'The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick' Episode Review: 'The River Styx (January 1964-December 1965)'

Episode Three: The River Styx (January 1964-December 1965)

Written by: Geoffrey C. Ward

Directed by: Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

With South Vietnam in chaos, hardliners in Hanoi seize the initiative and send combat troops to the South, accelerating the insurgency. Fearing Saigon's collapse, President Johnson escalates America's military commitment, authorizing sustained bombing of the North and deploying ground troops in the South. - from The Vietnam War's Episode List

On September 19, 2017, 300 PBS affiliates across the U.S. aired "The River Styx (January 1964-December 1965)," Episode Three of The Vietnam War, a 10-part documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (The War, Prohibition). Produced by Burns, Novick, and Sarah Botstein, this 18-hour examination of one of the most divisive events in modern American history was 10 years in the making. It features interviews of participants from all sides, including civilians and veterans from North and South Vietnam. (Hence the series’ tagline: “There is no single truth in war.”)

(C) 2017 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Florentine Films

"The River Styx (January 1964-December 1965)" begins with a prologue done in the familiar "Ken Burns" narrative style. It introduces the viewer to Denton Winslow Cooper, Jr, a teenager from the college town of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was the oldest child of biologist Denton Cooper and his wife, Jean-Marie.

"He was a colicky little baby," his mother remembers. "So we were up all night and day with him. My husband was a wonderful dad, very loving and attentive. He'd walk the floor with him. And one day he said, 'He's a regular little mogul the way he rules our  lives.' And that's where the name came from. We called him Mogie."

Mogie Denton was "intelligent, independent minded, and too nearsighted to do well at team sports, he loved books about American history and American heroes. At twelve, he started a diary in which he kept track of Cold War events. 'I hate Reds!" he wrote, and he admired most those who had proved willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause. President John F. Kennedy's call for every American to what he or she could do for their country had mirrored ideas he'd held since he was a small boy."

"The River Styx" (which takes its name from the mythological body of water in Hades, intertwines Mogie Cooper's personal odyssey from his home in Upstate New York to the battlefields of Southeast Asia with the shocking, maddening, and heartbreaking chain of events that culminated in America's active intervention in Vietnam. 

The main narrative of "The River Styx (January 1964-December 1965)" begins on an ominous note. President Kennedy, who was not keen on sending U.S. combat forces to Vietnam, is dead, struck down by an assassin's bullets during a political trip to Dallas on November 22, 1963. Three weeks earlier, South Vietnam's autocratic President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu were murdered by mutinous Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops in a coup that had been - reluctantly - approved by the now-dead American President. But with the ARVN generals now in charge of Saigon locked in a power struggle over who will lead the war-ravaged country, South Vietnam is in chaos. 

In Hanoi, North Vietnam's capital, a power struggle between two factions of the country's Communist Party leadership has ended, even though no one in Washington knows it. The two bands have the same goal - the reunification of North and South Vietnam and the creation of a single, independent , but Socialist state. But one, led by the revered but elderly Ho Chi Minh, wants to take its cues from the Soviet Union, which seeks to reduce Cold War tensions and improve relations with the West. The other faction, led by Party Secretary Le Duan, is aggressively following the advice from the North's other "big brother," Mao Tse Tung's People's Democratic Republic of China, which advocates armed struggle against American-led capitalist-imperialism.

In the end, Le Duan's faction emerges the winner, and thus a series of escalations and counter-escalations by both Hanoi and Washington begins in 1964. Le Duan, seeing that the corrupt and inept leaders in Saigon only control less than half of the South's territory and don't have overwhelming popular support, believes that South Vietnam is ripe for the taking. He gambles that by sending the first regular troops from North Vietnam's well-equipped and well-motivated army to the South via the Ho Chi Minh trail, the Communist insurgency will be able to destroy the ARVN in a series of big battles before the Americans send large numbers of soldiers to Vietnam.

Meanwhile, as 1964 begins, a conflicted Lyndon B. Johnson is preparing to run for his own term as President in November. Johnson, a shrewd political operator when it comes to domestic policies, has passed some of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. During his first months as President after JFK's death, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and more progressive accomplishments are on the way, including the creation of Head Start, Medicare, and all of the other programs intended to end poverty in America. Johnson, a New Deal Democrat whose hero was Franklin D. Roosevelt, called his agenda "The Great Society."

But there is a dark cloud in President Johnson's horizon: Vietnam. LBJ's bailiwick is domestic policy, and the long-time Congressman and former Senator from Texas feels at home in that arena. But he is unsure of himself as a maker of foreign and defense policies, so he keeps Kennedy's "best and brightest" team - Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy - to help him navigate the treacherous waters of America's foreign policy - especially in regard to the dirty little war in Vietnam.

Sadly, the "best and the brightest" did not serve LBJ - or the nation - as well as they should have. As intelligent and experienced as they were, Johnson's national security experts saw the situation in Vietnam on purely Cold War terms. They always gave the President two options, exit Vietnam now, or stay the course and keep escalating until North Vietnam saw the error of its ways and allowed South Vietnam to exist in relative peace. They always emphasized the perils of "Communist domination" over all of Asia if South Vietnam fell, thus pressing LBJ to keep on fighting a war that the President neither wanted nor believed in. 

Inexorably and in secret, the same man who signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and wanted to ease the burden of poverty for millions of Americans led his country into the quagmire of Vietnam. The generals in the Pentagon and the Cold Warriors in his Cabinet influenced an insecure Commander in Chief to transform a civil war between the Vietnamese people into an American war.

Once again, writer Geoffrey C. Ward (The Civil War, Prohibition, The War) and producer-directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novack strive to tell a multifaceted story with multiple points of view (American, North and South Vietnamese, civilian and military) in a compelling and informative way
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Their endeavor is made possible by the skills of principal cinematographer Buddy Squires; editors Tricia Reidy, Paul Barnes, Erik Ewers, and Craig Mellish; composers Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and David Cieri (The Roosevelts: An Intimate History). Together with narrator Peter Coyote, the Florentine Films team make "The River Styx (January 1964-December 1965)" a fascinating - and heart-breaking - window into one of America's most tragic periods.