"No good deed goes unpunished."
Started watching the last episode of "The Vietnam War" last night ... but turned it off after five minutes and went to bed. Why you ask? Because it started rehashing Nixon's disgrace and downfall, Watergate. I said to my wife, "What does this have to do with Vietnam?" and hit the clicker.
Actually, I suspect I know why Ken Burns and Lynn Novick needed to sully Nixon further. They had tried this in the previous episode and didn't quite pull it off. Matter of fact, this penultimate program left me with a new respect for Nixon. Yes, he was tricky and duplicitous, but he and Henry Kissinger had done the impossible. They had ended the Vietnam war, brought our soldiers and POWs home, and left South Vietnam with at least a hope of remaining out of the clutches of the North. All basically within his first four years in office.
And he had done this Herculean task, a task that neither JFK or LBJ had the slightest clue how to accomplish ... they kept making things worse ... despite scant support from the media and the massive resistance from America's counterculture. And he had also gotten overwhelmingly reflected in the process. He had done what he had promised when he had first gotten elected ... and the rabid liberals could not forgive him for this miracle.
Nixon had given the Left what they wanted and they needed to punish him for it. So, as his reward, they pounced on one of his foibles .... his paranoia about his opposition. (Actually, by now, quite a justified paranoia.) Last night I didn't need again to see how this downfall was orchestrated by his enemies ... for I once had been one of these enemies ... and now, being more of a realist, I am feeling remorse ... for how I was led by the nose into reviling and disgracing Richard M. Nixon for his heroic deed of ending our foolish war in Nam. History was now to say that JFK and even LBJ were the innocent victims and RMN was to be the goat. Bullshit!
6 comments:
Good for you, George. I find Mr Burns a rather untrustworthy historian. But I will say he (and the people around him) do know how to hype the show.
The sad part is that this will likely be all the history that our grandchildren know ... and much of which we taxpayers have footed.
Funny, you praise Nixon for "heroically" ending the Viet Nam war by abandoning Saigon. But you revile Obama for doing the same thing in Iraq. How strange is pretzel logic.
There is a small difference. In Vietnam, we were losing. In Iraq, we had won. And BTW, Saigon did not fall until at least two years after we had left.
I just watched episode 10 from the PBS website. You should have stepped out the room to get a snack because the whole Nixon/Watergate segment ran a minute and a half -- in a 20 hour program! -- never returning to Nixon at all (except for a tangential headline shown by a Canadian ex-pat. The explicit footage of the fall of the south and the Saigon, then extraction of only Americans was powerful stuff, presented fairly IMHO.
As I said in the blog post, as soon as 10 started with Watergate, I turned it off and went to bed. Alas!
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