The Sixties (2013) s01e04 Episode Script

1 It is a mixture of pretty scenery and ugly events.
Vietnam reports today of the bloodiest fighting in almost a year.
We will not surrender, and we will not retreat.
- Think we 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! God damn it, we're in the middle of Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
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? No, we are putting in a major effort in Vietnam.
As you know, we have 10 or 11 times as many advisors in 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.
In Southeast Asia, communist-inspired subversion was unrelenting.
South Vietnam looks to others for assistance in stemming North Vietnamese aggression.
Going back to the Eisenhower administration in the late 50s, 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 take over.
The communist North Vietnamese believed in nationalism.
Uniting their country under their own control.
The Cold War conspiracy was that if the Vietnamese communists win the war in Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would fall.
The dominoes would fall, one after another.
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.
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.
On January 2nd, 1963, South Vietnamese troops surprise a Viet Cong battalion at a village called Ap Bac.
5 American helicopters are shot down.
3 American advisers are killed.
63 South Vietnamese die, half of them shooting at each other.
We've got U.
S.
military advisers flying combat missions.
We've got advisers 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 has trained for conventional war, American-style.
There is growing uncertainty about whether the advisory effort is really working.
Then in the midst of this, there's what's called the Buddhist Crisis.
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.
The country's Buddhist majority sees President Diem as a tyrant.
We had established a government in South Vietnam led by a Western-educated Catholic named Diem.
Diem was our boy.
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.
Soldiers and police broke up the demonstrations and killed 9 persons.
A debate broke out in the American government over whether we should continue to support Diem or not.
By the summer of 1963, there had been discussions in the C.
I.
A.
, in the Pentagon, about toppling the Diem regime.
Mr.
President, has our government in any way been tardy in recognizing the nature of the Diem government? We are faced with the problem of wanting to protect the area against the communists.
On the other hand, we have to deal with the governments there.
That produces a kind of ambivalence in our efforts, which expose us to some criticism.
Mr.
President, in the last 48 hours, there have been a great many conflicting reports from there about what the C.
I.
A.
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.
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.
Once the U.
S.
had the led coup to get rid of Diem, Kennedy realized that the United States had finally bitten into a bad apple.
Monday, November 4th, 1963.
When that assassination took place, we owned it.
It actually started that early in the 60s, in the Kennedy administration.
When Kennedy came into office, January of 1961, you had on the order of about 600 U.
S.
military advisers in South Vietnam.
By the time he left on that fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963, there were more than 16,000.
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.
And now, the ideas and the ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.
Congress and the nation had reminders today that while the world seems suspended by our tragedy, it really kept on its whirling way.
In Vietnam, reports today of the bloodiest fighting in almost a year.
- Bob, how are we doing? - Oh, fine, I think, Mr.
President.
I want you your dictate to me on the situation in Vietnam.
Yup, yeah.
Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense.
He had been the head of the Ford Motor Company.
Brilliant executive.
Famous especially for his cold analytic methods.
He was a World War II vet.
He wanted to stop wasting the Pentagon.
We have increased the number of combat-ready army divisions by 45%.
The expectation is that he would figure out Vietnam.
The position of my government is clear.
We are prepared to furnish whatever economic aid, whatever military training, in whatever quantities are required, and for as long as that is required.
Vietnam moves on! 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.
Until a strong government begins to function here in Saigon, the war against the communists will continue to founder.
I'll tell you, the more I stayed awake last night thinking about this thing.
Gentlemen, this is a modern war, but it's a different war.
We are here to advise and support our courageous Vietnamese allies.
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.
3 P.
T.
boats identified by our State Department as North Vietnamese attacked the U.
S.
S.
Maddox, a Destroyer which is operating in the Tonkin Gulf, some 35 miles off the North Vietnamese coast.
This was not an unprovoked attack.
There had been these covert actions against North Vietnamese, directed by the United States.
And the North Vietnamese were responding to that on August 2nd.
This is a special report from CBS News in Washington.
Today, just past 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.
We know now for sure that the second Tonkin Gulf incident didn't happen but the Johnson administration pretty much dismissed evidence indicting that an attack actually hadn't taken place.
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 reaction.
" 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 interests as he deemed necessary.
And that is the beginning of the slippery slope.
Lyndon Baines Johnson has been elected President of the United States.
And the land slide has carried him in for his first term in office on his own right, by his own election.
Communist Viet Cong guerrillas killed 7 Americans and wounded 109 yesterday in a sneak nighttime attack on the American helicopter base at Pleiku.
I don't wish to speculate on action we may take in the future, I don't believe it'll ever be possible to protect our forces against sneak attacks of that kind.
Vietnam keeps creeping into the Oval Office.
But Johnson's stuck.
He refuses to be the American President who loses Southeast Asia.
So he has to keep going in deeper.
Are we going to send Marines in? Early in 1965, the President decided to launch Operation Rolling Thunder.
A sustained bombing campaign directed against North Vietnam.
The emphasis is on the destruction of strategic enemy targets.
Based on designs to cut off supplies from the North to the Viet Cong rebels in the South.
Our first mission was more or less static defense of the principle airfield for the bombing missions over North Vietnam.
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 had to protect the group troops surrounding the airfields.
And it sort of, we backed into this war not really understanding what we're doing.
3rd squad, let's go! The soldiers moved cautiously off into the jungle, encountering only an occasional sniper.
The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese didn't play by our rules.
They couldn't find the enemy.
They were invisible.
It was their country.
The enemy again broke contact, slipped away and disappeared.
Combat arouses emotions so powerful.
That teaches you about human nature at its best and at its worst.
Give the baby to Mama-san.
Come on, Papa-san, come on.
Give the baby to Mama-san.
Come on.
V.
C.
, V.
C.
? Yeah, you V.
C.
, you're Viet Cong.
The rule of thumb was not to trust anybody, regardless of sex or age.
What's going on? 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're supposed to be saving.
Success continues to be elusive in any meaningful way.
And Johnson keeps being told, "I need more troops.
" 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 raise the monthly draft call from 17,000 to 35,000 per month.
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.
It first appeared that the Marines had been sniped at, and that a few houses were made to pay.
Shortly after an officer told me, he had orders to go in and level the string of hamlets that surrounds Cam Ni village.
I wasn't looking for that story, but what I saw was absolutely shocking.
The day's operation burned down 150 houses, wounded 3 women, killed 1 baby, and netted these 4 prisoners, who could not answer questions put to them in English.
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 it would have the kind of repercussions it had.
Do you ever have any regrets about some of these people that you're leaving homeless? You can't expect to do your job and feel pity for these people.
Well, 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.
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 are always committed in war.
But we had never allowed ourselves to see them.
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.
" 3 months ago, the 1st Air Cavalry Division shipped off from Charleston, South Carolina.
Last week, some of them came home.
Most of these casualties were suffered in the battle of Ia Drang Valley.
The most significant yet fought by American troops in Vietnam.
It looked at first like a routine Viet Cong attack, but this was was a full-scale sustained assault by not only the Viet Cong of South Vietnam, but with North Vietnam and its strong and dedicated army.
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? The 1st Air Cavalry Band will go anywhere for a parade, even within rifle range of the Viet Cong.
The Viet Cong have terrorized you and have burnt 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 hit some Viet Cong on the other side of the valley.
The televising of the Vietnam War was like the spit-screen reality in American culture.
On 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 body bags.
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.
- They'll do all they 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 were they were.
As casualties mounted, that was turning the public in this country against the war.
How do you expect to be protected in this country unless you have people fighting for you? They're not fighting for me.
They're not.
It's genocide.
These people are being killed! They're being killed why? Dissent spread across campuses all over the country and gave a sense of empowerment to students who were about to be drafted but still couldn't vote.
A new type of protest and civil disobedience occurs in New York City.
David Miller publicly burns his draft card.
7 young and earnest protesters burn draft cards on the steps of a Boston courthouse.
A group of high school boys set upon them with fists.
The draft was in place from World War II.
When you turned 18 you had to register.
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 boring in on the American conscience and causing increasing concern.
It was a compulsory draft, 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.
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.
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.
No more war! No more war! Washington, November 27, the rally was to be held with at Washington Monument.
The protesters began to arrive, about 20,000 strong.
Most of the world actually lives all right.
Peace corps by day, and the bombers at night The whole world are watching us right now.
My attempt to support the Constitution of the United States.
I will not fight in Vietnam.
We forget this, but there was always a substantial number of Americans who supported the Vietnam War.
- Traitors! - I'm gonna get you, punk! Where's your son? My son's a Marine! It's hard to recapture how intense that period was.
How morally conflictual it was in your relationship with your country.
It was just something we never questioned.
The pressure on Mr.
Johnson to choose sides has been growing.
Clinging to a middle line, he tried to give one year to the war hawks in America, one ear to the doves, but both years to neither.
We halted bombing in the North in the hope that the government in Hanoi would signal its willingness 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 his 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.
A large committee of responsible lawyers has examined the United States' legal position in Vietnam.
Its conclusions, briefly and bluntly, are that the United States is violating the United 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 found it very difficult to get answers and sometimes they were lied to.
We're engaged in a historic debate in this country.
We have honest differences of opinion.
The 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.
And all I'm asking is if the people decide that this war should be stopped, are you going to take the position that's weakness on the home-front in a democracy? I would distill that our people are badly misguided and do not understand the consequences of such a decisive.
Well, we agree on one thing, that they can be badly misguided and you and the President, in my judgment, been misguiding them for a long time in this war.
At the beginning of 1965, there were 23,000 American servicemen 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.
- How old are you? - 22.
- Volunteer? - Nope.
- Would you? - Nope.
- What's the worst thing about it? - Getting shot, getting hit.
Or you see buddies get hit.
Living in the swamp, dirt.
3 days out in the bush, you're covered with ringworm and jungle rot.
It was just the nature of the terrain, and the weather.
It's hot in Vietnam, often hotter than the Mojave Desert.
The temperature rises to 120 degrees.
If we got 2 hours sleep at night, I'd be surprised.
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 would supply our commanders whatever they required to accomplish our objective in South Vietnam.
You started to distrust your own leaders, because you start to say, "well they're lying to us.
" 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? - I'm glad they're on our side.
- Move out, move out.
Alpha Company has reached Hill 943.
Forces coming this way, up! After sweeping the area around 943, Hill 943 is taken.
There is nothing to take.
And now that they enemy is gone, there is no reason for the Americans to stay.
When we abandoned the hill, it was crushing to morale.
Because if your friends died, what was that all that about? 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.
Progress was not being made.
There was no end in sight.
How would you measure progress? So it was kind of absurd situation.
How do you feel about it now that it's all over? Pretty bad in a way.
You live with them, you work with them, you get really attached to them.
I had three that died in my arms.
That hurt more than anything else.
We had to carry a lot of them.
And that's when it bothers you.
When you gotta carry them through the slop.
It really gets to you.
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'd be the last you'd see him.
And so you're constantly shoving it down because if you didn't, you couldn't function.
Stop the war now! Stop the war now! These women came by the thousands to the Pentagon this week.
They demanded to see Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to ask him to stop sending their sons to Vietnam.
And they showed their anger and frustration.
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 is producing results.
We will prevail in Vietnam over the communist aggression.
Fundamentally, we didn't have a strategy in the Vietnam War, to except that of attrition.
They talked about, "Well, we can kill 300 North Vietnamese "for every 1 of us.
" Do the American people care about the 300? No, they care about the 1! 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.
Please stop, please stop! Please stop! It was the first time that all these different factions, and philosophies, and personalities came together in one place.
The seed was planted when there was a massive march on the Pentagon.
People realized that we could go beyond polite protest into more massive civil disobedience and shake up the war-makers.
McNamara have been managing the war since 1961, and the man was just overwhelmed with guilt.
In less than 60 days, I will have served 7 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.
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.
The Tet Offensive was the big show of the Viet Cong.
It's huge.
They caught the Americans and South Vietnamese completely by surprise.
It exposed how tenuous the U.
S.
hold was.
Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I'm not sure.
The terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there, 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.
- What did you lose? - I had 36 when I started.
We got 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 guess.
I just knew we were going to get overrun.
If 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.
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 America's sons in the fields far away and 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.