Cohen: The war in Vietnam was a fight between lies and truth

Already there is controversy. The documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, airing on PBS and lasting an incredible 18 hours, has been denounced on the left for characterizing the Vietnam War as a fight between the north and the south and not one of anti-colonialism. It is also sure to be attacked on the right for not paying sufficient respect to the domino theory and the menace of international communism. But what becomes clear - clearer than ever - while watching “The Vietnam War” is that this was a war between lies and truth. By the time truth won, more than 3 million people were dead, 58,000 of them American.

“The Vietnam War” is a massive enterprise. It starts with the French colonization of Vietnam in the 19th century and goes through American involvement and its aftermath. Like the war itself, the film is sometimes plodding but more often heart-stopping, with gripping combat footage. The accounts of American vets - or their families - are sad and tragic and ultimately infuriating. Young men marched out of Norman Rockwell towns with their abundant flags and American Legionnaires or out of the inner city, typically with little ceremony but with an almost inexplicable patriotism, and fought for … well, for what?

The confusion is rampant, and it is announced in the film's promotional material: “There Is No Single Truth In War.” But there is to this one. The truth is that while lying might not have gotten us into the war - anti-communism was a genuine reaction to a world going increasingly red - lying is what sustained it.

The lying started with John F. Kennedy, who early on sensed the futility of propping up a corrupt, despotic and inept regime in Saigon, but did it anyway to protect his political flank. And it continued with Lyndon Johnson, who kept sending young men into the maw of Vietnam even though he knew that the war he said could be won could not. He lied about his intentions and the progress on the battlefield, but he never had the political integrity to get out.

The lying continued with Richard Nixon, who also persisted in a war that he knew to be both unwinnable and unnecessary. The lies covered up a dishonest secrecy, and when, in 1969, William Beecher of the New York Times broke the story that the U.S. was secretly bombing Cambodia, the Nixon administration ratcheted up its parallel not-so-secret war on the press and set out to find the leak. Who in God's name was telling the truth?

Similarly, after Morley Safer of CBS filmed American soldiers casually setting alight about 150 Vietnamese thatched huts in the village of Cam Ne in 1965, Johnson accused the network of desecrating the American flag. Safer was later accused of supplying the Zippo lighters himself. In subsequent interviews, the soldiers owned up to what they had done - and with their own lighters.

Once upon a time, we believed that the government would only tell the truth. In the documentary, John Musgrave, a Vietnam vet, puts it this way: “We were probably the last kids of any generation that actually believed our government would never lie to us.” Now, no one believes that. Vietnam shattered the myth, not just that the government was always truthful, but that it would never demand of its young men that they fight and perhaps die to prolong a war that the politicians could not end in a politically convenient fashion.

Donald Trump missed the war. But he profits from the cynicism that began in the 1960s on the left and later became endemic on the right. After Vietnam, it was possible to believe in a government capable of anything - of lying about climate change or health insurance or Mexican immigration or the crowd size at the inaugural. The skies were suddenly dark with black helicopters, and the news media were rancid with lying globalists, purveying the “fake news” of the 1 percent.

But it was the press - the courage of combat correspondents and the bravura commitment of the New York Times and the Washington Post to print the Pentagon Papers - that convinced many Americans that Vietnam not only could not be won but need not be won. The fight for truth, mocked now by the incessant lying of President Trump, helped end the carnage in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was lost. Now, its lessons may suffer the same fate.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post.