 Welcome, I'm Catherine Robb, and this afternoon I am here wearing two hats. One for the LBJ Library and Presidential Museum, and the other for KLRU TV Austin PBS. And on behalf of both, I welcome you all here today. I'm thrilled to be here with you today as a lifelong fan and supporter of public broadcasting and of the LBJ Library. Now as a child of the 70s, there were three very important birds in my family. My grandmother, Lady Bird Johnson. My mother, who is down here in the front, Linda Bird Johnson, Robb. And of course, Big Bird. Fifty years ago in the East Room of the White House, my grandfather, Lyndon Baines Johnson, signed into law the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which later established PBS and NPR, is a national distribution network for public television and radio. This was just one of the many laws that were part of the great society my grandfather envisioned to improve the lives of all Americans. In signing the Public Broadcasting Act, my grandfather said, I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge, not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use. He then continued on to say, think of the lives that this would change. Yes, just think of the lives it has and will continue to change. In signing the Public Broadcasting Act, my grandfather went on to say that the purpose of the Public Broadcasting Act or Public Broadcasting was to enrich man's spirit. The documentaries produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novak have achieved that goal not only of enriching man's spirit, but of educating and inspiring, as well as stimulating conversation and curiosity for the millions who have watched the programs on PBS. I am proud to support PBS. I'm honored to have served as a board chair for KLRU, for the board of directors here in Austin, and to have served on the board for a number of years, and honestly I think it's about half my life at this point. And in fact, the only organization that I may have been sort of involved with longer is where you are today, the LBJ Library, which I sort of got by virtue of birth, so you can understand. Last year, Ken invited me, along with then library director Mark Uptigrove and Amy Barbie, the executive director of the LBJ Foundation, to his studio in New Hampshire to view the series in progress. We remain grateful that the Johnson family and the library were involved in the making of this groundbreaking series. And as little aside, I have to tell you, this is sort of geeking out on you, and you probably know this already, but it is really super cool to get to go to the studio and see him work. So it was a lot of fun. But today we're fortunate to see a preview of the 10-part series on the Vietnam War, which will air in full on PBS in September. Leading up to the debut date, KLRU will invest in a series of public programs in conjunction with the Vietnam War series, bringing together students, veterans, educators, and the public. At the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act, my grandfather said, I believe the time has come to stake another claim in the name of all people. Ken and Lynn's wonderful work does that again and again. And KLRU's efforts and outreach with this series and in so many other ways do that unceasingly. Thank you, Ken. Thank you, everyone at KLRU, and thank all of you for staking a claim in the name of all people and for supporting these worthy and enriching endeavors. So let's watch and learn a little bit more. KLRU TV, Austin PBS is dedicated to telling stories that inspire and change our lives. This fall, we're proud to present the Vietnam War, a new documentary event. In an immersive narrative, Ken Burns and Lynn Novak tell the epic story of the Vietnam War as it has never before been told on film. KLRU is proud to be launching a six-month initiative inspired by this film. In the coming months, we'll be hosting a community conversation between youth, veterans, and Vietnamese Americans to discuss the conflict. We'll also feature personal stories from Central Texans in our Austin Revealed series. To learn more about events surrounding this initiative or for information on hosting a screening, visit klru.org slash vietnam. Good afternoon. I'm Bill Stotesbury, the general manager of KLRU, and behalf of all of us at KLRU, and we want to thank you for being here at the special preview of the Vietnam War filmed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novak. And we want to thank the LBJ Foundation and the LBJ Library for a wonderful partnership in bringing Ken to visit with us today. I also want to personally thank Katharine Robb for giving us half her life, and my only regret is we couldn't figure out how to get the other half. Vietnam War is a monumental 10-part, 18-hour, and a half documentary film series that sheds new light on the military, political, cultural, social, and human dimensions of a tragedy that took the lives of 58,000 Americans and as many as 3 million Vietnamese and polarized American society in a way that had not been seen since the Civil War. This monumental series begins on KLRU on September 17th, on Sunday evening September 17th at 7 p.m. It'll air over the following five nights, and then the following week, the week of September 24th, the final five nights will be aired, and along with that, we'll be airing local content that we create, content that we curate, and conducting as Judy Maggio told you a moment ago in the short video, a number of community outreach screenings and discussions around the film. Before I say anything else, I want to take a moment to recognize Lucy Baines Johnson, who I believe is sitting in front. Lucy, please, a round of applause. And let me also recognize Linda Johnson-Robb, who is sitting with Lucy. Please, you guys, stand up and be recognized. Public Broadcasting owes its birth and its vision to the legacy of President Johnson. And as we now bring one of the most acclaimed filmmakers that has graced the PBS Airwaves to you today, we ask you to consider the value of this incredible service to you, to your family, to your community, and to your nation. And join us at klru.org slash value, where you can learn more about ways you can express your support for PBS over the next several months. So let me just say that education, history, and documentary film are three of the core elements of the mission of PBS and klru. And education, history, and documentary film are also at the core of Ken Burns' remarkable catalog of work. Ken Burns and his team at Florentine Films are a national treasure. Let me say that again. Ken Burns is a national treasure. One of the very few creative forces whose unique style and commitment to creative excellence, accuracy, and quality make his work immediately identifiable as a Ken Burns film. Ken Burns has been making documentary films for almost 40 years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken's gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including the Civil War Baseball Jazz, The Statue of Liberty, and it could go on and on through World War II, National Parks, America's Best Idea, the Roosevelt's, and so many more. We are blessed as a network to be the home of Ken Burns films. Future projects include the history of country music, Ernest Hemingway, Benjamin Franklin, Emancipation to Exodus, and there's a long list here of things that I'll read to you. You're not going to want to leave your set, which is really what I hope for all the time anyway. Ken's films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 15 Emmys, two Grammys, and two Oscar nominations in the September 2008 at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards. Ken was honored by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Let me just say that it's a unique and truly, for me, a bucket list item to be able to say, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ken Burns. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm going to be back in Austin, and I want to thank particularly Catherine and Bill for the very, very kind words, but more importantly for their full-throated support of the role public media, public broadcasting plays in our lives, and while we have nothing to do with the defense of the country, I think we just help make the country worth defending, and that's a hugely important thing. We have one foot tentatively in the marketplace and the other proudly out of it, and yet this underfunded and often much maligned network happens to turn out the best children's, the best science, the best nature, the best public affairs, and I'm told the best history on the dial, and that's a pretty good accomplishment. Now, I said dial, and half of you are going, what's a dial, and then fortunately there's still a few of you that know what a dial is, and this will begin broadcasting this series starting on September 17th, and they'll play it every which way, and you'll be able to stream it. Streaming is something that people who don't know what dial is understand, but I would like to echo just the primacy of public broadcasting, how grateful we are to the vision and genius of Lyndon Johnson to bring this into existence, and though we are in times when we are questioned, it's heartening to know that a vast majority of the country, regardless of political inclinations, support the mission of public broadcasting. I'd also, we don't get here without the kindness of our underwriters, and I'd like to particularly acknowledge Bank of America, who for the 10 years that we've been working on this project and have been able to produce several other films, have been our sole corporate underwriter, and we'll hear from a little bit later, but also the Better Angels Society, which was a non-profit forum to help us fund the work that we do after the 08 meltdown, and there are many, many generous Texans who have given us extraordinary gifts and made it possible to do this film in particular, and I'm happy to say that our board member Cappy McGarr is here, and the chief executive officer and president, Amy Berg is also here, and so I just wanted to express in front of my neighbors in Texas how grateful I am to the Better Angels Society. I also know that two of the folks that have been helpful to us in making the film are also here. One is Colonel Matt Moten, who is a military historian, and we've worked with on other films before, but his expertise is invaluable, and Matt, we're very grateful that you're here, and I'd also like to have them bring up the house lights for a second because I want to first acknowledge someone who you'll meet in a few minutes in the film, Marine Corporal Roger Harris. Roger, where are you? Are you waving? Maybe he hasn't yet arrived, caught in traffic. You'll meet him in a second and maybe we'll have a chance, but before I begin just to set up what we're going to show, keep those lights up for one second, would you please? There are lots of lessons, and people talk about the lessons that we learn from war or we don't learn or the problems with not learning them, and certainly Vietnam embraces all of those things, but one of the lessons that we did learn from Vietnam and we will never forget as a people is that we will no longer blame the warriors, and I'd like to ask our Vietnam veterans, I'd like to ask those Vietnam veterans to stand up and be acknowledged. We made this film for you. The Vietnam War is the single most important event in the second half of the 20th century for Americans. The divisions that were spawned during that war beset us today, and it seems to us now that we have several decades, 42 years in a couple of days, three days since the fall of Saigon, 45 years since our real tangible investment, that we have learned so much, that we have the opportunity to go back and re-remind ourselves about the thing we haven't wanted to talk about, lots of reasons why we haven't, but we now live in a country that is so dialectically preoccupied. Everything is red state, blue state, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight, north and south, east and west. We find it so easy to judge the other and forgetting always that the great genius of America is our shared sacrifice, that we always do well when we listen to the other and compromise, and I think being able to in some way unpack Vietnam and relearn what actually took place, and I think we know from our experience, even with the scholars who spent the last 40 years studying it, even with the veterans who lived through it, that we're all flabbergasted by the portrait that we have put together of an entirely different war, and I hope that we're able to do this. You know, we have an amazing soundtrack in this film, something like 120 pieces from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but there's a Buffalo Springfield song that says, nobody's right if everybody's wrong, and I think that sums up the entire Vietnam era, and perhaps it sums up these divided times today, and maybe if Vietnam is a virus we caught, then perhaps learning about it and unlearning the conventional wisdom and jettisoning the superficial half-truths in favor of tolerating a multiplicity of perspectives and truths that can coexist at the same time, we might have a vaccine of a sort, and that is certainly Linnovik, my co-directors and my intentions in making this. You'll get to meet in the course of this film 80 or so individuals, most of them more than 50 Americans, Marines, and Army veterans, helicopter pilots and doctors and nurses and POWs and policy wonks in the Pentagon and Gold Star mothers and Gold Star families and military families torn by dissension and protestors and draft resistors and journalists and also North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians and Viet Cong guerrillas and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, none of whom have the same point of view, all of whom, like our Americans, view things with startlingly similar viewpoints, and it was our intention to put our arm around as much of the war as we could. We had no political agenda, we had no axe to grind, we felt we were umpires calling balls and strikes, and the only thing I wanted to say to you as I was standing by listening to Catherine and to Bill is that I've worked on this for 10 years, and I can't begin to tell you what it's like to be told that you're going to show 36 minutes of clips for a 10-part 18-hour, Bill gave us an extra half an hour, but it is actually 18 hours. So I asked the folks at the library and they are now, right now, barricading the doors, and we're going to look at the whole 18 hours right now, and you'll be out, I think, at about 8 o'clock tomorrow morning if we don't take any bathroom breaks. No, I'm going to show you six brief clips, it does total about 36 minutes, and then I'm really looking forward to the conversation that I'll be able to have with Mark Uptegrove, my friend and, you know, the former director here. The first clip is the intro to the series, it needs no introduction, I hope if it does, we're in trouble. The second is important, I think, to this audience and this place, it's from our third episode, and it is about a very important turning point in the war and has to do with a lot of very complicated misunderstandings and the way in which the remoteness of it and the way that this was a proxy war and all the other calculations conspire not to deliver us to a truthful moment, but sometimes to an untruthful moment. What's really important to understand is almost everybody in this room believes that the leader of our enemy was a man named Ho Chi Minh. He was, by 1959, though, marginalized on the Politburo, 59, that's not a typo, and he remained the figurehead to his people, the father of independence there, George Washington, but he was replaced by a much harder liner on the Politburo who Lyndon Johnson did not even hear his name until 1966 in a stray conversation, it went right over. McNamara was telling him that he'd met a British historian who said there was a hard liner on the Politburo, and saying there's a hard liner on the Politburo is like saying water is wet, and it, and the president quite correctly went, aha, and McNamara mispronounced his name, he spelled it L-E-D-U-A-N, and he said, Le Duan, it's actually Lays Juan, and from our first episode you have met Lays Juan and understood that he is the person who is directing everything, he will direct the upcoming Ted Offensive, he will do everything else, and in fact Ho has very little power and very little voice even on the Politburo, and so I thought you might help you understand that scene. We're gonna drop you into a scene from our fourth episode, we've been following also from the beginning a young woman who is the daughter of a Vietnamese man who worked first for the French and then for the Saigon government when Dien Bien Phu fell in 54, he moved from Hanoi to save his family down to Saigon, she is in every single episode and as I kind of glue though her sister joins the Viet Cong, or joins the Viet Minh, the precursor to the Revolutionary Viet Cong and NVA movement, and there's a short scene that I think is very self-explanatory. For the fourth clip we're gonna drop you in, in our fifth episode it's the fall of 1967, things are not going well, we're in I-Corps, which is the northernmost province of the South Vietnam, right at the DMZ, mostly occupied by Marines, some Army guys and the Marines are in a horrible, horrible situation, and we have been following since the beginning two Marines and both of them appear in Can Thien, this tiny little camp, one is John Musgrave and the other is Roger Harris, who I hope at some point will materialize and we can after you see, and perhaps appropriately after you see this scene, give him our thanks. The fifth and next to the last scene is from October of 1969, Johnson is no longer president, Richard Nixon is and there are mass demonstrations across the country, both for and against the war, and we just want to show the sort of balance with which we've tried to understand this thing, the umpires that we were calling those balls and strikes. And finally, one of the great symbolic shifts that took place in the war is that we began to focus a lot of attention when we realized there was not a military solution, when we realized there had to be a diplomatic solution, a great deal of our efforts began to focus on the plate of our POWs and their release and a lot of the movement towards a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese had to do with the release of POWs, quite understandably. And you should know that we have been following for many episodes, an army doctor named Hal Kushner, who helicopter crashes into a mountain during a rainstorm and everyone else is killed in the crash and he is the only survivor and ends up being captured by the Viet Cong and lives not in Hanoi Hilton, but for several years in a series of makeshift jungle camps that are just about as horrible as you can imagine, finally moving to the Hanoi Hilton. And this is the moment when the first wave of POWs begins to be released and is a pretty significant moment in our film, the end of our ninth episode before we sort of move to the conclusion of our series. It's hard to say about a difficult war like the Vietnam War. I hope you enjoy it, but we spend a lot of time working on it and it's the most complicated film I've ever worked on and I'm very grateful on this beautiful day in central Texas that you would give me your attention for a few minutes this afternoon. Thank you so very much. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark up to Grove and Ken Burns. Well, Ken, I don't have to say anything that says it all, but congratulations. I was just talking to your wife in the middle of that. I've seen that maybe 150 times and it still gets me. You know, Hal Cushner has an unknown story. Others, Albert Alvarez, known by a few people who follow this stuff. Obviously, John McCain is in this and is a very well known story, but we tried to do it from the bottom up and that was the first time Hal had ever told the story to anybody outside of family members and you can see what it meant on all sides and there's nothing I feel so privileged that the courage and the bravery of people to reveal their innermost feelings and memories is an incredible gift and I think Lynn and I felt that we had this incredible burden, this obligation to try to honor as many of those things. I was making the series on jazz and Winton Marcellus said to me at one point, this just initially confounding thing. He said, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing is true at the same time and those of us want to be morally absolute and to say that things are black and white and yet we know that nothing is that, that it is all shades of gray and so we tried to make a film in which so many diverse perspectives could coexist and you could tolerate them and people wouldn't feel their folks in this film who I'm sure wish we were still there fighting the commies, there are people in this film that knew from the very beginning this is wrong and held to that belief and every shade of gray and I hope that none of them feels in any way disrespected that they can hold their head up high and feel like the film sort of represented where they came from and not just American points of view but as you've seen in little snippets Vietnamese South and also North points of view. So you and I have talked about the consciousness that you had around Vietnam as a young man. You were very conscious of what was happening in Vietnam and Bill Stottisbury, Adley said you're our most prominent storyteller. You are a national treasure. I think the standing of Ashing just received as a testament to that. What took you so long to tackle Vietnam? You know, I don't think I could have done this any earlier. A lot of it has to do with what as historians vaguely amateur historians you're required. You need, you know, Philip Graham who used to own the Washington Post say history is the first, journalism is the first rough draft of history which is a wonderful, wonderful thing but until you realize that nobody turns in a rough draft, you know. And so history is about the finished draft and it requires the passage of time, the perspective that comes from that, the wisdom of intervening years when scholars can come in and triangulate all the different points of view and come to some at least for a while accepted sense of what happened. You know, we were constantly changing this. We'd learn information. It wasn't seven Vietnamese regiments coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail that month but it was six and so we'd scramble to change it once we felt that that source was reputable. This was so layered. This is so complicated. It's not fashionable these days to say anything Russian but it's we felt we were in the middle of a Russian novel and that there were so many characters and you do get to know more than a hundred people in this. Some people as important as President Johnson and the intimacy that the tapes reveal of the dialogue that's going on there. Nixon, of course, Kennedy to a lesser extent Truman and Eisenhower who are very much involved though we never knew it at the time. And then all of these people that you meet. And you know, I did a film on the Civil War and that's now 27 years ago. I did a film on World War II that's now 10 years and I after the Civil War it said I am not doing a war again. It was tough. Civil War soldiers when North and South when they'd been in combat, seen combat said that they'd seen the elephant. I guess it's the most exotic phrase they could think of because combat is so as the veterans in this room know so different from any other human experience. Life is vivified to a degree we can't even possibly imagine if we have an experience bigger than anything else in life and that's why it's so hard to let go of that and to come home and to reintegrate in a way. And I just said you know no more wars but I learned that a thousand at the end of the 90s of thousand veterans of the Second World War were dying each day in America. Actually that's not true. It's a lot less because there are a lot fewer of them. And that an absurd number of high school graduating high school seniors thought we fought with the Russians. I mean thought with fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War and I thought just like oh my god I have to do it. So seven years later we made a World War II but even before it was done even before the ink was dry on that film we said we have to do Vietnam. We have to do it. This is as I said the most important event. We haven't dealt with it as a country. Its wounds are festering. We didn't learn you know important lessons. We tried to the Pal doctrine and the First Gulf War was an admirable attempt to sum up certain policy and military decision failures and tried really hard to superimpose it. But you know we never point neon signs and said isn't this so like today. But look you've seen one thirty-sixth of our film just this afternoon. But if I told you without knowing what the subject was that I had been working on a film about a White House in disarray, about a White House obsessed with leaks, about big huge document dumps hacked from stolen from the United States government and dumped into the press and the American people, about asymmetrical warfare, about mass demonstrations filling up the city streets. You'd say Ken, you've abandoned history you're talking about our present moment. But that's what history does. History provides us not only a glimpse into the answers of say what happened on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd 1863 those are the dates of Gettysburg. But right now and what we think and what we feel, what we worry about, what we're anxious about, what our hopes are, where our dreams are. History is the set of questions we in the present ask of the past and it can't help but be informed however unconsciously by our, by those wishes and those anxieties and those dreams. This is not just one story this is many many stories. It's intertwined and integrated you will literally meet 80 people on camera most of whom I guess for most of the people in this audience I'd say 75 of them you have never heard of before in your life and that you will become as close to them at the end as somebody you might invite to your Thanksgiving table. And I can testify to that having seen the bulk of the film along with Katherine Robin and Amy Barby as Katherine mentioned earlier. But where did you find these stories? How did you how did you ferret them out? You know our ten years is a long time and it allows you to find tens of thousands of images. I live in New Hampshire as you know you made that track we're so grateful. We make maple syrup up there and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup and that's very much what this process is about. So collecting tens of thousands of photographs and knowing what to subtract this is very much a subtraction not an additive process as you might think you build a film you actually in some ways you know it's like sculpture you've got to block a stone and you're chipping away at stuff to to find out what that story is and you're listening to it you're not superimposing your preconceptions or your ideas on it you're trying to not do that and listening to it and so it's all serendipity so we met a journalist many of you might know him he's from Texas Refugio I think that's how you say it Texas named Joe Galloway and Joe at one point said you have to meet this guy I met his name is Phil Brady he was a Marine advisor and later he was USIA which probably means he was CIA or intelligence in some way and we met Phil and we interviewed Phil and Phil then said you got to meet this guy Chan Ngoc Tuan who was my counterpart when I was an advisor in I was in the US Marine advisor and he was in the South Vietnamese Marines and so we went to Houston and filmed him and he told us unbelievable stories one of the most brave human beings I've ever met of a battle that nobody here unless you were there knows about called Bin Ja one of the turning points where the Viet Cong were able to bring in more than a thousand gorillas just outside of Saigon in 64 early 64 and just decimate South Vietnamese regiments Marine regiments Tuan was part of that had to play dead shows us all the places where the AK-47 bullet went in and was shot here when he was playing dead and the three days it took to crawl back to Bin Ja to be rescued covered with maggots I mean it's unbelievable story and we were able last night in Houston to bring him out in his crisp Arvin uniform he went to Dalat which is the equivalent of West Point and it was an amazing moment last night you know Houston has a very large Vietnamese diaspora and she's an amazing here so it's like that you you talk to Joe he's a journalist he's he's an amazing figure in our film I think you've seen some of the stuff that he's been in and Brady and Tuan narrate the story of Bin Ja but we also have a Viet Cong gorilla on the other side of the hedgerow that they are ducking from because there's heavy fire coming out of that and I'm not sure I've seen a documentary that's been able to triangulate again that word a battle that way and it's so it's oral fortuitous you suddenly realize you know we need somebody like this and you meet this Marine and he tells you about somebody else and you know you John Musgrave who you just saw briefly there at Kandien is one of the most incredible presence in the film at all what happens to him for the rest of his life is unbelievable and I think if some evil person had come a year ago and said we're taking away all your interviews but one I'd save John Musgrave and call this the education John Musgrave so what is the greatest misconception when you drill down on this story what was your greatest misconception about the Vietnam War you know it's so long I do recognize the person who began this project and and who's sitting talking with you my friend I mean all of this ten years has been a kind of daily humiliation and little ways and big ways about what I thought I mean I lived through this I had that arrogance of I know what happened and you very quickly realize we know had no idea what happens and it was so heartening as I said to meet the the historical advisors who scholars military historians across I guess you would call the political or academic spectrum all of whom worked really carefully to help us get it right but they often knew only one aspect of it and they they'd be just as shocked to learn something that we discovered by going to Vietnam or hearing North Vietnamese soldiers admit to the massacre that far outweighs the Milai massacre that North Vietnamese in Viet Cong perpetuated on innocent Saigon government workers their families and their children in the retreat retreat from Hue during the Tet offensive Saigon I mean Hanoi to this day does not admit that it happened we have two NBA soldiers saying yeah it happened we know it happened we saw it happen and you know so thousands of things like that you just you you develop a kind of humility and and then all it is is not one of the misconceptions but how do we tell the story right how do we wrestle it to the ground how do we represent all the different views of people the draft resistors the protesters the gold star families you met Carol Crocker there at the end of the moratorium scene her brother we spend two episodes as you know following her brother into war with her mother talking so painfully about the loss of a son and all of a sudden somewhere along the line she begins to change her own political consciousness as a majority of Americans did in the course of the Vietnam war and and she's one of the several people that reflect that change and at the same time we have lots of people who didn't changed and held on to the kinds of things that were expressed in other parts of that scene so it was just being open and listening to them and we're really grateful for I mean bearing witness to that express memory hearing it for the first time is is a great thing I mean you know that a year when you come across something that you just say oh my goodness I had no idea the the other side of the war is personified by Ho Chi Minh how do you view Ho Chi Minh after going through this project what do we what do we not understand about Ho Chi Minh well number one is I said it wasn't Ho Chi Minh running things I mean he I mean early on I mean there's an amazing thing in the first episode where the OSS in 45 parachuted into northern Vietnam they meet the sickly head of the Viet Minh who's declared independence of the French he's dying they save his life they arm him to fight the Japanese his name is Ho Chi Minh and he says wow you guys are so fabulous you never had an imperialist empire I'm going to rename it the Viet American Army and on September 2nd and a lot of people 1945 a lot of people know the importance of that date because out in Tokyo Bay on the USS Missouri the formal surrender of the Japanese in the second world took place but in Bodin Square in a town Hanoi that that Ho Chi Minh knew far less than he knew Paris France or London or even New York or Boston where he had worked as a pastry chef at the Parker House after having tried to present Wilson's attention in 1919 in Paris about a petition to to think about Vietnamese independence didn't happen nobody showed it to Wilson nobody showed his letters to Truman nobody did any of that he goes out in Bodin Square and declares Vietnamese independence and he says all men are created equal they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and standing next to him is an OSF officer within a month within weeks a US advisor a OSS guy there Peter Dewey is killed accidentally by the Viet Minh mistaking him for a Frenchman because of course all Westerners look alike this is why it's called deja vu and there's a big policy thing the Cold War is happening Truman's being blamed for losing China and all these things are beginning to happen over the intervening years and De Gaul is throwing a tantrum and saying if you don't help us restore our colony I'm going to be forced to go into the Soviet orbit and all of a sudden we're no longer neutral and so Ho Chi Minh is writing please don't be distracted by this thing called communism he'd already the Soviets were so suspicious of him they saw him as a nationalist first in a communist second so he's a very interesting figure and remains there until his death but it's Lays Juan who's calling the shots and wouldn't you like to know that I mean if you're landing a D-day you don't think you're going after a guy named Hitler only to I'm himler only to find out 45 years later it's a guy named Hitler you know I mean wouldn't you like to know that and we have that tape of McNamara maybe you've heard it you know talking to Johnson about this guy Le Duan and it's amazing and when General Jiop Tom is here you know he we talk about this all the time who's met him and spoke with him it's actually pronounced Zopp the hero of Diem Bien Fu when he died at 104 the New York Times opiate quite correctly started on the front page full page inside gave him credit for the Ted Offensive he's so opposed General Zopp so opposed the Ted Offensive that his entire general staff was arrested by Lays Juan and General Zopp was sent to Hungary for medical treatment and Ho so opposed it that he his secretary was arrested and he was sent to Beijing for medical treatment even though it was going to be Ho's poem read over the radio that was a signal to commanders all over the south to begin to go into position to start the raid because he was the figurehead but behind it is this guy named Lays Juan and so you'll meet him in episode one and he'll be there in every single episode from then on and that's like a totally new character in a war we think we know right you see very clearly the divisions in this country through this film some of us remember them but it was it was dramatic we now live once again in a divided America what lessons can we learn from from Vietnam America well I think what we what I suggested in my remarks we do not mention any of this in the film we're just trying to tell story from beginning and middle and end and then and then and then is that the divisions that began then are the divisions we have today they've just metastasized and grown and so what if we could get back to an understanding of how they happened in this country through a variety of factors and we don't have to blame the other we can allow a thing in the opposite of the thing to be true at the same time that we don't have to subscribe to conspiracy theories or that there are a lot of people who say well you know just if Kennedy had lived he would have not gone into Vietnam there is absolutely zero evidence that that is true I mean he inherited six or seven hundred advisors military advisors from Eisner there were 17 thousand when he was murdered in Dallas right Johnson felt less self-assured about foreign policy and kept every single one of Kennedy's foreign policy apparatus you know McNamara and defense Rusket state McGeorge Bundy Maxwell Taylor the whole slew of them and they pushed and pushed and pushed you know LBJ said that foreigners aren't like the people that I know in America and he was much more interested in being the reincarnation of his hero FDR he had an ambitious domestic agenda which he was trying so hard and one of the great tragedies of the Vietnam War one of the many casualties of it is LBJ's domestic problem because as the war becomes all consuming and the budget is eaten up it erodes the effectiveness and the ability to continue his great society which is the continuation of the New Deal and that's a tragedy and then Nixon has its own stuff so I think we we constantly be set by these little tropes that we have well if this had happened this wouldn't have happened last night somebody came up and said how many prisoners of war do you think there still are in Vietnam and I said zero zero the Vietnamese have been working with us for more than 20 years not just finding that but but but our MIA the remains are no you know the remains they're helping us do it and they have 300 000 MIAs people that have they don't have any evidence of their presence or their the lack of presence it's I mean it's this is an amazing thing and while we were arguing over five six hundred POWs the South Vietnam our proxy government and the CIA and others were managing somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand prisoners of in the in South Vietnam so it's just it's a such a complicated Russia Mon story and the only thing is to do is sit back and say yes this is what happened you can look at the return with great patriotic fear fervor you know and hear Ray Charles and just invest yourself and I mean this is why I really do hate showing clips because if you'd seen the other 10 clips over five other episodes with Hal Cushner you'd understand even more what what it meant for him to be free what a climactic moment what a climactic moment it was this is 18 hours as you mentioned uh I think when we were in New Hampshire it was to be 19 and a half hours that you whittled it down further this is breathtaking in scope where do you start with the probe with a project like this where do you begin you know it's the you hit the nail in the headmark it's the most terrifying thing where do you begin and so that intro that you saw had been worked on and polished for longer than anything else I think the intro is the last thing we fussed with because it's always that first note in a piece of music or the first chord or the first measure that really determines its tenor you know the kind of almost PTSD anxiousness of these fragments of scenes and memories and dreams are coming up to consciousness and then this incredible symmetry that an american marine veteran can be friends with another couple he and his wife can be friends with another couple for 12 years before the wives put it together that they've both been in the marine corps in vietnam and they good friends hadn't said a word and that he could ask that and what happens at the end of that intro you've got a north vietnamese veteran carl marland says by the way as a writer who wrote a powerful novel called matterhorn bowneen has written the the the shadow of war it's amazingly beautiful book same thing he was a grunt in the nva and he said the veterans don't talk about it so we have the exact same thing americans are still divided the vietnamese a great revelation does are still divided they're arguing over it was the cost right you know 75 of their population was born after 1975 there you know have 80 million people now they just they're going on there they're a very interesting pragmatic kind of repressive regime they've got an open market they've got a pretty free internet unlike china it's not controlled and you know they're moving on and a lot of people don't want to talk about it but a lot of the veterans are saying it was it worth the cost was it worth just their calculus was they would not count the cost we assume we would erode their morale they said we will throw as many human beings at them as they can and eventually they were tired you know fritz hollings went down there and westmoreland bragged to him and said hey we're killing 10 of them to every one of us and he said my constituents only care about the one westie and at some point those ones add up to enough that americans say in everd alvarez's language no must we sit in the uh in the library of the 36 president who 50 years ago this year created the national broadcasting outside the national broadcasting act law which created pbs and we we now are in a world where there's a very crowded media landscape and many vehicles for for for distribution why do you continue to go back to pbs you know i'm very good friends with the head of hbo really he's a he's a dear dear friend and he's been very helpful to us in fundraising and things like that and i was at a dinner and a person at that dinner asked that very question like richard why why isn't why don't you have ken he said we'd like to have him and i said but he wouldn't have spent 10 years letting me make vietnam and he said no there is only one place that could have happened and that's true of every film i have made and it was interesting while i was making the civil war others would come out after the success of the civil war people would come up and say what are you doing next i'd say baseball it's the sequel and they kind of look sequel what are you talking about you must be crazy so it's a couple of hours i said it's actually 18 and a half hours no one will watch it so it had even higher viewership than the civil war and then after that well what are you doing well we're doing a history jazz um african american stuff doesn't sell and so i mean every single time and it's the highest rated arts program on pbs so every time you begin to realize that um this place is willing to tolerate our process and in this case our process was to spend 10 years until we felt we could get it right that we could get the facts right that we could get all of the nuances all right that we'd be able to see it from so many perspectives that it might be possible for the people that are sad that are angry that are tormented there's a moment when we do a scene in our last episode on the wall when our marine john musgrove grave goes there and he says he sits down and he sobs he says you know i suddenly realize thank god this is going to save lives and i hope that in some ways that that we could flatter ourselves that the um that our film could in some ways promote the kind of courageous conversations i think we could have to help the very divisions that your previous question was asking about we have that possibility of returning to the kind of america that we know that does things together that knows that politics is always um about the half getting the half loaf not not everything that you want and not the ideological purity that seems to be no it's my way or the highway you know i'm right you're wrong if nobody's right if everybody's wrong buffalo springfield i keep coming back to that we were uh last year we hosted a vietnam war summit and a year ago tonight ken burns was here to share his film with us at that time we were honored again to have him uh today i don't have to commend this film to you you've already seen it and you can see how dramatic and compelling it is and how important it is it will change the paradigm of vietnam the way we think about that war what you mentioned pbs being a partner i know bank of america was a partner in this great project as well it's my great privilege to welcome to the stage nikki graham who's the austin president of bank of america nikki and i can tell you there's not a worst place to be on the agenda than after ken burns and um and last year i was actually here at the summit and the moment when everyone joined hands to seeing where of all the flowers gone uh is still in ingrained in my mind but i'd like to thank you ken and lin and k l r u and the library for this amazing preview of what promises to be a great opportunity to bring this country together and engage in a dialogue about the vietnam war and i'm honored especially that bank of america has been the sole corporate underwriter for this film as it has been for eight other ken burns films since 2008 so we are a huge fan and this film is personal to me as it is to many of my associates at bank of america um on october 17th of 1972 just three weeks before my third birthday my father's fighter jet was shot down outside of hanoi he was declared m i a and his remains a piece of jawbone were returned to us in 1977 36 years later in that same village right outside of hanoi i met the man who witnessed the crash last night who had led the militia that shot that plane down so my story is not unique as we'll see in this film there are daughters and sons spouses parents brothers sisters multiple generations affected by this war in some way and i so look forward to seeing the entire story as only ken burns can share it with us as we close today's program we honor those most important to the story the people who lived it there's many opinions many sides many points of view but the fact remains that many in this room were willing to die for our country and today we honor their service thank you so much for being here and i hope you'll join me this in september for the complete film thank you