
and a lot injured.
[people scream]
[Nho] That was a catastrophic mistake.
The anger was severe, strong, boiling.
Boiling.
[Arnett] Protests began on the streets
of Saigon within a week or two.
[people shouting]
There were thousands of people
massed along the streets of this parade.
And as they came
along Phan Đình Phùng Street,
a large, old automobile
that had been part of the parade stopped.
This elderly man was led
out of the vehicle by a younger monk,
taken to the center of the street
where he sat cross-legged
on the street.
And the assistant poured
a liquid over him.
And, uh, this monk lit a match
and [claps hands]
was in flames.
[melancholic ethereal music plays]
[monks chanting]
[Hayslip] One Buddhist monk died
to figure out how could he help
to save the people.
Only way he can do is to give himself up.
[Arnett] Madame Nhu was outspoken
on everything.
When the Buddhist crisis was erupting
and the immolations by fire began,
she called them "monk barbecues."
[Nhu] What have the Buddhist leaders
done comparatively?
The only thing they have done,
they have, uh, barbecued
one of their monks,
uh, whom they have intoxicated,
whom they have abused the confidence.
And even that barbecuing was done, uh,
not even with self-sufficient means.
Because they-- they used,
uh, imported, uh, gasoline.
[brooding synthesizer music plays]
You love your country
and you say those things?
It doesn't heal.
It break up the faith of the people.
[Veith] There is a difference
between how President Diệm
and his brother Nhu looked
at the Buddhist protests.
Diệm himself was attempting
to actually talk to the Buddhists
and sort of reach a compromise.
[sparse tense music plays]
[Veith] It was Nhu that sent
the police and the military
into the pagoda raids in late August.
[Lien-Hang] They start
raiding the pagodas.
They start arresting more people.
Waging war on their own people.
[Arnett] This clearly alarmed Washington,
who was supporting
the regime of President Ngô Đình Diệm.
The heart of the matter is
that they've established a police state,
and that they're interfering
with the liberties of the people,
and that you have resentments
born of that.
- [Kennedy] Right, yeah.
- Right?
[Lien-Hang] The United States is watching
in horror as this is playing out
in the summer of 1963,
that they are telling Diệm,
"You need to stop raiding these pagodas."
[newscaster] In Saigon,
President Ngô Đình Diệm's regime
has accused the United States government
of being off base
in denouncing the military crackdown
on his Buddhist opponents.
[suspenseful pulsing music plays]
[man in Vietnamese] President Diệm,
from my standpoint,
was the person who rebuilt the country.
But at his side,
Ngô Đinh Nhu brought about events
which made Diệm look bad.
Dissent began to brew
from within the military ranks.
[Kennedy in English] You have to assume
that Diệm has felt that there's going
to be a coup against him
for probably the last couple of months.
[host] The Guiding Light will not
be seen today
in order to bring you
the following CBS News special report.
Good day from New York.
South Vietnam is
in a state of revolt today,
and there are unconfirmed reports
that President Ngô Đình Diệm's government
has been overthrown.
[melancholic music plays]
[guns firing]
[soldiers shouting]
[Lien-Hang] High-ranking military generals
under Dương Văn Minh carry out the coup.
Diệm and Nhu were able to escape
the presidential palace
by way of secret doorways into tunnels.
Eventually, they would regroup
in a Catholic church.
They were promised safe passage
back to the palace
and to eventually leave the country.
[in Vietnamese] They sent a convoy
to Cha Tam Church to pick up Mr. President
and Mr. Advisor to bring them back.
[music intensifies]
Captain Nhung was Lieutenant General
Dương Văn Minh's closest bodyguard.
Later, it was learned
that while sitting in the armored vehicle,
he used a dagger blade
to stab Ngô Đình Nhu once,
causing him to collapse on his seat.
He was about to stab once more,
but he saw Ngô Đình Diệm on the side
slightly leaning toward him,
so he stabbed him once instead.
He stabbed them one more time each,
then shot them with his pistol.
[pistol fires faintly]
That is what's called a "mercy shot."
[gun fires twice]
[Hughes, in English]
During the entire coup period,
Madame Nhu was in the United States.
That probably saved Madame Nhu's life.
[Nhu] Treason does not pay.
And nobody can rule Vietnam,
can rule Vietnam
with just money and puppets.
And all those whom some of the Americans
intend to settle and to tutor,
for how long will they hold power
if they ever hold power?
[newscaster] The new leaders,
General Dương Văn Minh
and Premier Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ,
want immediate support from the people
and recognition from the West.
[Lien-Hang] There were a series
of declassifications,
and we now know
that the Kennedy administration,
in particular President Kennedy,
had started courting with this idea
of removing Diệm
as early as August of '63.
So the events that transpired
in the beginning of November, they knew.
[indistinct]
[Logevall] There's no doubt
John F. Kennedy was
the decision-maker on Vietnam
in those fateful weeks in 1963
when the decision was made
to essentially give the green light
to the coup-plotters in Saigon.
[gentle sullen music plays]
[Logevall] One interesting question
is whether John F. Kennedy understood
that Diệm and Nhu would likely be killed.
[Hughes] The South Vietnamese
never received
any sort of caution from the US government
that Diệm or Nhu or anybody else
in the Ngô family was to be protected,
held harmless,
allowed safely to go into exile.
One of the things that I think
is quite clear as a historian
is that the coup-plotters knew
that if Diệm lives,
that there would be constant coups,
and the Americans knew that.
The Kennedy administration
has blood on their hands.
[Osnos] Some of the most poignant things
you can hear from Kennedy
is what he dictated
on the Monday morning after the coup.
[Kennedy] I, uh, feel that we must bear
a good deal of responsibility for it,
beginning with our cable of early August
in which we suggested the coup.
[crowd cheers]
[Kennedy] I was, uh, shocked
by the death of Diệm and Nhu.
I met Diệm with Justice Douglas
many years ago.
He was a an extraordinary character.
While he became increasingly difficult
in the last months,
nevertheless, over a ten-year period,
he held his country together,
maintained its independence
under very adverse conditions.
He
The way he was killed
made it particularly abhorrent.
Ngô Đình Diệm was a controversial figure
for many different kinds of reasons,
but I think that
for some of the South Vietnamese,
he represented the possibility
of nationalist independence,
a country led by a Vietnamese president.
The politics of this
was very, very complicated obviously,
because South Vietnam was
a politically diverse place.
There were people
of different religious backgrounds
and so on.
But he was controversial
to different populations,
again, for different reasons.
Americans were opposed to him
because they thought he stood in the way
of their particular policies.
[church bells ring]
[Viet] At least for some
Vietnamese Catholics,
he was a revered political leader,
nationalist figure,
whose assassination was a tragic event.
[somber droning music plays]
[woman] When President Ngô Đình Diệm
got assassinated, my father came home.
He said that, "It not gonna be
a good time anymore."
"It can be a lot of chaos."
"Nobody can deal with Hồ Chí Minh,
can deal with the Communists,
like President Ngô Đình Diệm."
[Hughes] What happened after the coup
was a series of coups,
kind of a revolving-door government
in Saigon,
where various generals decided
that they would be the best people
to run the war against the Việt Cộng.
So it was a period
of instability in Saigon.
[Lien-Hang] Several weeks after
Ngô Đình Diệm and Ngô Đình Nhu
are assassinated,
the United States goes through
one of the most tragic days
in presidential history.
[melancholic music plays]
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
You'll excuse the fact
that I'm out of breath, but
about 10 or 15 minutes ago,
a tragic thing, from all indications
at this point, has happened
in the city of Dallas.
There has been an attempt,
as perhaps you know now,
on the life of President Kennedy.
He was wounded in an automobile
driving from Dallas Airport
into downtown Dallas,
along with Governor Connally of Texas.
They've been taken
to Parkland Hospital there,
where their condition is as yet unknown.
[melancholic music plays]
- [gun fires]
- [people scream]
[reporter] It appears as though something
has happened in the motorcade route.
Something, I repeat, has happened
in the motorcade route.
We just have a report
from our correspondent,
Dan Rather in Dallas,
that he has confirmed
that President Kennedy is dead.
Walter, we have some additional film
taken at and near Parkland Hospital,
where President John Kennedy died.
Uh, this film is in rough cut form.
These are some of the witnesses
in the area of the shooting.
There was a great deal
of disbelief at first
that the President had even been shot.
[Rather] To be there that day
was pretty much what was reflected
around the country.
The first reports were he was shot.
Then it was confirmed
he was-- he was dead.
[man] Late afternoon editions
[Rather] The Kennedy assassination
was a shock to the American psyche.
We believed that those kinds of things
didn't happen in our country anymore.
[reporter] Women here in shock.
Some have fainted.
Grown men, Secret Service men,
standing by the emergency room,
tears streaming down their face.
There's only one word
to describe the picture here
and that's "grief," and much of it.
[sad arrangement
of "The Star-Spangled Banner" plays]
[Logevall] If you look
at Kennedy's even opponents,
many of them in the United States,
even for them,
this was a-- a monumental blow.
Today, millions of people
throughout the world
are trying to find
words adequate to express
their grief and their sympathy
to his family.
[priest] the souls
of all the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
In the name of the Father,
and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.
[Logevall] If we engage
in so-called "what if" speculation,
though we will never know for sure,
I think that the best argument
is that a surviving Kennedy
would have avoided
large-scale escalation in Vietnam.
I think his doubts went deeper
in terms of what
American military power could do.
And maybe most important,
Kennedy would have reached
the critical decisions on Vietnam
in his second and final term.
And at that point,
he could no longer run for re-election.
Anyone can speculate all they want
about what he might have, should have done
had he been re-elected.
But all we have is the record.
And the record is that President Kennedy
got us involved in Vietnam
and escalated the war,
and was escalating the war
when he was assassinated.
And it's very hard for me to believe
that he wouldn't have carried on the war.
[reporter] As always,
democracy finds its strength
in the continuity of the presidency.
Lyndon B. Johnson becomes
the 36th President of the United States,
just 99 minutes
after his predecessor's life
had ebbed away.
[Osnos] Lyndon Johnson became president.
But in that first year,
he kept referring to himself
as "the accidental president."
[spacey anxious music plays]
[Osnos] When it came to domestic politics
and domestic policy,
he was truly in command.
But on Vietnam, he was insecure.
He didn't really understand this issue.
[Hughes] President Johnson started
recording his phone calls
using a Dictabelt system
of his own immediately.
And so we have a great record
of Lyndon Johnson's phone calls.
[button clicks]
I would like to have, for this period
when everybody is asking me,
something in my own words.
I can say, "Well, here are--
here are the alternatives,
and here's our theory,
and here's what we're basing it on."
LBJ basically, by his own admission,
didn't know what he was doing.
And he was very poorly advised
by his advisors,
especially McNamara.
I do think, Mr. President,
that it would be wise for you
to say as little as possible.
The frank answer is,
we don't know what's going on out there.
The signs I see coming through the cables
are-- are disturbing signs.
[Rather] President Johnson always had
something of a vulnerability
about his education.
When he came to the presidency,
he was surrounded
by President Kennedy's
hand-picked advisors.
And President Johnson,
I know having talked to him,
thought to himself,
"Geez, I just graduated
from this small teacher's college
in South Texas,
and I have around me
the best brains in the country
that President Kennedy brought on."
And the Kennedy advisors, make no mistake,
were almost unanimous in saying,
"You've got to stay in Vietnam."
[anxious music intensifies]
[Logevall] There's a recognition
on the part of senior US officials
in the summer of 1964
that South Vietnam is in deep trouble.
The insurgency is continuing
to gain strength.
There is infighting
among South Vietnamese officials.
And something needs to happen.
Arguably, the United States enters
the month of August
looking for a pretext
to flex American muscle.
In a limited fashion.
[Weiner] The American war in Vietnam began
in the summer of 1964
with political lies
based on false intelligence.
[tense music plays]
[man 13] USS Maddox,
one of the United States Navy destroyers,
was conducting
signals intelligence patrols
in the Gulf of Tonkin
along the North Vietnamese coast.
They were up deep into enemy territory
above the 17th parallel.
Information gathering,
intelligence gathering
through, uh, electronic eavesdropping.
Unbeknownst to the Maddox,
the South Vietnamese were conducting
commando raids closer to the coast,
firing weapons and mortars
against North Vietnamese installations.
On the afternoon of August 2nd, 1964,
three North Vietnamese torpedo vessels
come out and engage the USS Maddox.
[Weiner] Three North Vietnamese
patrol boats approached the Maddox,
which both engaged them with fire
and called for air support
from a nearby naval carrier.
[naval artillery fires]
[Weiner] The Maddox sustained damage
in the form of one bullet hole.
[Paterson] All three
of the North Vietnamese torpedo vessels
are struck.
One is completely destroyed.
The other vessels managed to drift back
to their bases with some heavy damage.
They fired at us.
We responded immediately.
And we took out one of their boats,
put the other two running.
We kept We're putting our boats
right there. We're not running--
[McNamara] Our instructions
are to destroy--
[Johnson] That's right.
Now I want to leave an impression
on the people we talk to over here
that we're gonna be firm as hell.
We oughtn't do anything
that the national interest
doesn't require,
but we sure ought
to always leave the impression
that if you shoot at us,
you're going to get hit.
[Paterson] In order to demonstrate
US resolve,
the military command center,
and as well as the commander-in-chief,
order the Maddox to return the next day,
now accompanied by USS Turner Joy,
which is another US military destroyer.
[dark pulsing music plays]
Weather goes south on them very fast.
[lightning crashes]
[Paterson] Wave heights are now
at about six feet.
Low visibility.
Rain squalls moving through the area.
The tensions were pretty high.
When the US Navy destroyers start seeing
radar signals approaching the vessels
there's some confusion
because the blips are moving really fast,
and they're coming
from different directions
and then sometimes disappearing.
But also, the sonar operators
are starting to hear
propeller noises and torpedo noises
in the water.
And so the crew
and the officers on board the two ships
were getting pretty nervous
that they were under attack.
Mr. President,
we, uh, just got a, uh, report
from the commander
of that task force out there
that they have sighted
two unidentified vessels
and three unidentified prop aircraft
in the vicinity of the destroyers.
[Johnson] Uh, what else
do we have out there?
[McNamara] We have ample forces to respond
not only to these attacks
on the destroyers
but also to retaliate,
should you wish to do so,
against targets on the land.
The message traffic back and forth was,
"Give me proof
that there was a torpedo there."
"Give me some flotsam, a cushion,
anything that would say
that there was a torpedo boat."
We did not see one torpedo boat.
[Paterson] At this point,
there was some uncertainty
about whether or not
an attack had actually occurred.
This is now late at night on August 4th.
And the signals intelligence
on board the ships pick up messages
from the North Vietnamese Navy
that they had struck
some of the enemy vessels
that were in the area.
And it validates everything
that they had suspected at this point.
I think I might get, uh, Dean Rusk
and Mac Bundy, have 'em come over here,
and we'll go over
these retaliatory actions.
[Alvarez] I was attached
to a squadron of A-4 Skyhawks.
The next thing I know,
I was going on a mission.
[ominous music plays]
[Alvarez] Our targets were
along the coast of Vietnam,
the naval bases on the northern part,
like around Hải Phòng
and north towards China.
[jet engines roar]
[Alvarez] I went in and hit my target.
And as I was exiting, I got hit.
And I pulled the ejection curtain.
I felt the chute pop open.
And I was in the water.
And as I tried to swim away,
looked around,
and here was a fishing boat.
And it had about three rifles
pointing at me.
They hauled me aboard. They stripped me.
They wrapped me up
with a rope like a-- a knot.
That was the beginning
of a a long captivity.
[reporter] The Pentagon said
two pilots were lost.
One was reported
to be a prisoner of the Reds.
[Paterson] All this message traffic
and all these accounts were top secret
and kept classified
for the better part of about 40 years.
But as it turns out,
the attack on August 4th never happened.
Their radars reflecting off the sea waves
and the low cloud level
the sonar operators were picking up
their own rudder noises
and own propeller noises.
As President Johnson later said,
"The damn sailors were shootin'
at flying fish."
[Paterson]
As for the North Vietnamese message,
they were transmitting
a follow-up message
to the August 2nd attack
in which they had
the initial confrontation
just with USS Maddox.
So it was not about the events
that supposedly occurred
on the night of August 4th.
I think Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara had doubts
about the attack on August 4th.
But instead of being honest
and truthful about what happened,
McNamara misrepresents it to Congress
as well as misrepresents it
to members of the press.
They were reporting
they were avoiding torpedoes
and that they had sunk
one of the attacking patrol craft.
And so he really opens the door
for President Johnson to escalate the war.
[droning music plays]
Even though attacks didn't transpire
on August 4th, 1964,
LBJ used the pretense of these attacks
to go to Congress
to seek what we now know as a blank check
to go to war in South Vietnam.
That is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
[Johnson] In each house, the resolution
was promptly examined in committee
and reported for action.
In each house,
the resolution was passed on Friday last,
with a total of 502 votes in support
and two opposed.
[Bass] The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
is unusual
because it is not a declaration of war,
but it gave full authority
to the United States
to assist the South Vietnamese government
in defending its territories
from aggression from the North.
[Johnson] To any armed attack,
our forces will reply.
To any in Southeast Asia who ask
our help in defending their freedom,
we're going to give it.
I have ordered to Vietnam
the Air Mobile Division
and certain other forces which will raise
our fighting strength almost immediately.
[Daddis] Operation Rolling Thunder
was a strategic bombing campaign
against North Vietnam
[haunting music plays]
[Daddis] to use
massive amounts of air power
to break the enemy's willpower.
[inaudible]
[Hughes] In public,
the Johnson administration,
like the Kennedy administration,
was officially optimistic
about their ability to win the war.
Even though they entertained doubts
at the highest level.
It's going to be difficult for us
to, very long, prosecute effectively
a war that far away from home.
[ominous music plays]
[Alvarez] I arrived about a week
after I was shot down.
I was the first American pilot
captured in North Vietnam.
I was flown-- flown my last mission
on, uh, 5 August 1964.
I was, uh, put
into a seven-foot by seven-foot cell
with high walls
and, uh, a little ventilation window.
The concrete beds had wooden blocks
like-- like leg restraints.
Sitting there five, six days
without sleep, food, and water.
Some guys didn't survive.
[reporter] Hanoi has used
the prisoners of war
for its propaganda purposes
almost from the day
the first captive was shot down
on the first day
of US bombing of the North.
[Alvarez] Then there was the Hanoi March.
They took 50 of us.
They loaded us up in trucks.
[gently bold classical music plays]
And the next thing we know,
we were on the perimeter of a park.
[people speaking excitedly]
And they started marching us.
As far as you could see
is thousands of people.
They were shouting.
[reporter] North Vietnam paraded
this group of prisoners
through the streets of Hanoi.
A parade designed to depict them
as humbled and impotent air pilots.
[Alvarez] Somebody hit me,
and I staggered down.
I remember looking
at the guys ahead of me,
that they were getting
the hell beat out of 'em.
It just went on and on,
and I didn't know
if we were going to make it.
And I realized that these are
not good-- good times coming up.
[Rather] The longer we stayed,
the worse it got.
It was the first real shock Americans got
of what the reality of war is.
[bold music intensifies]
[Logevall] What's our role?
What does it mean to be the United States?
What does it mean to be an American?
To be the most powerful nation
on the globe?
Vietnam forced a reckoning
around those questions.
["Gimme Shelter"
by The Rolling Stones plays]
[Viet] In the United States,
we call it the Vietnam War.
But in Vietnam,
they call it the American War.
There are vastly different interpretations
of the same set of facts.
[Hayslip] To the West, it's just a movie.
Put it on the camp!
[Hayslip] A John Wayne movie.
[guns fire]
But to the village, it's real.
It's just so sad and suffering,
the people who have nothing to do
with the politics.
Everybody killing everybody.
Ooh, a storm is threatening ♪
My very life today ♪
If I don't get some shelter ♪
Ooh yeah, I'm gonna fade away ♪
War, children ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
War, children ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Ooh, see the fire is sweepin' ♪
Our very street today ♪
Burns like a red coal carpet ♪
Mad bull lost your way ♪
War, children ♪
Yeah ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
War, children ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Rape, murder ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Rape, murder, yeah ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Rape, murder ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Yeah ♪
Mmm, the floods is threatening ♪
My very life today ♪
Gimme, gimme shelter ♪
Or I'm gonna fade away ♪
[spacey music plays]
[man 1] I was born in Brooklyn, New York,
May 19th, 1946,
and when I was about four,
we moved to Florida.
My stepfather was a policeman,
and he was in an organization
called the John Birch Society,
which was a right-wing organization.
[spokesman 1] We're proud members
of the John Birch Society.
We're all engaged along with the society
in an epic undertaking.
We have got to defeat
the international Communist
world control conspiracy.
[Camil] His job for the John Birch Society
was making telephone tapes.
People would dial
the word "freedom" on the telephone,
and they would get a recorded message.
[spokesman 2]
The road to tyranny was enacted
in the form of the Civil Rights Bill
[Camil] Most of those recorded messages
were about how bad the Communists were.
[spokesman 2] The goal
of the international Communist conspiracy
is world domination.
[Camil] I didn't know
what a Communist was,
but I knew they were bad,
and that they were
the enemy of the United States,
and that it would be my job
to go in the military
when I graduate high school
and stop the commies
before they got over here.
Three days after I graduated,
I was at Parris Island.
Boot camp, that's where they basically
take the civilian out of you
and put the military in you.
They take all your personal belongings
away from you,
and they put you in a rack, a bed.
[bugle plays "Reveille"]
[Camil] And then the next morning,
the lights come on,
people are running up and down
the barrack halls,
making a lot of noise,
and they're pushing over the bunk beds
and knocking people out of their beds.
I woke up, and I thought
I was having a bad dream,
but it was real. [laughs]
They give you impossible tasks,
and then they punish you
for not doing those impossible tasks.
For instance, I was asked to jump.
So I jumped.
And the drill instructor said,
"Private Camil, who gave you
permission to come down?"
[recruits yelling]
[Camil] There's a lot
of dehumanization in the training.
[soldiers sing]
[Camil] You run,
and you sing songs with a cadence.
One of the songs was
I'm gonna go to Vietnam ♪
I'm gonna kill some Việt Cộng ♪
With a knife or with a gun ♪
[swallows and sniffles]
Either way, it will be fun ♪
- [soldiers chanting indistinctly]
- [pensive music playing]
- [music fades]
- [static crackling]
[helicopter blades chopping in distance]
[woman 1] I cannot think
of a more cataclysmic event
than the Vietnam War.
[droning anxious music plays]
[woman 1] For Vietnamese people,
the events that took place
were life-defining.
And in terms of the United States,
Vietnam shaped their understanding
of their place in the world.
[protestors drum and sing]
And do all this, and do it right
[man 2] The Vietnam War caused
a great loss of faith in presidents
and their top foreign policy advisors
because we saw things just not work out
the way they were presented,
and the way they were sold to us.
[inaudible]
[woman 1] Prior to the Vietnam War,
for the most part, Americans believed
their leaders in Washington, D.C.
After Vietnam,
you had the first decline
of what we call the imperial presidency.
This was really when
the American people understood
that, you know,
our leaders in Washington, D.C.
aren't always doing
what we think they're doing.
They don't always tell us
the decision-making
that was taking place behind closed doors.
And during the Vietnam War era,
the American people saw that leaders
for the first time lied to them.
From a political standpoint,
we could've flushed it
down the drain three years ago.
Blame Johnson and Kennedy.
[man 3] Many of the things
that plague our society today,
resentment, alienation, cynicism,
a tendency to mistrust one another,
to question one another's motives,
a breakdown in civic institutions,
they have complex causes, no question,
but I think many of them
have their roots in the Vietnam era.
[protestors shout indistinctly]
[man 4] America's changing.
Did Vietnam cause it?
It was one of the causes.
It let loose a torrent of emotion
in American society.
[protestors] No more war! No more war!
This was a shredding
of the innocence of this country,
the revelation of that.
[man 5] It was transformative,
not only that,
but it-- the anti-war movement woke up
a lot of other communities
like, "Hey, we need representation here."
"We need to be heard."
[Muhammad Ali] My conscience won't let me
go shoot my brother,
or some darker people,
or some poor, hungry people in the mud
for big, powerful America.
And shoot them for what?
They never called me "nigger."
[protestors chant]
I was angry, and I wanted to make sure
when I threw the rock through the window
of the Army recruitment office,
I was willing to go to jail for that.
[man 6] What was happening to us,
our image of ourselves
as the last best hope on earth
was shaken.
And if it wasn't shaken,
if it was still strong
to millions and millions of Americans,
by the end of the war in Vietnam,
it was shattered.
[man] Watch out!
[Weiner] Because viewed a certain way,
the United States in Vietnam
was not the last best hope on earth.
It was a violent,
militaristic, imperial power.
[man 7] We all live
under the shadow of Vietnam.
We all live
with the consequences of Vietnam.
The memory of that war is something
that a lot of people are spending
a lot of time trying to erase.
But we can't forget Vietnam.
It's with us today.
- [soldier shouts]
- [gun fires]
[droning anxious music continues]
[ethereal music plays]
[man 8] When I was a very young boy,
perhaps ten,
plucking hairs from my mother's head
She must have been in her fifties
or late forties at that point
in San Jose, California.
And out of nowhere,
she tells me that in Vietnam,
she saw a dead child
on a doorstep in her neighborhood.
And that child had died
because of the famine.
So that was one of the ways
by which I started to understand
that the history of the country
where I had come from was complicated
terrible
unspoken of in so many ways.
Certainly among Americans,
but also to a certain extent
among the Vietnamese too.
There's history in the sense of facts.
But there's also history
as stories, as narratives.
With the war in Vietnam,
the histories we tell about that
are really, really crucial.
For me, as someone
who's Vietnamese and American,
I'm deeply aware
that in both of these countries,
there are deeply conflicting histories.
That's part of what led
to the war in Vietnam.
In the United States, early on,
the American mindset
was certainly this Cold War mindset.
There was communism,
and there was capitalism,
and there was totalitarianism,
and there was democracy.
Either or, us or them,
everybody had to choose.
That was the American perspective.
Only a few generations
have been granted the role
of defending freedom
in its hour of maximum danger.
I do not shrink from this responsibility.
I welcome it.
[Logevall] John F. Kennedy,
the 35th President of the United States,
is an extraordinary figure
in American political history.
He was a Cold War president.
To some degree,
I would say he was a cold warrior.
Kennedy obviously inspired Americans,
through his idealism,
through his rhetoric,
to support, fundamentally,
his vision for the nation's future.
[announcer] From the Office
of the White House in Washington, D.C.,
NBC Radio now presents an address
by the President of the United States,
John F. Kennedy.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the President of the United States.
We preach freedom around the world,
and we mean it,
and we cherish our freedom here at home.
[Logevall] But he's a very key figure
on the Vietnam story.
It's fair to say, uh,
it's not his best chapter.
[ominous music plays]
[man 9] So when Kennedy comes in,
he believes that he inherits
a very, very dangerous
geopolitical situation.
You have these two great power centers
that are emerging in the Communist world,
the Soviet Union,
as well as the People's Republic of China.
[newscaster] What we oppose,
fundamentally,
is the aggressive nature
of the Communist state,
its unceasing effort
to expand wherever it can,
to grow bigger, to take over, to supplant.
[Logevall] It's hard today to recapture
the degree to which ordinary Americans,
as well as their leaders,
were concerned about the threat
that Communism represented
to the American way of life.
[Selverstone] In 1961, the Communists
decide to build a wall in Berlin.
- [people screaming]
- [dark music playing]
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
[Selverstone] At the same time,
Cuban leader Fidel Castro
and his Communist brethren
had taken over Cuba.
It looks like the Soviets,
the Communists, have a beachhead
in the Western Hemisphere.
And Kennedy inherits a plan
to take down Castro.
[weapons firing]
[Selverstone] The Bay of Pigs affair
is a disaster for the United States.
It ends in catastrophe.
There are hundreds of deaths.
It's a real black eye for Kennedy.
[somber music plays]
[machine clicks]
This is essentially a political war,
because it's a war for men's minds.
And, uh, if we lose the minds
of these people,
we lose the minds of the officer corps
and of the civil servants,
we will have lost the war.
[Selverstone] The reason
that Kennedy starts recording?
It's unclear.
[Hughes] He was the first president
to tape extensively.
He recorded about 260 hours
of White House conversations.
He got the Secret Service
to install it on the QT.
The tape recorder was hidden
in the White House basement.
It is a time machine.
[chuckles] It's like if you could
just dial up the past
and be a kind of a fly on the wall
as people are making
incredibly important decisions.
There are increasing reports, uh,
in Saigon and in Huế, as well,
that students are talking
of moving over to the Việt Cộng side.
[Selverstone] Kennedy can see
that the world is changing.
Who is JFK? Is he really going to be
a leader to contend with or not?
Kennedy recognizes the danger of that.
So that's one of the reasons why,
by the end of the year,
he recognizes that Vietnam
may be the place he needs to take a stand.
[mournful orchestral music plays]
[crowd cheers and applauds]
[boots stomp]
[Weiner] I think most Americans,
certainly most white
middle-class Americans,
had an idealistic view of their country.
The United States stood
for good in the world
against the evil empire
of the Soviet Union.
Nobody knew anything about Vietnam.
Nobody knew where it was.
[Viet] By then, North Vietnam
had become completely identified
as a Communist state
with a Communist revolution,
supported by China and the Soviet Union.
South Vietnam was going to be
a capitalist democracy
modeled on something
like the United States
and what it had to offer.
[Selverstone] The Democratic Republic
of Vietnam was the Communists
led by Hồ Chí Minh.
[Logevall] He believed sincerely
in the Communist cause,
but it's always his country.
The nationalist fervor is
what really drives Hồ Chí Minh.
A non-Communist government
is in power in Saigon,
led by Ngô Đình Diệm.
A dedicated nationalist,
very courageous figure personally,
a Catholic,
who feels strongly that he knows
what's best for South Vietnam,
but he is a dedicated anti-Communist.
And he becomes a very important ally
of the United States.
[pensive music playing]
[Viet] There was a war being carried out
mostly by the North Vietnamese.
[reporter 1] These are films
of South Vietnam
after the destruction of a village
by the North Vietnamese.
To those in command
of North Vietnam and the Việt Cộng,
the pursuit was a united Vietnam
under Hanoi with a Communist government.
To those in South Vietnam,
the pursuit was to be left alone.
But they were not left alone.
[reporter 2] By 1960, every area of life
in the South has become a combat zone.
[dramatic music plays on news broadcast]
[automatic weapons firing]
[Veith] The state of Vietnam,
when Kennedy comes into office,
is that the insurrection in South Vietnam
had grown very rapidly.
[explosion]
[weapons firing]
By January of '61,
Kennedy was facing a country
that had already lost
much of the control of the countryside.
[automatic weapons firing]
[Veith] And the Communists
were on the move.
There was concern that if Vietnam fell,
then the others would fall also,
you know, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, etc.
I think that was quite generally believed.
[intriguing music plays]
[Lien-Hang] This is the domino theory.
If you had one country in Asia
fall to Communism,
that it would set off falling dominoes
that would lead
all the way to San Francisco.
[reporter] Mr. President, have you
ever had any reason to doubt
this so-called domino theory,
that if South Vietnam falls, the rest
of Southeast Asia will go along behind it?
No, I-I believe it. I believe it.
I think that, uh, the struggle
is close enough.
China is so large, looms so high
on the-- just beyond the frontiers.
If South Vietnam went,
it would not only give them
an improved geographic position
for a guerrilla assault on Malaya,
but would also give the impression
that the wave of the future
in Southeast Asia
was China and the Communists.
[tense percussive music plays]
[Logevall] Kennedy's top
foreign policy advisors,
Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy,
that trio, along, I think,
with senior military brass,
are convinced that South Vietnam's future
may depend on increased US involvement.
Top aides who are basically saying,
"Mr. President, we think you need to put
American troops into South Vietnam."
They even come up with various schemes
that can be used to introduce
American forces sort of under the radar.
In the past year, we've doubled
the rate of building Polaris submarines.
[Logevall] The Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara
must be central to this story.
[brooding music plays]
[man 10] Robert McNamara grew up
in California,
went to Berkeley,
and then got an MBA at Harvard.
During World War II,
he worked in the units
that did bomb spotting.
After he came out of the Army,
he went to work at Ford.
I'm Bob McNamara,
Group Vice President in charge of the car
and truck divisions of the company.
[Logevall] He was
a very imposing figure in Washington
in terms of his persona
and the degree
to which he intimidated people
with his forceful personality
and his intelligence.
And he's an architect of the Vietnam War,
of the Americanization of the Vietnam War.
[Selverstone] The United States is not
at war with the Communists,
but American military advisors
are going over to work
with the South Vietnamese military.
[intriguing music plays]
[Selverstone] Kennedy's advisors tell him
that Vietnam is actually in grave danger.
The Communists have made inroads
all throughout South Vietnam.
It doesn't look like Diệm's forces
are able to really withstand the tide.
While I can report, Mr. President,
definite progress and increasing strength
in the government forces,
the progress is slow.
And it's very, very slow,
slower than we would like to see.
[speaks Vietnamese]
[Selverstone] When Kennedy comes
into office,
there are less than 700
US military advisors in South Vietnam.
Keep your eye on the man ahead of you.
Keep him in that gun sight at all times.
[Selverstone] But now Kennedy decides
to put in more military advisors
to help the South Vietnamese learn
how to fight the war better
against the Communists.
[guns firing]
[Barry] I grew up in central New York
in the Finger Lakes area
near Ithaca, New York.
I only had a tiny idea
that something was going on in Vietnam.
[bells ringing]
[Barry] I wanted to go to West Point.
So I decided to just walk downtown,
go to an Army recruiter,
and join the Army.
[officers shout indistinctly]
[Barry] That was, uh,
in the spring of 1962,
and I was in Vietnam
by the end of the year.
[indistinct]
[Barry] I got the sense that the military
had no idea what they were doing.
There had been
an assistant secretary of defense
who said, "We need a cover story
for what we're doing in South Vietnam."
They were sending in advisors.
What that really meant was they would take
a group of South Vietnamese troops,
put them on a helicopter
or otherwise transport them to some place,
and push them into a firefight.
Sometimes they turned around
and shot at the American helicopters.
So that wasn't working out so well,
turning somebody else into the army
that we would direct.
[tense sparse music plays]
[Barry] And that's why
they kept bringing in
more and more of our own advisors.
[man 11] But this is not going to be
like World War II.
This is an insurgency fight.
This is a war without front lines,
where war is fought in and among
the population, not separate from it.
This is the only way that you can be sure
that you always have
the equipment which you need
in order to go out and fight the Việt Cộng
and win the battle against the Việt Cộng.
[Lien-Hang] "Việt Cộng" is a contraction
between "Vietnam Cộng Sản,"
or Vietnamese Communism.
"Việt Cộng," it would be used
in a derogatory way
to describe any Communist enemy
in South Vietnam.
So it would be called "VC" for short.
They would become known officially
as the National Liberation Front.
[Daddis] And what you see
is an escalation of US advisors,
an escalation of military aid,
economic aid.
[Selverstone] By the end of 1961,
there are roughly 3,000
American military advisors
embedded with the South Vietnamese.
By the end of 1962,
I've seen figures upwards of 11,000.
And by 1963,
there are well over 16,000
US military advisors
in South Vietnam.
This is a dramatic increase.
[pastor] Almighty God,
we stand before thee
as thy children should, acknowledging
[man 12] We didn't know much
about this operation that was developing.
Kennedy did not allow
much information to emerge
of the kind of support
that he was sending to Vietnam.
[Bass] The Vietnam War is a turning point
in United States history.
There's a stark difference
between the before and the after
when it comes to the Vietnam War.
And one of those turning points is
this thing called the credibility gap.
That's a gap between
what the government is telling you
and what is actually happening
on the ground.
[reporter] And you feel
that you have told the American people
as much as can be told
because of the sensitivity
of the-- of the subject? Is that?
[Kennedy] Well, I-- I think
I've just indicated what our role is.
We have increased our assistance
to the government, its logistics.
We have not sent combat troops there,
though the training missions
that we have there,
uh, have been instructed,
if they are fired upon, to, uh
They, uh, would, of course, fire back.
[Arnett] He didn't say
that they were reinforcing
the South Vietnamese military
with heavy weapons and aircraft.
[speaks Vietnamese]
[tense music continues playing]
[Arnett] He didn't say
that American so-called "advisors"
would fly the planes
going out on bombing missions.
[Selverstone] The advisors are not
supposed to be fighting the war.
They're only supposed to be assisting,
but they're actually fighting as well.
And dying too.
[priest] continue to bless this world
with men such as these.
[Arnett] We also learned in that period
that the Kennedy administration had sent
guidelines out to the American mission
not to cooperate with the Western press.
The important question
was what was really happening
on the ground in South Vietnam.
[motorcycle engine revs]
[people chatter]
[Arnett] I arrived in Saigon in June 1962
as a correspondent
for the Associated Press.
The roadblocks we encountered
were enormous.
The South Vietnamese government
enforced strict censorship.
So any story we sent out,
we had to send through the post office.
[South Vietnamese national anthem plays]
[Arnett] They did not allow
any critical references
or anything that would suggest
the inadequacies of the government.
And the US diplomatic
and military missions
were totally uncooperative
with the media in Saigon.
One of the solutions we found
to get information
of what was really going on
was we would simply
drive out in the mornings
along the main highways out of Saigon,
looking for any action,
say, helicopter traffic.
We would follow the helicopters
along the main roads.
And when we saw dead bodies
on the road or wounded people,
we knew we'd found
the battle and the action.
[guns fire, bombs explode]
[Bass] To be a great journalist,
you gotta get close to the action.
You got to be there.
And Arnett is famous
for the stories that he covered
where he was just on top of the action.
[droning, disturbing music plays]
[Arnett] It was dangerous,
but getting a story was the main thing.
And that's how we got
the story about Ấp Bắc.
We didn't know anything
about this operation.
The helicopter contacts
at the Tân Sơn Nhứt airport called us
and said they're really worried
because they've lost
several of their helicopters
in this place, Ấp Bắc.
And we're given a helicopter ride
around the battlefield.
And we went pretty close.
You could see bodies on the ground.
And at that point, there'd been
five American helicopters shot down,
three American dead.
There were eight or nine injured,
50, 60 South Vietnamese casualties.
It was just a complete mess.
The Battle of Ấp Bắc
is extremely important.
[guns fire]
[Bass] US helicopter pilots
and US soldiers are directly involved
and noticeably directly involved
for the first time in the war.
It is evident
that they're flying the helicopters.
So the pretense
that the United States is only there
in the capacity of advising Vietnam
can no longer be maintained
at the Battle of Ấp Bắc.
[Arnett] General Paul D. Harkins arrived.
He was the chief
of the American military mission.
And we walked over to him.
We said, "General, how does it look?"
And he said, "Boys
it was a great victory."
"We've got the VC on the run,
and we're moving in
on them right now. Bye."
That was the senseless optimism
that prevailed
amongst the senior-most Americans
in Saigon.
[reporter] Most of the Red guerrilla band
was wiped out.
American observers counted
at least 80 bodies.
They added that it was the best action
Vietnam's 7th Division has yet executed.
US training seems to be paying off.
[Selverstone] The military painted
the Ấp Bắc engagement as a victory.
But it's a real black eye
for the Americans,
as reported in the American media,
back home, to the country
as well as to Kennedy.
When Kennedy sees a picture
of an American helicopter on the ground,
you know, "What's going on here?
I-- I thought we were doing well."
[trumpets play military call]
[Selverstone] It's impossible
to divorce American politics
from American policy abroad.
Politics is always going to be
part of the mix
because that's just baked into the system.
[Hughes] John F. Kennedy is hoping
that he can keep this all
on the back burner
through the '64 election.
But that hope is dashed
when the Buddhist crisis erupts.
[solemn music plays]
[Arnett] Buddhists were a big part
of Vietnam's 15 million or so population.
[ominous music plays]
[Viet] The United States supported
South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm.
He was a Vietnamese Catholic.
And of course he received
a lot of support,
I think, from Vietnamese Catholics.
Vietnamese Catholics are a minority
throughout Vietnam.
Their Catholicism owes
to the French and Portuguese presence
throughout the past few centuries
of Vietnamese history.
South Vietnam, under Ngô Đình Diệm,
did not have a policy against Buddhism.
He supported the building,
the construction of many Buddhist temples.
But by the 1960s,
Diệm's older brother, Ngô Đình Thục,
who was a Catholic archbishop,
was clearly promoting Catholicism
in South Vietnam.
That gave people the impression
that Diệm was discriminating
against Buddhism and Buddhists.
As Mr. Diệm consolidated his power,
he became more autocratic.
[reporter] Among Diệm's people,
there is no genuine political opposition.
It is simply not permitted.
[Nhã] He has his brother, Mr. Nhu,
who ran the secret police.
[Vu] Ngô Đình Nhu is younger brother
of Ngô Đình Diệm.
Madame Nhu, his wife,
was much younger than he was.
She was well-educated under the French.
She became the first lady
because Diệm was not married.
[reporter] Madame Nhu
and her husband, Diệm's brother,
live in the presidential palace.
[Mike Wallace] What do you think
that the United States can do most now
to help Vietnam?
I think that the most urgent
is to decide not to be intoxicated anymore
by the propaganda, uh, plot
directed by the Communists.
[marching band plays]
[Lien-Hang] One of the things you see
in Diệm's administration
is a concerted campaign
to kill off all of the VC in the region.
[somber music plays]
[Lien-Hang] Việt Cộng
and anyone who disagrees with him is a VC.
[inaudible]
[Lien-Hang] The Buddhist political
opposition would fall under this category
as enemy of the state.
[Vu] There were factions
in the Buddhist church.
There was the more militant faction
who wanted Buddhism to play
a bigger political role
in the life of the nation.
And they did not like the idea of having
a Catholic president for the country.
[woman] Ngô Đình Nhu, who is a policeman,
only thing in his mind
is torture and kill.
When the South Vietnamese
came in our village,
they put a big Ngô Đình Diệm photo
and a cross
right inside our temple, or our altar.
They made us bow to Ngô Đình Diệm,
and they talking about him
as just like a god.
Like he is somebody
that's so important to us.
We don't care.
We just want to be peaceful.
We want to worship our ancestors,
hang up the Buddhist flag.
But the next thing we know that,
everybody's killed.
[foreboding music plays]
[Hayslip] They killed the leaders
in the village.
They killed the monks.
They buried them alive.
So they killed
whoever they think that's Việt Cộng.
[sniffles]
And so, more them doing that,
the more our family
and 90% of the villagers,
yeah, we join the Việt Cộng,
we stand up and we fight.
And so daytime,
we praise the Ngô Đình Diệm.
The nighttime, we praise Hồ Chí Minh.
[Lien-Hang] By 1963, you had all-out war
between the Catholic leadership
and their Buddhist majority.
[tense classical music plays]
[Nho] In South Vietnam,
I demonstrated against the government.
Not to overthrow the-- the system
of government that we have,
but to establish
a constitutional order for the country.
[Arnett] In Huế, the decision was made
by the security forces
to push the protesters back.
[sirens wail]
[Arnett] And in that melee,
several grenades were thrown.
Eight Buddhists were killed
and a lot injured.
[people scream]
[Nho] That was a catastrophic mistake.
The anger was severe, strong, boiling.
Boiling.
[Arnett] Protests began on the streets
of Saigon within a week or two.
[people shouting]
There were thousands of people
massed along the streets of this parade.
And as they came
along Phan Đình Phùng Street,
a large, old automobile
that had been part of the parade stopped.
This elderly man was led
out of the vehicle by a younger monk,
taken to the center of the street
where he sat cross-legged
on the street.
And the assistant poured
a liquid over him.
And, uh, this monk lit a match
and [claps hands]
was in flames.
[melancholic ethereal music plays]
[monks chanting]
[Hayslip] One Buddhist monk died
to figure out how could he help
to save the people.
Only way he can do is to give himself up.
[Arnett] Madame Nhu was outspoken
on everything.
When the Buddhist crisis was erupting
and the immolations by fire began,
she called them "monk barbecues."
[Nhu] What have the Buddhist leaders
done comparatively?
The only thing they have done,
they have, uh, barbecued
one of their monks,
uh, whom they have intoxicated,
whom they have abused the confidence.
And even that barbecuing was done, uh,
not even with self-sufficient means.
Because they-- they used,
uh, imported, uh, gasoline.
[brooding synthesizer music plays]
You love your country
and you say those things?
It doesn't heal.
It break up the faith of the people.
[Veith] There is a difference
between how President Diệm
and his brother Nhu looked
at the Buddhist protests.
Diệm himself was attempting
to actually talk to the Buddhists
and sort of reach a compromise.
[sparse tense music plays]
[Veith] It was Nhu that sent
the police and the military
into the pagoda raids in late August.
[Lien-Hang] They start
raiding the pagodas.
They start arresting more people.
Waging war on their own people.
[Arnett] This clearly alarmed Washington,
who was supporting
the regime of President Ngô Đình Diệm.
The heart of the matter is
that they've established a police state,
and that they're interfering
with the liberties of the people,
and that you have resentments
born of that.
- [Kennedy] Right, yeah.
- Right?
[Lien-Hang] The United States is watching
in horror as this is playing out
in the summer of 1963,
that they are telling Diệm,
"You need to stop raiding these pagodas."
[newscaster] In Saigon,
President Ngô Đình Diệm's regime
has accused the United States government
of being off base
in denouncing the military crackdown
on his Buddhist opponents.
[suspenseful pulsing music plays]
[man in Vietnamese] President Diệm,
from my standpoint,
was the person who rebuilt the country.
But at his side,
Ngô Đinh Nhu brought about events
which made Diệm look bad.
Dissent began to brew
from within the military ranks.
[Kennedy in English] You have to assume
that Diệm has felt that there's going
to be a coup against him
for probably the last couple of months.
[host] The Guiding Light will not
be seen today
in order to bring you
the following CBS News special report.
Good day from New York.
South Vietnam is
in a state of revolt today,
and there are unconfirmed reports
that President Ngô Đình Diệm's government
has been overthrown.
[melancholic music plays]
[guns firing]
[soldiers shouting]
[Lien-Hang] High-ranking military generals
under Dương Văn Minh carry out the coup.
Diệm and Nhu were able to escape
the presidential palace
by way of secret doorways into tunnels.
Eventually, they would regroup
in a Catholic church.
They were promised safe passage
back to the palace
and to eventually leave the country.
[in Vietnamese] They sent a convoy
to Cha Tam Church to pick up Mr. President
and Mr. Advisor to bring them back.
[music intensifies]
Captain Nhung was Lieutenant General
Dương Văn Minh's closest bodyguard.
Later, it was learned
that while sitting in the armored vehicle,
he used a dagger blade
to stab Ngô Đình Nhu once,
causing him to collapse on his seat.
He was about to stab once more,
but he saw Ngô Đình Diệm on the side
slightly leaning toward him,
so he stabbed him once instead.
He stabbed them one more time each,
then shot them with his pistol.
[pistol fires faintly]
That is what's called a "mercy shot."
[gun fires twice]
[Hughes, in English]
During the entire coup period,
Madame Nhu was in the United States.
That probably saved Madame Nhu's life.
[Nhu] Treason does not pay.
And nobody can rule Vietnam,
can rule Vietnam
with just money and puppets.
And all those whom some of the Americans
intend to settle and to tutor,
for how long will they hold power
if they ever hold power?
[newscaster] The new leaders,
General Dương Văn Minh
and Premier Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ,
want immediate support from the people
and recognition from the West.
[Lien-Hang] There were a series
of declassifications,
and we now know
that the Kennedy administration,
in particular President Kennedy,
had started courting with this idea
of removing Diệm
as early as August of '63.
So the events that transpired
in the beginning of November, they knew.
[indistinct]
[Logevall] There's no doubt
John F. Kennedy was
the decision-maker on Vietnam
in those fateful weeks in 1963
when the decision was made
to essentially give the green light
to the coup-plotters in Saigon.
[gentle sullen music plays]
[Logevall] One interesting question
is whether John F. Kennedy understood
that Diệm and Nhu would likely be killed.
[Hughes] The South Vietnamese
never received
any sort of caution from the US government
that Diệm or Nhu or anybody else
in the Ngô family was to be protected,
held harmless,
allowed safely to go into exile.
One of the things that I think
is quite clear as a historian
is that the coup-plotters knew
that if Diệm lives,
that there would be constant coups,
and the Americans knew that.
The Kennedy administration
has blood on their hands.
[Osnos] Some of the most poignant things
you can hear from Kennedy
is what he dictated
on the Monday morning after the coup.
[Kennedy] I, uh, feel that we must bear
a good deal of responsibility for it,
beginning with our cable of early August
in which we suggested the coup.
[crowd cheers]
[Kennedy] I was, uh, shocked
by the death of Diệm and Nhu.
I met Diệm with Justice Douglas
many years ago.
He was a an extraordinary character.
While he became increasingly difficult
in the last months,
nevertheless, over a ten-year period,
he held his country together,
maintained its independence
under very adverse conditions.
He
The way he was killed
made it particularly abhorrent.
Ngô Đình Diệm was a controversial figure
for many different kinds of reasons,
but I think that
for some of the South Vietnamese,
he represented the possibility
of nationalist independence,
a country led by a Vietnamese president.
The politics of this
was very, very complicated obviously,
because South Vietnam was
a politically diverse place.
There were people
of different religious backgrounds
and so on.
But he was controversial
to different populations,
again, for different reasons.
Americans were opposed to him
because they thought he stood in the way
of their particular policies.
[church bells ring]
[Viet] At least for some
Vietnamese Catholics,
he was a revered political leader,
nationalist figure,
whose assassination was a tragic event.
[somber droning music plays]
[woman] When President Ngô Đình Diệm
got assassinated, my father came home.
He said that, "It not gonna be
a good time anymore."
"It can be a lot of chaos."
"Nobody can deal with Hồ Chí Minh,
can deal with the Communists,
like President Ngô Đình Diệm."
[Hughes] What happened after the coup
was a series of coups,
kind of a revolving-door government
in Saigon,
where various generals decided
that they would be the best people
to run the war against the Việt Cộng.
So it was a period
of instability in Saigon.
[Lien-Hang] Several weeks after
Ngô Đình Diệm and Ngô Đình Nhu
are assassinated,
the United States goes through
one of the most tragic days
in presidential history.
[melancholic music plays]
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
You'll excuse the fact
that I'm out of breath, but
about 10 or 15 minutes ago,
a tragic thing, from all indications
at this point, has happened
in the city of Dallas.
There has been an attempt,
as perhaps you know now,
on the life of President Kennedy.
He was wounded in an automobile
driving from Dallas Airport
into downtown Dallas,
along with Governor Connally of Texas.
They've been taken
to Parkland Hospital there,
where their condition is as yet unknown.
[melancholic music plays]
- [gun fires]
- [people scream]
[reporter] It appears as though something
has happened in the motorcade route.
Something, I repeat, has happened
in the motorcade route.
We just have a report
from our correspondent,
Dan Rather in Dallas,
that he has confirmed
that President Kennedy is dead.
Walter, we have some additional film
taken at and near Parkland Hospital,
where President John Kennedy died.
Uh, this film is in rough cut form.
These are some of the witnesses
in the area of the shooting.
There was a great deal
of disbelief at first
that the President had even been shot.
[Rather] To be there that day
was pretty much what was reflected
around the country.
The first reports were he was shot.
Then it was confirmed
he was-- he was dead.
[man] Late afternoon editions
[Rather] The Kennedy assassination
was a shock to the American psyche.
We believed that those kinds of things
didn't happen in our country anymore.
[reporter] Women here in shock.
Some have fainted.
Grown men, Secret Service men,
standing by the emergency room,
tears streaming down their face.
There's only one word
to describe the picture here
and that's "grief," and much of it.
[sad arrangement
of "The Star-Spangled Banner" plays]
[Logevall] If you look
at Kennedy's even opponents,
many of them in the United States,
even for them,
this was a-- a monumental blow.
Today, millions of people
throughout the world
are trying to find
words adequate to express
their grief and their sympathy
to his family.
[priest] the souls
of all the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
In the name of the Father,
and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.
[Logevall] If we engage
in so-called "what if" speculation,
though we will never know for sure,
I think that the best argument
is that a surviving Kennedy
would have avoided
large-scale escalation in Vietnam.
I think his doubts went deeper
in terms of what
American military power could do.
And maybe most important,
Kennedy would have reached
the critical decisions on Vietnam
in his second and final term.
And at that point,
he could no longer run for re-election.
Anyone can speculate all they want
about what he might have, should have done
had he been re-elected.
But all we have is the record.
And the record is that President Kennedy
got us involved in Vietnam
and escalated the war,
and was escalating the war
when he was assassinated.
And it's very hard for me to believe
that he wouldn't have carried on the war.
[reporter] As always,
democracy finds its strength
in the continuity of the presidency.
Lyndon B. Johnson becomes
the 36th President of the United States,
just 99 minutes
after his predecessor's life
had ebbed away.
[Osnos] Lyndon Johnson became president.
But in that first year,
he kept referring to himself
as "the accidental president."
[spacey anxious music plays]
[Osnos] When it came to domestic politics
and domestic policy,
he was truly in command.
But on Vietnam, he was insecure.
He didn't really understand this issue.
[Hughes] President Johnson started
recording his phone calls
using a Dictabelt system
of his own immediately.
And so we have a great record
of Lyndon Johnson's phone calls.
[button clicks]
I would like to have, for this period
when everybody is asking me,
something in my own words.
I can say, "Well, here are--
here are the alternatives,
and here's our theory,
and here's what we're basing it on."
LBJ basically, by his own admission,
didn't know what he was doing.
And he was very poorly advised
by his advisors,
especially McNamara.
I do think, Mr. President,
that it would be wise for you
to say as little as possible.
The frank answer is,
we don't know what's going on out there.
The signs I see coming through the cables
are-- are disturbing signs.
[Rather] President Johnson always had
something of a vulnerability
about his education.
When he came to the presidency,
he was surrounded
by President Kennedy's
hand-picked advisors.
And President Johnson,
I know having talked to him,
thought to himself,
"Geez, I just graduated
from this small teacher's college
in South Texas,
and I have around me
the best brains in the country
that President Kennedy brought on."
And the Kennedy advisors, make no mistake,
were almost unanimous in saying,
"You've got to stay in Vietnam."
[anxious music intensifies]
[Logevall] There's a recognition
on the part of senior US officials
in the summer of 1964
that South Vietnam is in deep trouble.
The insurgency is continuing
to gain strength.
There is infighting
among South Vietnamese officials.
And something needs to happen.
Arguably, the United States enters
the month of August
looking for a pretext
to flex American muscle.
In a limited fashion.
[Weiner] The American war in Vietnam began
in the summer of 1964
with political lies
based on false intelligence.
[tense music plays]
[man 13] USS Maddox,
one of the United States Navy destroyers,
was conducting
signals intelligence patrols
in the Gulf of Tonkin
along the North Vietnamese coast.
They were up deep into enemy territory
above the 17th parallel.
Information gathering,
intelligence gathering
through, uh, electronic eavesdropping.
Unbeknownst to the Maddox,
the South Vietnamese were conducting
commando raids closer to the coast,
firing weapons and mortars
against North Vietnamese installations.
On the afternoon of August 2nd, 1964,
three North Vietnamese torpedo vessels
come out and engage the USS Maddox.
[Weiner] Three North Vietnamese
patrol boats approached the Maddox,
which both engaged them with fire
and called for air support
from a nearby naval carrier.
[naval artillery fires]
[Weiner] The Maddox sustained damage
in the form of one bullet hole.
[Paterson] All three
of the North Vietnamese torpedo vessels
are struck.
One is completely destroyed.
The other vessels managed to drift back
to their bases with some heavy damage.
They fired at us.
We responded immediately.
And we took out one of their boats,
put the other two running.
We kept We're putting our boats
right there. We're not running--
[McNamara] Our instructions
are to destroy--
[Johnson] That's right.
Now I want to leave an impression
on the people we talk to over here
that we're gonna be firm as hell.
We oughtn't do anything
that the national interest
doesn't require,
but we sure ought
to always leave the impression
that if you shoot at us,
you're going to get hit.
[Paterson] In order to demonstrate
US resolve,
the military command center,
and as well as the commander-in-chief,
order the Maddox to return the next day,
now accompanied by USS Turner Joy,
which is another US military destroyer.
[dark pulsing music plays]
Weather goes south on them very fast.
[lightning crashes]
[Paterson] Wave heights are now
at about six feet.
Low visibility.
Rain squalls moving through the area.
The tensions were pretty high.
When the US Navy destroyers start seeing
radar signals approaching the vessels
there's some confusion
because the blips are moving really fast,
and they're coming
from different directions
and then sometimes disappearing.
But also, the sonar operators
are starting to hear
propeller noises and torpedo noises
in the water.
And so the crew
and the officers on board the two ships
were getting pretty nervous
that they were under attack.
Mr. President,
we, uh, just got a, uh, report
from the commander
of that task force out there
that they have sighted
two unidentified vessels
and three unidentified prop aircraft
in the vicinity of the destroyers.
[Johnson] Uh, what else
do we have out there?
[McNamara] We have ample forces to respond
not only to these attacks
on the destroyers
but also to retaliate,
should you wish to do so,
against targets on the land.
The message traffic back and forth was,
"Give me proof
that there was a torpedo there."
"Give me some flotsam, a cushion,
anything that would say
that there was a torpedo boat."
We did not see one torpedo boat.
[Paterson] At this point,
there was some uncertainty
about whether or not
an attack had actually occurred.
This is now late at night on August 4th.
And the signals intelligence
on board the ships pick up messages
from the North Vietnamese Navy
that they had struck
some of the enemy vessels
that were in the area.
And it validates everything
that they had suspected at this point.
I think I might get, uh, Dean Rusk
and Mac Bundy, have 'em come over here,
and we'll go over
these retaliatory actions.
[Alvarez] I was attached
to a squadron of A-4 Skyhawks.
The next thing I know,
I was going on a mission.
[ominous music plays]
[Alvarez] Our targets were
along the coast of Vietnam,
the naval bases on the northern part,
like around Hải Phòng
and north towards China.
[jet engines roar]
[Alvarez] I went in and hit my target.
And as I was exiting, I got hit.
And I pulled the ejection curtain.
I felt the chute pop open.
And I was in the water.
And as I tried to swim away,
looked around,
and here was a fishing boat.
And it had about three rifles
pointing at me.
They hauled me aboard. They stripped me.
They wrapped me up
with a rope like a-- a knot.
That was the beginning
of a a long captivity.
[reporter] The Pentagon said
two pilots were lost.
One was reported
to be a prisoner of the Reds.
[Paterson] All this message traffic
and all these accounts were top secret
and kept classified
for the better part of about 40 years.
But as it turns out,
the attack on August 4th never happened.
Their radars reflecting off the sea waves
and the low cloud level
the sonar operators were picking up
their own rudder noises
and own propeller noises.
As President Johnson later said,
"The damn sailors were shootin'
at flying fish."
[Paterson]
As for the North Vietnamese message,
they were transmitting
a follow-up message
to the August 2nd attack
in which they had
the initial confrontation
just with USS Maddox.
So it was not about the events
that supposedly occurred
on the night of August 4th.
I think Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara had doubts
about the attack on August 4th.
But instead of being honest
and truthful about what happened,
McNamara misrepresents it to Congress
as well as misrepresents it
to members of the press.
They were reporting
they were avoiding torpedoes
and that they had sunk
one of the attacking patrol craft.
And so he really opens the door
for President Johnson to escalate the war.
[droning music plays]
Even though attacks didn't transpire
on August 4th, 1964,
LBJ used the pretense of these attacks
to go to Congress
to seek what we now know as a blank check
to go to war in South Vietnam.
That is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
[Johnson] In each house, the resolution
was promptly examined in committee
and reported for action.
In each house,
the resolution was passed on Friday last,
with a total of 502 votes in support
and two opposed.
[Bass] The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
is unusual
because it is not a declaration of war,
but it gave full authority
to the United States
to assist the South Vietnamese government
in defending its territories
from aggression from the North.
[Johnson] To any armed attack,
our forces will reply.
To any in Southeast Asia who ask
our help in defending their freedom,
we're going to give it.
I have ordered to Vietnam
the Air Mobile Division
and certain other forces which will raise
our fighting strength almost immediately.
[Daddis] Operation Rolling Thunder
was a strategic bombing campaign
against North Vietnam
[haunting music plays]
[Daddis] to use
massive amounts of air power
to break the enemy's willpower.
[inaudible]
[Hughes] In public,
the Johnson administration,
like the Kennedy administration,
was officially optimistic
about their ability to win the war.
Even though they entertained doubts
at the highest level.
It's going to be difficult for us
to, very long, prosecute effectively
a war that far away from home.
[ominous music plays]
[Alvarez] I arrived about a week
after I was shot down.
I was the first American pilot
captured in North Vietnam.
I was flown-- flown my last mission
on, uh, 5 August 1964.
I was, uh, put
into a seven-foot by seven-foot cell
with high walls
and, uh, a little ventilation window.
The concrete beds had wooden blocks
like-- like leg restraints.
Sitting there five, six days
without sleep, food, and water.
Some guys didn't survive.
[reporter] Hanoi has used
the prisoners of war
for its propaganda purposes
almost from the day
the first captive was shot down
on the first day
of US bombing of the North.
[Alvarez] Then there was the Hanoi March.
They took 50 of us.
They loaded us up in trucks.
[gently bold classical music plays]
And the next thing we know,
we were on the perimeter of a park.
[people speaking excitedly]
And they started marching us.
As far as you could see
is thousands of people.
They were shouting.
[reporter] North Vietnam paraded
this group of prisoners
through the streets of Hanoi.
A parade designed to depict them
as humbled and impotent air pilots.
[Alvarez] Somebody hit me,
and I staggered down.
I remember looking
at the guys ahead of me,
that they were getting
the hell beat out of 'em.
It just went on and on,
and I didn't know
if we were going to make it.
And I realized that these are
not good-- good times coming up.
[Rather] The longer we stayed,
the worse it got.
It was the first real shock Americans got
of what the reality of war is.
[bold music intensifies]
[Logevall] What's our role?
What does it mean to be the United States?
What does it mean to be an American?
To be the most powerful nation
on the globe?
Vietnam forced a reckoning
around those questions.
["Gimme Shelter"
by The Rolling Stones plays]
[Viet] In the United States,
we call it the Vietnam War.
But in Vietnam,
they call it the American War.
There are vastly different interpretations
of the same set of facts.
[Hayslip] To the West, it's just a movie.
Put it on the camp!
[Hayslip] A John Wayne movie.
[guns fire]
But to the village, it's real.
It's just so sad and suffering,
the people who have nothing to do
with the politics.
Everybody killing everybody.
Ooh, a storm is threatening ♪
My very life today ♪
If I don't get some shelter ♪
Ooh yeah, I'm gonna fade away ♪
War, children ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
War, children ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Ooh, see the fire is sweepin' ♪
Our very street today ♪
Burns like a red coal carpet ♪
Mad bull lost your way ♪
War, children ♪
Yeah ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
War, children ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Rape, murder ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Rape, murder, yeah ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Rape, murder ♪
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away ♪
Yeah ♪
Mmm, the floods is threatening ♪
My very life today ♪
Gimme, gimme shelter ♪
Or I'm gonna fade away ♪