Jim DiEugenio takes Fredrik Logevall to task for his role in both the current Turning Point series on Vietnam and his prior role in the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series on the subject.
An Open Letter to Fredrik Logevall
Dear Dr. Logevall:
I have just watched all five segments of Turning Point: The Vietnam War. My review appears at the website Kennedys and King.com. I would venture to say it is the longest and most detailed examination of that disappointing series you will find.
I have written or contributed to five books on the JFK case. And I was the screenwriter for Oliver Stone for his two most recent documentaries on that case, JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed. One of the things that puzzled me about Turning Point is that I could not find a writing credit for the series. Because if one is going to do an over six-hour series on such a controversial, multi-faceted, complex subject, it is not wise to just wing it and hope the chips fall into place. And, as we will see, that is not what I think happened here. Let me explain why.
As you must know by now, the series begins with the John Kennedy administration. Which is odd in and of itself. Because America was involved in Vietnam two administrations prior: under Truman and Eisenhower. In other words, for about ten years before JFK was inaugurated. Kennedy inherited the war from those two men.
What this series does is something that is inexplicable. It leads with Kennedy, and spends the whole first segment on him. It then, in Part 2, tells us about what happened in the fifties. In other words, it flashes backwards, referring to something that should have been the lead in. And at that, it is an abbreviated treatment of those ten years. The key development, what actually got this country into Vietnam, was America’s breaking of the Geneva Accords and its installation of the Nhu family as the leaders of the manufactured country of South Vietnam. This was done by President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon. It had been presaged by Dulles’s planning of Operation Vulture to prevent the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu.
There are simply no questions about any of this. America backed the French until the bitter end, and Dulles was willing to use atomic weapons to save the French empire. Dulles then broke his oral agreement at Geneva, i.e., to hold elections and then unify the country. He installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam and kept him in power with rigged elections. This is what started the war under America and caused the rise of the Viet Minh.
To say the film skimps over all this is being much too kind. But it cannot be skimped over, because this was all a monumental miscalculation. Vietnam was never worth using atomic bombs over, and it was not worth creating a new country, led by a man who turned out to be a tyrant. A leader who spoke English, wore Brooks Brothers suits, and had an American styled haircut. This was the true origin of American involvement. And you know this. Because you wrote a book about it called Embers of War.
But as poor as that aspect was, it was not the worst part of Turning Point. Because the film jumped from the fifties to 1965. Let me repeat that: from the fifties to 1965. In other words it skipped over 1964! I could hardly believe what I was witnessing. Why? Because unlike what the film tried to depict, there was no mystery as to how all those American combat troops got into South Vietnam. They arrived there on President Johnson’s orders. And Johnson was planning this expansion of the war and its Americanization throughout 1964. But there was one problem. He had to get elected. So he lied about his planning for America’s direct entry. Some of the people who he had planning for that entry were William Sullivan and Bill Bundy. As Joseph Goulden wrote in his book, Truth is the First Casualty, Sullivan’s first paper on this for LBJ said that this American involvement was necessary in order to halt the advance of the Viet Cong. (p. 88)
But we don’t need Mr. Goulden in order to certify that 1964 was a sea change do we? Because again, you wrote a book on this very subject. It was appropriately titled Choosing War. In other words unlike Kennedy, who stated it was Saigon’s war to win or lose, Johnson was making it America’s war. As you note in your book, two milestones in 1964 made it that way. The first was NSAM 288 which mapped out an air war against the north. The second was planning for a casus belli to get America into the war. This was achieved through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which was written before the infamous incident happened, and which Johnson carried around in his suit coat. That was the equivalent of a declaration of war against the north. From there the first American combat troops landed at Da Nang in early 1965, as planned for by Johnson.
When Kennedy was killed there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam than when he took office. Which means there were none. As everyone who has studied the war understands, and as Maxwell Taylor and McGeorge Bundy were explicit about, Kennedy was determined not to commit combat troops into Vietnam. And he did not. Even though, as Gordon Goldstein has shown in his book about Bundy, he was confronted with this proposition nine times. Yet he refused each overture. Johnson did not need to be so encouraged.
You would have been an excellent interview subject for what Johnson did in 1964. Instead you uttered the phrase that Vietnam was not Kennedy’s shining moment. Oh really? Compared to who? Compared to Lyndon Johnson, who started Rolling Thunder and committed a half million ground troops into theater? Or compared to Richard Nixon? Who invaded both Laos and Cambodia; the latter bringing a holocaust to that country. President Nixon also dropped more bomb tonnage over Indochina than Johnson did. Or shall he be compared to Eisenhower; who was going to use atomic weapons at Dien Bien Phu, but he could not get the British to back him on that. Ike also told Kennedy that Laos was worth going to the brink over in Indochina. Thankfully, Kennedy rejected that advice.
I first encountered you and your work through the book Virtual JFK. In the transcripts that make up that volume I thought you were a well informed and objective scholar. You then got involved with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. They had you do the reply to people like John Newman and David Kaiser and Jamie Galbraith on Kennedy’s withdrawal in the book that accompanied their bloated and utterly mediocre series. Galbraith replied to you on that issue quite strongly and appropriately. Yet you have now repeated that performance. Again, you are part of a film that ignores NSAM 263, the McNamara/Taylor Report, and Johnson’s conscious reversal of Kennedy’s policy. Maybe you did not know what this film was going to be like. After all there does not seem to have been a script. But you sure do know now.
I’d wish you well on your relatively new high profile. But it's not the profile I had imagined for you.
( This letter will be sent directly to the director and one of the producers of Turning Point.)
Source: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/an-open-letter-to-fredrik-logevall
