Making Sense with Sam Harris - #97 — The Impossible War

Episode Date: September 15, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about their latest film, The Vietnam War. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Okay, a few new speaking dates to announce. The links are not yet live on my website, but you can mark your calendars if you live in the relevant cities. I'll be in Seattle on December 6th, San Francisco on December 7th, Boston on January 11th, D.C. on January 12th, and Philadelphia on January 14th. Those last three are surrounding the January 13th date in New York, which is virtually sold out. I believe there are 12 seats left last time I looked. So more to come about those events. Supporters of the podcast will get a link to tickets on September 20th, and then

tickets will be available to the general public a week after that. So you can see my events page on my website for more details, and you can also join my email list if you want to hear about these things in the most reliable way. Okay, today I am speaking with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. They are filmmakers who have made some of the most beloved documentaries of our time, and certainly changed the way that documentary films have been made over the last few decades. And they're releasing their latest film, The Vietnam War, this weekend on PBS. It premieres on Sunday, the 17th of September, and it will be available on DVD and Blu-ray very soon after that. This documentary is in 10 parts. It's 18 hours long. And as you'll hear in this conversation,

10 parts. It's 18 hours long. And as you'll hear in this conversation, it fairly blew my mind. It really is a remarkable piece of work, which took Ken and Lynn and the rest of their team 10 years to make. So you'll hear much more about it and my experience watching it over the next hour. But I really recommend that you take the time to watch this series. If you thought you knew something about the Vietnam War and what it was like to live through it, I would dare say, even if you fought in that war, there's something to be learned from this documentary. So, now I bring you Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Burns, and Lynn Novick. I am here with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Ken and Lynn, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure.

Well, listen, to say that I'm a fan of your work is certainly an understatement, and I think that's probably an understatement for almost anyone who encounters your work. You have made so many amazing films together, probably most famously The Civil War, which virtually everyone has seen, I imagine. But there was Prohibition, Jazz, Baseball, just so many great films. And these are miniseries, really. I mean, these are many hours long. And now you've released, or you're about to release the latest, which is The Vietnam War, which is 18 hours long. Is now you've released, or you're about to release, the latest, which is The Vietnam War, which is 18 hours long. Is that correct? Yes. 10 episodes, 18 hours. Yeah. So I am about 15 hours into it. Don't spoil the end for me. We win this war, right? I really don't want to do a spoiler thing for you.

I've had a full immersion experience that most people watching it on PBS won't because, you know, I have the discs. And I was I've watched those 15 hours in the last, you know, 48. So, oh, wow. It really, really amazingly intense. And it strikes me that this is an utterly unique document for reasons that you couldn't fully control. I mean, first of all, there was an endless amount of footage of the actual war, which you can't say of every war. And there's also the fact that there were so many people who experienced the war who are still alive who you could talk to. you. And then there's the additional fact that we are at enough remove from this particular war in time, now about 50 years, so that you can have this perspective on it and give it this amazingly even-handed treatment. And finally, and this is something you really

had no control over, there's the fact that you're releasing this now at this moment in history and it has a resonance, which I really, I feel like it wouldn't have had, had you released this, let's say, in the first term of Obama's administration. I mean, it just, it strikes me as an incredibly relevant and prescient document right now. It's like looking into a time capsule, but it's also, I also felt like I was looking into a crystal ball that was 50 years old. And so I don't know if it strikes you that way, but it just seems like this is a goldmine. Very much so. This is the

great gift of history that we always forget, and I would suggest that had we released it 10 years ago, it might also have stunning and different kind of resonances. Human nature never changes, and so whatever's going on now,

the past is always going to resonate with it because we can see features of it. But I think it's quite startling right now and nothing that we intentionally timed the completion of the film to. Indeed, most of the editorial work was done on this before the Most of the editorial work was done on this before the caucus and primary seasons began in the election. But this is a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration, about a White House in disarray, obsessed with leaks, about a president certain the press is lying, making up stories about him, about asymmetrical warfare that confounds the mighty might of the U.S. military, about huge document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilizes the conventional wisdom and the current conversation, and accusations that a political campaign reached out during the time of a national election to a foreign power to help them influence that national election. That's pretty stunning.

But all of these were true back in 2006 when Lynn and I began working on it, as they are still true now. And all of them and dozens more are from Vietnam that resonate in the present. Strangely, some of the resonances are inconvenient or at least uncomfortable in that their polarity is reversed in a way. Yes. So, for instance, there was some, I forget which administration did it, I guess it was LBJ. At some point, there was the allegation that Russian operatives were stoking the anti-war movement, essentially. And, you know, whether or not that could have been true then, it certainly played as a completely cynical bit of paranoia, whereas now we have this increasingly well-documented meddling of Russia into our system. It was a bewildering experience, frankly, to watch this film. Yes, and then you have the actual evidence that the Nixon campaign reached out to South Vietnam to get them to boycott the peace talks that had suddenly improved and were improving Humphrey's chances.

And Johnson gets wind of this and calls up Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate, and said, this is treason. And Dirksen says, yes. And in our film, the next call that you hear is Nixon sort of saying, oh, you know, Mr. President, I never do this. And Nixon's lying and the president knows it. And so you have an exact correlation, just as the other one seemed kind of absurd and paranoiac, but now true. This one is, you know, a fact, but we're now trying to connect the dots in this moment about that. So it's, you know, plus ça change. Yeah. So let's step back from the actual content of the film for a moment and just talk about your making of it. And then I want to move through the story a little bit systematically, because it really is an education that most of us haven't had on just how damaging the Vietnam

War was to our society and to Vietnam. And it was a disaster on so many levels. When did you guys decide to make this film? Well, we've been thinking about the Vietnam War as one of the most important events in American history since the Second World War. And it's been sort of on the back burner for many years, sort of lurking there, along with many other subjects. And when we finished our film on the Second World War, it hadn't been broadcast yet, but it was around 2006,

Ken turned to me at one of the mixing sessions and said, you know, we really, we have to do Vietnam. And I remember saying, I agree, which part? And he said, all of it. And I said, okay, that's great. Let's do it. And yet we took a big, deep gulp because we knew even then how enormously complicated and challenging this story would be to tell. And it has turned out to be the case. We really wanted to try to tell it from every possible side and to listen to people who have very strong feelings about it, sometimes conflicted feelings, and to understand Vietnamese perspectives as well as Americans. And so it took us 10 years to kind of wrestle this enormously challenging story to the

ground. And the footage you have is amazing, both the contemporaneous footage of actual battles, which you appear to have from both sides. You have North Vietnamese footage too, right? Yes. It's just astonishing that this even exists. And you seemingly have an endless amount of footage of our own side, which is also, it just strikes me as strange that it exists in so many cases. Well, we had a free press that was unfettered in their access to the war and the theater of war, in this case, unlike World War II in Korea, where the press was very much censored and controlled. And Vietnam represents that one outlying situation that permitted the press at great risk to themselves. And in fact, hundreds of journalists and

videographers and filmmakers and sound men were killed during the course of the war to provide this, you know, seemingly bottomless amount of footage. What happens, though, is that they congregate in archives all around the world, and a traditional film production only has the resources to spend a little time in each archive if they can even get there. So what happens is that we tend to push around our plate the same footage over and over again. And it's footage that we have, but we've also had the luxury of spending a decade and having the deep dive and permitting us to go into the archives and spend more than just a cursory amount of time, but literally months and years getting to know them and finding out all the nooks and crannies of that archives,

not just footage, but also still photographs, to benefit this production. So while the classic images are there, the classic famous moments, we are able to deconstruct them in, we think, a different kind of light, whether it's the napalm girl Kim Phuc, or it's the assassination of Lem in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive by the head of the National Police, Luan, or other famous things, we can in some ways deconstruct them. But more importantly, for these quotidian moments with fighter pilots and helicopter crew chiefs and Marines and army guys ambushed or in battle charging up hills, you have a kind of immersive experience that places you there. And one thing you should know is that 98% of the footage comes to us without any sound. And we have to therefore

then research ourselves what an M16 sounds like as opposed to an AK-47, as opposed to a traditional tripod-mounted machine gun, as opposed to other kinds of armaments, and what the sounds of the engines of an A3, as opposed to an A4, sound like, and what they actually look like to get it straight. And so much of the years involved in this is the attempt at verisimilitude, and in many cases, those battles that you referred to have new footage, perhaps never-before-seen footage, but also a sound effects track that may number into 150 or 160 individual sounds to create the moment of battle. I didn't know that, but in retrospect, it seems like the sound design was amazing. I felt like I had not actually seen war footage like this before.

Well, we were our own sound editors we've worked with for years and years, and they are a remarkable group of people. episodes and invite periodically the head of the archives, say at CBS or ABC or NBC, a principal source of material, as you can imagine, and watching them watch stunned at how their footage had been used, intermixed with their competitors' footage, and then finally brought to life with this complex sound effects. And they found themselves as distracted and immersed into the story when their job was to sort of evaluate the uses of it. And we felt thrilled and they were extraordinarily helpful at every juncture in making sure we could find and get every lost bit of footage, every, you know, obscure bit of footage. And that extended to still photographs and audio tapes from the presidential library,

the presidential tapes that are so extraordinarily intimate and damning. Yeah. I mean, just to have that as a resource. I mean, those LBJ tapes are unbelievable because what you have, both in the case of LBJ and Nixon, I guess Kennedy too, you have the ultimate mind-reading machine. And what is perfectly obvious from the earliest stages of this war is how hopeless it appeared even from their perspective. And yet we meander further and further into this quagmire for years and years. And there's a point in the series where you think, surely the war is about over, given what we're

hearing. And yet it's just beginning. I want to ask you a little more about your process before we dive into it, but perhaps you can address this question. How is it, given what they were clearly thinking, that this war was possible, that it unfolded the way it did? Well, you know, we don't have historians appearing on screen interpreting what is the story being told. So we really try to just put the pieces together and using this remarkable real-time audio of conversations in the White House as you hear LBJ and Nixon and Kennedy talking about what they're doing and their decision-making process and the information they have available to them and then you have to as a viewer sort of try to think yourself about well

why are they continuing to prosecute a war when they don't think they have a very good chance of success and one of the things that comes up again and again is that they're worried about getting reelected. They're worried about their popularity. They're worried about whether the American public would want to be told that we're not going to win the war. That's a pervasive theme, a drumbeat from very early on. And that's, we live in a democracy. That's a real question for people who assume the greatest levels of power. They're always worrying about getting reelected, and the Vietnam War is a huge byproduct of that. Yeah, it was a concern over the loss of face,

which it is a kind of psychosis when you actually understand what's happening on the ground, and you're just sending waves upon waves of people to die for something that, on every level, the descriptions of these battles where the whole goal is to take a hill, but there's no point in actually taking the hill. And once they take it at the cost of hundreds of lives, they occupy it for like an hour and then walk on down the other side because there was no point in getting the hill in the first place. The picture of futility that develops here over the course of the series, you basically live out the political

implications of it hour after hour as you see the resistance to this war building. Again, before we jump into the content, I want to just ask you a little more about your process. How do you collaborate on a film like this? I mean, are you together most of the time? Are you in different states? I live and work in New Hampshire, and Lynn lives and works in New York, so the New York office became the kind of production center during the production. The film was edited in New Hampshire. And so there's, thanks to the way we're talking now, all sorts of ways in which we collaborate instantaneously on this. And it's just, we have an extraordinary group of colleagues, Jeffrey Ward, the writer I've

worked with for, you know, 35 years. Editors I've worked with for, you know, even, you know, that amount of time as well, 30 plus years. Co-producers that have assisted us, people who are researching pictures. It's an extraordinarily close-knit family divided between New Hampshire and New York and lots of communications. And it's a wonderful process. And you're right to focus on that because process is everything that we're about. We're not about setting a prescribed research period and then followed by a writing period out of which is produced some document that is now written in stone that informs the shooting and the editing, but in fact, an open-ended process that never stops researching,

that never stops writing, that is constantly willing to shoot or reshoot or add a new interview and is always looking for new material, whether it's footage or still photographs. And I think more to the point, it's easy to say never stop researching, but that means constantly being aware, particularly on a subject as controversial and as constantly shifting as the scholarship about Vietnam, aware of the most recent scholarships. So we find a lot of our work just changing, you know, a number from four to three when we find out that that was how many regiments of North Vietnamese soldiers went down the Ho Chi Minh Trail that month to try to

get it right. The last year and a half as we were sound editing and onlining and mixing, The last year and a half as we were sound editing and onlining and mixing, we were also removing adjectives and adverbs that we thought maybe, perhaps, might have suggested a particular bent. We had no agenda. We had no axe to grind. This was not a polemical piece. We wanted to be umpires calling balls and strikes, and it was hugely important that our process serve that. And it has for a long time. And I think this production more than anything else bears the fruits of that kind of diligent adherence to process insofar as this was the most challenging of any production we've ever engaged in and very satisfying because we were able, even in the darkest moments,

to trust to our process and to yield to it and understand that eventually structures and arcs and storylines would emerge, that things that we seemed overly identified with would be lost, that new things we would have to incorporate, that the little darlings would all have to be eliminated, but new ways of understanding it. We, you know, filmmakers, particularly my experience is when you have a scene that's working, the last thing you want to do is change it if it's working. But inevitably, in every scene, you found out new information that complicated each minute dynamic within every scene. And instead of sort of pushing back and perhaps settling, we sort of reveled in and moved towards that complication and tried to, every time, engage what was difficult about this

and proved our point that we felt all along that particularly in war, but also in many other things, more than one truth can obtain at the same time and still be a truth. There's not a moral relativism to that. There is just depending on your perspectives. And as Lynn said, we had decided at the beginning to engage all sorts of perspectives, not just American perspectives, but North Vietnamese, the winners, and South Vietnamese, the losers, who lost not only a war, but their country, which disappeared off the face of the earth after barely 20 years in existence. And so every day was a constant reminder that that open-endedness, the willingness to be

corrigible, the willingness to suddenly realize you might have to double back on yourself, the necessity to, at the very beginning, jettison preconceptions and baggage in favor of a Vietnam War that betrays even those like me who lived through it, betrays our original, those like me who lived through it betrays our original conventional wisdom about it. It was exhilarating and humiliating and about as stimulating as you could possibly imagine. I just wanted to chime in one thing about the way that we collaborate, because as Ken was speaking, it's hard to explain, but we're documentarians, right? So we're not making up a story. We're actually trying to organize this enormous amount of material that Ken described into a coherent narrative that works sort of chapter by chapter, scene by scene, episode by episode into some kind of coherent whole over 18 hours.

And what happens is it's a process of distillation, it's enormously creative and it is enormously collaborative. And, you know, it really comes down to sort of intuitively suggesting ideas about what might or might not work in the film and then trying them out and listening to each other and then trying to make the film better. And that is what we do day after day after day in a very open way that I think is unusual in how most people go about their jobs. We just get up every day, go to work, hear what each other has to say and how to make our film better. And it could be little tiny decisions or huge decisions about what's in an episode or what's in a scene or which character we're going to amplify and what we're going to cut and what word we're going to choose and where we're going to put the comma and which picture we're going to look at and what, you know, what music we're going to hear and where the sound effect is going to go. There's a million decisions and it is,

as Ken said, a process and one of the most, it's almost euphoric when we're all working together toward this thing that ends up being bigger than any of us. And I just feel very lucky that we get to do it together. I'm glad you mentioned the music, because talk about an embarrassment of riches. Yes. And it's actually a point that's made in the film about the protest movement, that somebody at some point says that the protest movement itself was immensely empowered by just how good the music of the time was, which is something I had never really thought of. But that point is brought home in just how you score this thing, because it's just one fantastic song after another. I want to go back to something you said, Ken, about

moral relativism, because what you get here is not a picture of moral relativism, but it's just, there's the status of the war in so many respects is so ambiguous morally that it almost demanded the kind of even handedness you described. Whereas you went there with as though from Mars without any agenda and you just let each side tell its story. And it's an amazing experience to witness a war from both sides in this way, where there aren't obvious bad guys. I mean, there are some obvious bad guys, and perhaps we can talk about that. But the picture of the pointless wastage of human life and the gains, wastage of human life and the gains such as they are of civilization is brought home by this, because it's just, you can understand both sides, and yet the whole thing seems so profoundly unnecessary. It is remarkable, and it's not a story you could have told, say, of our fight against the Nazis. No, and we did do a film, Lynn and I, on the history of World War II and, well, it was challenging.

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