By David K. Shipler
Russians used
to tell a joke in communist times: What’s the definition of a Soviet historian?
A person who can predict the past.
Disfavored
officials were air-brushed out of photographs and deleted from textbooks.
Wartime atrocities were ignored, and history was burnished with heroism. It was
done by government edict, making the synthetic past immune to correction. It
also made the Soviet Union very different from open societies, where (we
believe) facts will survive and truth will ultimately prevail.
But will
they? Look closely and you can see that pluralistic democracies also manipulate
history, notwithstanding their spirits of fluid inquiry and acerbic debate. Critics
can dispute distortions, of course, as they do vigorously in both the United
States and Israel, two countries where portrayals of history are often bent by
the emotional weight of war. Yet distortions endure, for nature abhors a moral
vacuum when it comes to war, and war is exactly that: a moral vacuum.
A fresh search
for virtue is underway this spring, the 40th anniversary of the fall
of Saigon, illustrated by the air-brushed history in a new documentary, “Last
Days in Vietnam,” directed and produced by Rory Kennedy, to be broadcast by PBS
April 28.
The film is
the anguished tale of panicky Americans rushing to evacuate as many Vietnamese
as possible before North Vietnamese tanks roll in. Many of the images are
familiar, the personal accounts less so. They are gripping stories of Vietnamese
made vulnerable by their military service or their employment by the U.S.
government, and of daring American officials organizing an airlift out of
chaos.
The trouble
is, the brief historical set-up to this climax is so badly flawed that after
the movie was first screened last year, a strong letter urging revisions was
sent to Kennedy, signed by more than 30 correspondents who covered the war
(including me). It didn’t help. (See link to text of letter in righthand column.) The film’s crucial silences lead the viewer to
think that the ceasefire called for in the 1973 Paris agreement was violated by
only North Vietnam, that no misdeeds by the U.S. or South Vietnam contributed
to the peace plan’s demise.
No mention
is made of South Vietnam’s military offensives after the supposed ceasefire, of
the rampant corruption and drug addiction in the South Vietnamese military, or
of the failure by all sides to pursue the political settlement outlined by the
agreement. Absent is the illicit involvement of American ex-military men in arming
South Vietnamese aircraft for bombing runs violating the ceasefire.
The silences add to the dramatic
effect—the South Vietnamese as innocent victims, the Americans as pure
humanitarians—which heightens the nobility of those who struggled
compassionately at the end. But by creating an occluded lens through which to view
that finale, the film lets “a false narrative take root in the public mind,”
the correspondents’ letter observed. The troubling result was aided briefly by WGBH,
the sponsoring public television station in Boston, whose resource for teachers
featured a six-minute clip of the one-sided history, until it was taken down around
the time of a complaint about it by a former correspondent, Arnold R. Isaacs.
“If you consult reputable
historians and any serious journalist who covered that history, I believe a
large majority will tell you that this video presents fiction, not historical
fact,” he wrote to WGBH. “It is a safe bet that only an infinitesimal minority
of teachers or students who might see this video will know enough to recognize
its faults.”
Isaacs (in the interest of full
disclosure, my brother-in-law) had been there at the end, for The Baltimore Sun, and wrote a powerful,
authoritative book, Without Honor: Defeat
in Vietnam and Cambodia, chronicling the period from the Paris agreement
through those final weeks and days. Among his objections to the film’s history
was its clip of Vietnamese struggling to get onto a World Airways flight from
Danang to flee south, ahead of the North Vietnamese advance. “Watching that
video,” he wrote to me last week, “if you didn’t know it beforehand you would
have had no clue that the people mobbing the hatchway were virtually all
soldiers who had shot their way through crowds of civilian refugees to get to
the plane. As I wrote in Without Honor,
it landed in Saigon with four women, three children, three old men, and 320
soldiers.”
The film is being broadcast under
the rubric of WGBH’s and PBS’s American Experience, which has decided to brook
no criticism on its site. Jim Laurie, who covered the war for NBC, wrote a
solid piece on the historical inaccuracies but was told it would not be posted
unless his direct criticisms of the film were deleted. For example, he notes
that the film leaves unchallenged the assertion by then Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger that officials thought the Paris accords could lead to
permanent division, as in Korea, a fanciful argument that Kissinger himself
could not have believed, given that “the United States has stationed more than
30,000 troops in Korea for more than sixty years to guarantee a two state
situation on the peninsula,” Laurie wrote. “In Vietnam no such role for the US
was ever envisioned.”
“Also missing from the film’s
narrative is any reference to the incompetence and corruption of some of the
South Vietnam command,” he added, quoting Loren Jenkins of Newsweek seeing South Vietnam’s Economic Minister in 1974 handing
out $100 bills to commanders in Danang in Hue. “They lined up like school boys
at a candy store for their handouts,” Jenkins said.
Even the history that survives WGBH’s
hatchet will not be visible to the public until after the broadcast, Laurie
told me. His piece will be posted only on Wednesday, although “I argued that
people might go to the website for more information during or just after the
broadcast and would find no corrective there.” Laurie sardonically called this “my
‘American Experience.’”
If Americans can’t agree on facts
about a war long ended, imagine Israelis’ debates over the origin of their
continuing conflict, their War of Independence in 1948. It took decades for
textbooks to acknowledge that Israeli troops expelled Arabs, and longer for
massacres of Arab civilians to be exposed. A respected Israeli historian, Benny
Morris, documented about two dozen massacres but could not confirm one case in
particular, at the village of Tantura, which recently embroiled both Israelis
and Americans in a battle over artistic freedom.
An Israeli playwright, Motti Lerner,
grew up near Tantura hearing stories of the killings. He believes that
excavating history and listening to the other’s narrative are essential to
Israeli-Arab coexistence. So he built a play, “The Admission,” around fictitious
Arab and Jewish men, now friends, who were both at the village—the Arab as a
witness, the Jew as a commander. Their children dig through layers of memory
and denial, leaving the audience “deeply unsettled and unresolved,” in the
words of Ari Roth, who produced the play in Washington, D.C., as the artistic
director of Theater J. It is a genre designed “to break somebody open so that
they can pick up the pieces outside the theater,” he said. Perhaps this can “ultimately
effect change in society by leaving the theatergoer devastated, pulverized,
opened up, and agitated.”
Theater J, in the District of
Columbia Jewish Community Center, had been under fire for years by a small
group of conservative American Jews who decried, as slanderous, plays and
discussions exploring Israel’s morality. Urging donors to withhold
contributions, they made fundraisers nervous, particularly when the argument
turned on a moment of disputed history.
“The Admission” got full houses and
rave reviews, the usual index of theatrical success. But the Jewish Community Center,
heading into a capital campaign, cancelled Roth’s annual Middle East festival,
then fired him after he told the press about the conflict. He has now launched a
new enterprise, the Mosaic Theater Company, which next year plans a new play by
Motti Lerner, After the War.
You can bet that Roth will put unwelcome truths
on his stage, resisting the admonition that even in an open society, you
sometimes have to predict the past.
