Original subtitles

It is a mixture of pretty scenery

and ugly events.

Walter Cronkite: Vietnam reports today of the

bloodiest fighting in almost a year.

(machine gun and artillery fire)

We will not surrender

and we will not retreat.

You think you can win?

Oh I know we can win.

These people are being killed.

They're being killed, why?

The United States must stop this bloody aggression.

Goddamnit, we're in the-- (explosion)

♪ (theme music) ♪

Unidentified male: Ladies and gentlemen,

the President of the United states.

Unidentified male: Mr. President,

it was just a year ago that you ordered

stepped-up aid to Vietnam.

There seems to be a good deal of discouragement

about the progress.

Can you give us your assessment?

John F Kennedy: No, we are putting in

a major effort in Vietnam.

As you know, we have about 10 or 11 times

as many advisors there as we had a year ago.

So we don't see the end of the tunnel but

I must say, I don't think it's darker than

it was a year ago, in some ways lighter.

Early on, Kennedy made a command decision.

We will not allow South Vietnam

to fall to the Communists.

(gunfire)

Unidentified reporter: In Southeast Asia,

communist inspired subversion was unrelenting.

South Vietnam looked to others for assistance

in stemming North Vietnamese aggression.

Robert Dallek: Going back to the

Eisenhower Administration in the late 50's,

the country split into South and North Vietnam.

You have the Communists in the North

and so the United States is very eager

to preserve the South from a Communist takeover.

Andrew Bacevich: The Communist

North Vietnamese believed in nationalism,

uniting their country under their own control.

Neil Sheehan: The Cold War conspiracy

was that if the Vietnamese Communists

won the war in Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would fall.

The dominoes would fall one after another.

Charles Collongwood: There is no doubt

that the fall of South Vietnam

would have serious repercussions

on the other countries of Southeast Asia.

This is fundamentally the reason

why we're in South Vietnam.

Dallek: After all, Eastern Europe

has fallen to Communism.

China has fallen to Communism.

We can't lose Southeast Asia.

So we have to stabilize South Vietnam.

(helicopter blades whirring)

Reporter: On January 2nd, 1963,

South Vietnamese troops surprise a Viet Cong battalion

at a village called Ap Bac.

(explosion) (machine gun fire)

Reporter: Five American helicopters

are shot down,

three American advisors are killed,

and 63 South Vietnamese die,

half of them shooting at each other.

We've got US military advisors

flying combat missions.

We've got advisors that are accompanying

South Vietnamese forces into the field.

So by this point their role had gone beyond simply advising.

We have learned a bitter lesson.

The army of South Vietnam cannot cope

with the Viet Cong,

the committed guerrilla enemy.

It is trained for conventional war, American-style.

George Herring: There is growing uncertainty

about whether the advisory effort

is really working.

Then in the midst of this,

there is what's called the Buddhist Crisis.

Reporter: The war in Vietnam

has literally become a fight on two fronts.

On one hand, the government faces

the Viet Cong Communists

and on the other hand it faces

a revolt of the Buddhist majority,

a fight which has been joined by

thousands of students.

Unidentified male: The country's

Buddhist majority sees President Diem as a tyrant.

Richard Reeves: We had established

a government in South Vietnam

led by a western-educated Catholic named Diem.

Diem was our boy.

Dallek: But absolute power corrupts

and Diem becomes the dictator.

So you have a Catholic presence

imposing itself on a Buddhist majority

and now, they're going after the Buddhists.

(shouting)

Frank McGee: Soldiers and police

broke up to demonstrations and killed nine persons.

Unidentified male: A debate broke out

in the American government

over whether we should continue

to support Diem or not.

Dallek: By the summer of 1963

there had been discussions in the CIA,

in the Pentagon about toppling the Diem regime.

Chet Huntley: Mr. President has

our government in anyway been tardy in recognizing

the nature of the Diem government?

We are faced with a problem of wanting

to protect the area against the Communists.

On the other hand, we have to deal

with the government there that produces a kind of...

ambivalence... in our efforts which

expose us to some criticism.

David Brinkley: Mr. President, in the last

48 hours, there have been a great,

many conflicting reports from there

about what the CIA was up to.

Could you give us any enlightenment on that?

No. I don't think so.

Okay.

This is an NBC Special news report.

The government of South Vietnam

has been overthrown by a military coup.

Robert Schenkkan: Now, this happens with our

understanding and knowledge.

And then the President of South Vietnam

is shot and killed by a cabal of South Vietnamese Generals.

Kalb: Once the US had led the coup to get rid of Diem,

Kennedy realized that the United States

had finally bitten into a bad apple.

Kennedy: Monday, November 4th, 1963.

Karl Marlantes: When that assassination

took place, we owned it.

It actually started that early in the 60s,

in the Kennedy Administration.

Fredrik Logevall: When Kennedy came into office,

January of 1961,

you had on the order of about 600

US military advisors in South Vietnam.

By the time he left on that fateful trip to Dallas

in November 1963 there were more than 16,000.

♪ (somber music) ♪

(applause)

Lyndon Johnson: John Kennedy's death

commands what his life conveyed...

that America must move forward.

I think Johnson genuinely felt

that continuity in the government

after this terrible event was essential

to retaining the confidence of the American people.

Johnson: And now, the ideas and the ideals

which he so nobly represented must and will be translated

into effective action.

(applause)

(marching drums)

Walter Cronkite: Congress and the nation

had reminders today

that while the world seemed suspended by our tragedy,

it really kept on it's whirling way.

In Vietnam, reports today of the bloodiest fighting

in almost a year.

How are we doing?

Oh fine, I think Mr. President.

I want you your dictate to me

on the situation in Vietnam

Yeah, yeah.

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense.

He had been the head of the Ford Motor Company,

brilliant executive.

Schenkkan: Famous especially for his cold analytic methods.

Marlantes: He was a World War II vet.

He wanted to stop wasting the Pentagon.

Robert McNamara: We have increased the

number of combat ready army divisions by 45 percent.

Schenkkan: The expectation is

that he would figure out Vietnam.

(cheering)

The position of my government is clear.

We are prepared to

furnish whatever economic aid, whatever military training

and whatever quanties are required

and for as long as that is required.

Vietnam 'Mung Nam'!

Fredrik Logevall: The public Secretary of Defense

McNamara is all about kind of bullish bravado,

that we are going to prevail, but privately

McNamara is increasingly gloomy about the prospects.

Murray Fromson: Until a strong government

begins to function here in Saigon,

the war against the Communists will continue to flounder.

I'll tell you, the more I stayed awake last night

thinking about this thing...

Gen. William Westmoreland: Gentleman, this is a

modern war.

But it's a different war.

We are here to advise and support

our courageous Vietnamese ally.

It was Westmoreland's misfortune

to inherit the most complex war

that we had fought to this time

and I think his plan for the war was

an entirely conventional plan

in a very unconventional war.

We're over here to win

and we have what it takes

to assist them in this victory.

Is that enough for you?

I'm going to put this in two parts,

so I'll be a little more candid in the second round.

Lyndon Johnson doesn't want to be

a President who found his Administration torpedoed

by an unpopular war.

Parenthetically however,

we have a very interesting episode that happens

in August of 1964 in the Tonkin Gulf.

Three PT boats

identified by our State Department as North Vietnamese,

attacked the USS Maddox, a Destroyer

which was operating in the Tonkin Gulf,

some 35 miles off the North Vietnamese coast.

Logevall: This was not an unprovoked attack.

There had been these covert actions

against the North Vietnamese

directed by the United States.

And the North Vietnamese were responding

to that on August 2nd.

Reporter: This is a special report

from CBS news in Washington.

Today, just pass the midday point,

unofficial sources started to report

additional Naval combat action

in the same Tonkin Gulf.

Now, I'd like to review briefly

in chronological order, the unprovoked attacks

which took place today, August 4th.

Herring: We know now for sure

that the second Tonkin Gulf incident didn't happen.

But the Johnson Administration

pretty much dismissed evidence indicating

that an attack actually hadn't taken place.

Schenkkan: There was this acute

political pressure from the right wing

to be strong, stand up to Communist aggression.

Certainly I think

a more prudent administration

that wasn't looking for a pretext

to flex some American muscle

would have stepped back and said,

"Let's determine what actually happened here

before we launch any retaliatory action."

Johnson: My fellow Americans, hostile actions

against United States' ships on the high seas

have today required me

to order the military forces of the United States

to take action in reply.

That was the beginning

of the American air assault on North Vietnam.

President Johnson has

asked for and will soon get a congressional resolution

authorizing the president to act as he is.

The Tonkin Gulf resolution said that Johnson had

all out power to use American military strength

to defend American interest as he deemed necessary.

Schenkkan: And that is the beginning

of the slippery slope.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

has been elected President of the United States.

And the landslide has carried him in

for his first term in office

on his own right by his own election.

Communist Viet Cong guerrillas

killed seven American and wounded 109

yesterday in a sneak night time attack

on the American helicopter base at Pleiku.

I don't wish to speculate on

action we may take in the future

but I don't believe it'll ever be possible

to protect our forces against

sneak attacks of that kind.

Schenkkan: Vietnam keeps creeping

into the Oval Office but Johnson stuck.

He refuses to be the American president

who loses Southeast Asia.

So he has to keep going in deeper.

Then we're going to send the Marines in.

(explosions)

Early in 1965,

the President decided to launch

'Operation Rolling Thunder'.

A sustained bombing campaign

directed against North Vietnam.

Reporter: The emphasis is

on the destruction of strategic enemy targets.

Raids are designed to cut off supplies

from the North to the Viet Cong rebels

in the South.

Caputo: Our first mission was

more or less static defense

of the principle airfield

for the bombing missions over North Vietnam.

Reporter: General, will this entail

any offensive operations?

No.

No, I don't believe it will.

The reason we put ground troops in

was to protect airfields.

And then we have to protect the ground troops

surrounding airfields. And it sort of,

we backed into this war,

not really understanding what we're doing.

Let's go out. Let's go!

Reporter: The soldiers move

cautiously off into the jungle

encountering only an occasional sniper.

(gunfire)

The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese

didn't play by our rules.

(chatter amongst soldiers)

They couldn't find the enemy.

They were invisible, it was their country.

(heavy machine gun fire)

The enemy again broke contact,

slipped away and disappeared.

Caputo: Combat arouses emotions

so powerful, that teaches you about

human nature at it's best and at it'sworst.

Unidentified soldier: Give the baby to mama-san.

-Yeah. -Papa-san, come on.

Give the baby to mama-san, come on.

Unidentified soldier: VC? You VC?

Yeah, you're VC, you're Viet Cong.

Caputo: The rule of thumb was just

not to trust anybody regardless of sex or age.

(machine gun fire)

Unidentified soldier: What's going on?

(soldiers cheering)

Neil Sheehan: If the Americans got

sniper fire from a village,

they didn't send a squad in

to find the sniper and kill him.

They just called for artillery

or air strikes and blew the whole hamlet away.

The United States was killing

25,000 civilians a year.

We were blowing up and burning down

this country we were supposed to be saving.

Success continues to be elusive

in any meaningful way

and Johnson keeps being told,

I need more troops.

Lyndon B Johnson: I have today ordered

to Vietnam certain forces

which will raise our fighting strength

from 75,000 to 125,000 men...

almost immediately.

This will make it necessary

to the raise of the monthly draft call

from 17,000 to 35,000 per month.

And this is the most agonizing

and the most painful duty of your President.

It's difficult to understand,

why would you take the course

that is going to lead to a large-scale war,

even with what we now know is this

deep skepticism on the part of Lyndon Johnson.

But it seems he felt that no matter

which way he went on Vietnam,

he would be crucified.

We're on the outskirts of the village of Cam Ni

with elements of the 1st Battalion 9th Marines.

(explosions)

Reporter: It first appeared

that the marines had been sniped at

and that a few houses were made to pay.

Reporter: Shortly after

an officer told me, he had orders to go in

and level the string of hamlets

that surrounds Cam Ne village.

Safer: I wasn't looking for that story

but what I saw was absolutely shocking.

(speaking Vietnamese) (weeping)

Reporter: Today's operation

burned down 150 houses,

wounded three women, killed one baby

and netted these four prisoners

who could not answer questions

put to them in English.

Rather: To a Vietnamese peasant,

it will take more than presidential promises

to convince him that we are on his side.

The morning news had put the first bit

of footage on the air.

I had no idea we would have that kind of repercussions it had.

Do you ever have any regrets about

some of these people that you are leaving homeless?

You can't expect to do your job

and feel pity for these people.

But I think it's sad in a way

but I don't think there's any other way

you can get around it, in this kind of war.

Lawrence Wright: What Vietnam did

to America via television

was introduce us to a new kind of America,

one that was not pure,

one that committed the same kinds of atrocities

that will-- are always committed in war

but we had never allowed ourselves to see them.

Safer: The President, I understand,

called the senior executive at CBS.

And Lyndon Johnson said,

"Frank, this is your President.

Your boys just shat on the flag of the United States."

(ship born blaring)

Walter Cronkite: Three months ago

the first Air Cavalry Division

shipped out from Charleston, South Carolina.

Last week some of them came home.

Most of these casualties were suffered

in a battle of Ia Drang Valley.

The most significant, yet fought

by American troops in Vietnam.

(gunfire)

Safer: It looked at first like a

routine Viet Cong attack

but this is was a full scale sustained assault

by not only the Viet Cong of South Vietnam

but with North Vietnam and it's strong and dedicated army.

(gunfire and explosions)

Reporter: At first light

the full shock came.

Americans and North Vietnamese

lay side by side in the grass.

Kind of walked right into an ambush.

It was pretty bad to listen to your friends

crying out for help

and not being able to do a thing.

We just... we were all pinned down.

I want to congratulate you on your

distinguished victory.

You were fighting regular North Vietnamese troops.

The consensus

of the military after Ia Drang is

we can inflict enough casualties on them to win.

Our armed forces are prepared

to take the necessary casualties

in order to seek out and destroy the enemy.

The question remains, are the American people

prepared to lose

more and more young men in Vietnam?

♪ (dramatic music) ♪

♪ (Band music playing) ♪

Reporter: The first Air Cavalry band

will go anywhere for a parade,

even within rifle range of the Viet Cong.

Frederick Ackerson: The Viet Cong

have terrorized you and have burned your homes.

We are here to help you.

And to show how much we are able to protect you,

the Air Force are going to get

some Viet Cong on the other side of the valley.

♪ (band playing) ♪

(explosions)

The televising of the Vietnam War

was like the split-screen reality in American culture.

On one side you had what the official story was,

which was "we're winning in Vietnam."

And yet, every time that Americans looked up,

what they saw was bodybags.

Reporter: Marine Colonel Michael Yunck

was hit by fire from a village

while he was directing close air support

from a helicopter.

He saw women and children there

and decided not to order an air attack.

The Colonel talked about it

while surgeons amputated his leg.

Surgeon: I'll going to do all I can to save that leg.

I know.

God damn it! I hate to

put bombs and napalm on these women and children.

I just didn't do it, I just said

they can't be there.

I'm sure now that that's where they were.

Sheehan: And as the causalities mounted,

that was turning the public in this country

against the war.

(crowds chanting anti-war slogans)

Reporter: How do you expect to be

protected in this country

unless you have people fighting for you?

They are not fighting for me.

They're not. They're not.

This is genocide.

These people are being killed.

They are being killed. Why?

Dissent spread across the campuses

all over the country and

give a sense of empowerment to students

who were about to be drafted. But still couldn't vote.

Reporter: A new type of protest

and civil disobedience occurs in New York City.

David Miller publicly burns his draft card.

Reporter: Seven young and

earnest protesters burned draft cards

on the steps of a Boston court house.

A group of high school boys set upon them with fists.

Denis O'Neill: The draft was in place from World War II,

when you turn 18 you had to register.

Reporter: In January 1965,

5,400 young men were called for the draft.

In December 1965,

45,224 young men were called.

This is one fact pouring in on the American conscience

and causing increasing concern.

Tom Hayden: It's a compulsory draft

It forced you to make a choice.

Vietnam against your will, jail against your will.

Canada against your will. No good options.

All kinds of ways are found to try

to beat the physical.

People are known to mutilate themselves.

Starve themselves, declare that

they were homosexual when they weren't.

Herring: There were also

escape hatches in terms of deferment,

like deferments for college students,

which means that working class, young people,

are likely to get drafted before

upper middle class.

(crowd chanting)

Their war was waged

in a lot of living rooms in America.

There's a real generational divide

because my father's generation

went off and saved Europe.

I fully expected to have a military experience.

But it was the wrong damn war.

Reporter: Washington, November 27.

The rally was to be held at the Washington Monument.

The protestors began to arrive, about 20,000 strong.

♪ Most of the world ♪

♪ Peace corps by day ♪

The whole world

are watching us right now.

I'm here to support the Constitution

of the United States, I will not fight in Vietnam.

(crowd cheering)

We forget this. But there was always

a substantial number of Americans

who supported the Vietnam War.

(booing)

Go away!

(crowd booing anti-war supporters)

-You traitors! -I'll get you, you punk!

Where is your son?

My son's a marine!

Wright: It's hard to recapture

how intense that period it was.

How morally conflictual

it was in your relationship with your country,

which is something we never questioned.

Harry Reasoner: The pressure on Mr. Johnson

to choose sides has been growing.

Clinging to a middle line

he tried to give one ear to the war hawks in America

one ear to the doves but both ears to neither.

We halted bombing in the North

in the hope that the government in Hanoi

would signal it'swillingness to talk instead of fight.

But I regret to tell you

that no signal came during those 37 days.

Johnson feels alternately outraged

that he's being attacked in this way,

when he's doing the best he can.

Until the day they decide

to end this aggression

and to make an honorable peace,

I can assure you

that we speaking for the United States of America

intend to carry on.

(explosion)

Frank McGee: A large committee of

responsible lawyers has examined

the United States' legal position in Vietnam.

It's conclusions, briefly and bluntly, are

that the United States is violating

the Unite Nations Charter,

the Geneva Agreement and finally violating

the United States Constitution which says,

"Only Congress can declare war."

When the Congress tried to ask questions

about the Vietnam War,

they've found it very difficult

to get answers and sometimes they were lied to.

Senator Wayne Morse: We're engaged in a

historic debate in this country.

We have honest differences of opinion.

Herring: Fulbright hearings are

one of the first times when people

who weren't far on the left

or extreme on the right, started raising

some very serious questions about the war.

Morse: And all I'm asking is

if the people decide that this war should be stopped,

are you going to take the position

that it's weakness on the home front in a democracy?

General Maxwell Taylor: I would feel that our people,

we're badly misguided and did not understand

the consequences of such a disaster.

Well, we agree on one thing

that they can be badly misguided

and you and the President, in my judgment,

have been misguiding them for a long time in this war.

At the beginning of 1965,

there were 23,000 American service men in Vietnam.

Currently, there are about 267,000

U.S fighting men in Vietnam

and 18,000 more will be there

by the end of this month.

The commitment

became bigger and bigger and bigger.

You could feel the spirit of the troops was draining.

Reporter: How old are you?

22.

Reporter: Volunteer?

Nope.

Reporter: Would you?

Nope.

What's the worst thing about it?

Getting shot, getting hit.

Well you see...

your buddies get hit.

Living in the swamp, dirt.

Karl Marlantes: Three days out in the bush,

you'll be covered with ringworm and jungle rot.

It was just the nature of the terrain

and the weather.

Reporter: It's hot in Vietnam,

often hotter than the Mojave Desert.

The temperature rises to 120 degrees.

(breathing heavily)

Caputo: If we got two hours sleep at night,

I'd be surprised.

Marlantes: You're almost in a

hypnotic state.

I'm amazed that these kids didn't just

completely fall apart.

Humans are really, really tough.

Yes, I think so.

Today I can tell you that

military progress in the past 12 months

has exceeded our expectations.

Our policy remains what it was

and has been, we will supply our commanders

whatever they require to accomplish our objective

in South Vietnam.

Caputo: You started to distrust

your own leaders because you started to say,

"Well they're lying to us." I mean...

or if they're not lying to us they

don't know what's going on over here.

If they don't know what's going on,

what the hell is going on?

(gunfire)

Get in the hole. -Soldiers: In the hole.

(explosions)

I'm glad they're on our side.

Unidentified soldier: Hold out.

Reporter: Alpha company has

reached Hill 943.

(gunfire)

Force them in this way! Up!

Reporter: After sweeping the area around 943,

Hill 943 is taken.

There is nothing to take.

And now that the enemy is gone,

there is no reason for the Americans to stay.

Marlantes: When we abandoned the hill,

it was crashing to our morale

because your friends died.

What was that all that about?

Reporter: There is a hill in Vietnam

which was assaulted twice, taken twice

and abandoned twice by Americans.

And today, 943 is again controlled

by the North Vietnamese.

Safer: Progress was not being made.

There was no end in sight.

How do you measure progress?

So it was kind of an absurd situation.

(indistinct chatter)

Reporter: How do you feel about it now

that's it's all over?

Pretty bad in a way,

you live with him, you work with him,

you get really attached to them.

I had three that died in my arms,

that hurt more anything else.

(gunfire)

We have to carry them out, you know.

And that's when it bothers you.

When you got to carry them through the slop,

it really gets to you.

♪ (somber music) ♪

Marlantes: I'd lose friends and I would just like--

Wow. You know, I got a job to do here and

you throw him on a chopper

and that'll be the last you'll see him.

And so you're constantly

shoving it down because if you didn't

you couldn't function.

Crowd: Stop the war now!

Reporter: These women came

by the thousands to the Pentagon this week.

They demand to see Secretary of Defense

Robert McNamara to ask him

to stop sending their sons to Vietnam.

And they showed their anger and frustration.

Women's Strike For Peace: Stop war now! Stop war now!

(yelling)

(clapping)

Given the nature

of the enemy, it seems to me

that the strategy we are following at this time

is the proper one.

And that it is producing results.

We will prevail in Vietnam

over the Communist aggressor.

(applause)

Ricks: Fundamentally we didn't have

a strategy in the Vietnam War

except that of attrition.

Marlantes: They talked about,

"Well, we can kill 300 North Vietnamese

for everyone of us."

Do the American people care about the 300?

No. They care about the one.

(gunfire and explosions)

Reporter: 500,000 American troops,

14,000 American dead,

the war in Vietnam is no longer simply

their war to win or lose.

It's ours as well.

And it has become the most divisive

in 100 years of American history.

Peace now!

So it was the first time that all these

different factions and philosophies

and personalities came together in one place.

(crowd yelling)

Tom Hayden: The seed was planted

when there was a massive march on the Pentagon.

People realized that we could

go beyond light protest

into more massive civil disobedience

and shake-up the war makers.

(yelling)

McNamara had been managing the war since 1961.

The man was just overwhelmed with guilt.

In less than 60 days, I will observe

seven years as Secretary of Defense.

No one of my predecessors has served so long.

I, myself, did not plan to.

Robert McNamara leaves office.

I think it's fair to say

that he is, by that point,

tortured on a personal level by the war.

(gunfire)

Mike Wallace: Tonight, the Communists

hit the very heart of Saigon,

the brand new U.S. Embassy building

and at least 10 cities in that war torn country.

Kurlansky: The Tet offensive was

the big show of the Viet Cong.

It's huge, they got the Americans and

the South Vietnamese completely by surprise.

Kurlansky: It exposed how tenuous the U.S. hold was.

Walter Cronkite: Who won and who lost

in the great Tet offensive against the cities?

I'm not sure.

But terrible loss in American lives,

prestige and morale,

and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there.

It seems now more certain than ever

that the bloody experience of Vietnam

is to end in a stalemate.

When Walter Cronkite,

who was the most trusted man in America

said that, 'Lyndon Johnson said,

"If I've lost Walter,

I've lost middle America."'

Lyndon Johnson realized he was no longer

in charge of the war. The war was in charge of him.

Reporter: What'd you lose?

I had a... 36 when I started.

We got a... 21 killed.

What were you thinking about?

I was thinking...

of my wife and...

my baby that I haven't seen, I guess.

I got a baby coming in June

and that was on my mind.

I just knew we were going to be overrun.

You look at the history of Vietnam,

it was a tragic 'Comedy of Errors'

from beginning to end.

And the tragedy of Johnson

is that he achieved remarkable things,

particularly in terms of Civil Rights

but will be remembered for Vietnam.

Schenkkan: It's the full Shakespearean

wheel of fortune.

The man who has nothing,

who rises to everything,

and then loses it all.

In a moment of tragedy and trauma

the duties of this office fell upon me.

With American sons in the field

far away

and the America's future

under challenge right here at home,

I have concluded

that I should not permit the presidency

to become involved in the partisan divisions

that are developing in this political year.

Accordingly, I shall not seek

and I will not accept

the nomination of my party

for another term as your President.