“We weren’t on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.” – Daniel Ellsberg
With the 30th anniversary of the end of the US attack on Vietnam, the event which is usually referred to as the “defense of South Vietnam” or the Vietnam War in mind, I was able to see the notorious documentary Hearts and Minds, by Peter Davis, which won the 1974 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and was promptly denounced by Frank Sinatra (who presented the next award).
The film is far from perfect. It is too heavy-handed; it tells us how to interpret many of the things it simply needs to show us. There’s also a distracting attempt to explain American cultural militarism by drawing a parallel with American Football, which strikes me as too easy. The movie doesn’t need to try to supply easy answers to difficult questions.
The largest portion of the film features interviews with Americans involved in the war from two perspectives; Ex-soldiers explaining their role, and ex-bigshots explaining theirs. One such soldier, a flag-waving ex-POW nitwit named George Coker, explains that Vietnam would be a great place if not for the “backwards” and “primitive” natives. Then there’s Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who provides an explanation for why the US government felt it was acceptable to murder 3.4 million Vietnamese, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is cheap in the Orient.”. Davis managed to secure an interview with the quintessential Cold Warrior – Walt Rostow, whose belief at that point that the attack was “worth it” is recorded for posterity. Rostow’s combative attitude and myopic view of the situation is quease-inducing, but its also somewhat amusing to see him ranting and raving about his own wrong-headedness.
The best parts of the film are the frequent comments by Daniel Ellsberg. Since more than any other single man, the heroic Ellsberg is responsible for ending the attack (by leaking the Pentagon Papers), his presence is gratifying. One memorable sequence has him explaining the history of White House lies, and how they crossed administrations and partisan politics for two decades;
Truman lied from 1950 on, on the nature and purposes of the French involvement, the colonial re-conquest of Vietnam that we were financing, and encouraging. Eisenhower lied about the reasons for and the nature of our involvement with Diem and the fact that he was in power essentially because of American support and American money and for no other reason. Kennedy lied about the type of involvement we were doing there – about our own combat involvement, and about the recommendations that were being made to him for greater involvement. President Kennedy lied about the degree of our participation in the overthrow of Diem. Johnson of course lied and lied and lied; about the provocations against the North Vietnamese prior to and after the Tonkin Gulf incident; about the plans for bombing North Vietnam, and the nature of the buildup of American troops in Vietnam. Nixon as we now know, lied to the American public from the first months of his [term in] office, in terms of the bombing of Cambodia and Laos [and] ground operations in Laos, the reasons for our invasion of Cambodia and of Laos, and the prospects for the mining of Haiphong that finally came about in 1972 but was envisioned as early as 1969.
The movie serves as an excellent companion piece to Errol Morris’s superior The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. The theme of both films is that the Vietnamese saw the Americans as invaders and imperialists (in The Fog of War, McNamara responds to this by shouting “which was ABSURD!”), a fact the Americans either failed to understand or ignored.
The final act of Hearts and Minds features what appears to be a White House Press Club roast for Nixon. The president stands up and tells the press of a difficult decision he had to make; to bomb Vietnam with B-52s. As I watched the glorious ovation given by the press and the accompanying grin on Nixon’s face, I was reminded of H.C. Anderson’s The Emperor Has No Clothes – proximity to power has turned these ‘independent journalists’ to odious sycophants, showering their master with accolades and worshipping him in his great genocidal wisdom.