Give Peace a Chance - Critical Review of Burns/Novick Vietnam War Series
(Excerpted from an article by historian Maurice Isserman) In their new documentary series The Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick offer a sharp indictment of an atrocious war. But when it comes to portraying the antiwar movement, they lapse into troubling stereotypes.
Out of a total of eighty witnesses who appear in The Vietnam War, a grand total of two fit the common stereotype of the Vietnam protester—students with no direct experience of or connection to the war—and they’re both presented as being sorry for what they did. Were there truly no unrepentant protesters for Burns and Novick to interview?
