American Experience (TV Series) The Movement and the 'Madman' (2023) User Reviews

Hope the Russian People get a chance to see this.

[jrneptune · 9/10 · 29 March 2023]

What a timely airing for a documentary.

I was 12 years old when I had gotten my draft notice in the mail. Personally, I was proud and ready to server my country. My grandmother took me to the Postmaster and asked them if I appeared to be 18 and showed them my identification. They took me off the list. But I digress.

Nixon was leading us into a path of destruction and his advisors knew it but because they wanted to follow his orders and more importantly, the orders of people behind the scenes they pushed deeper into a war they knew we should not be involved in.

The documentary does a great job of explaining how people from various levels of society were bound together into a common cause to protest the war.

It explains even further the 'Madman' part of the title and so closely matches Putin right now it is scary.

A great watch for anyone over the age of 10, maybe even 8.

By the way, I did further study military history and did serve and retire from the military. I have seen three wars. No one wins in a war. There are only survivors. The folks who benefit from it or either fighting for Freedom or selling materials used for the war machine..

Do you remember? If not, watch this show!

[planktonrules · 9/10 · 8 March 2024]

During the 1968 election, Richard Nixon talked as if he wanted to end the Vietnam war and said he planned on bringing troops home gradually. When he took office, the truth came out...Nixon planned on radically INCREASING the troops in Vietnam and only wanted peace on his terms. As a result, this galvanized the anti-war movement and energized them. This episode of "American Experience" is about this time period and centered mostly on the actions of various anti-war groups...such as huge marches on Washington.

This is an excellent installment of the show for anyone who wasn't alive or were too young to remember this time period. Well made and never dull.

Antidote to the Burns version of the war against Vietnam

[Red-125 · 10/10 · 1 April 2023]

"American Experience" The Movement and the 'Madman' (TV Episode 2023) is a brilliant documentary directed by Stephen Talbot.

In 2023, if people think of Vietnam, they think of it as a tourist attraction. In the 1960's and 1970's, Vietnam was the site of a horrendous war waged by the United States. This history has been largely forgotten, because the people involved are now in their 60's, 70's, and 80's. (And, of course, many have already passed away.)

Director Talbot has made this brilliant documentary about U. S. resistance to our war against Vietnam. He focuses on the year 1969, when the U. S. witnessed massive opposition to the war.

Talbot concentrates on the 1969 "Mobilizations," when hundreds of thousands of people publicly protested the war. The organizing for these mobilizations was a Herculean task, carried out mostly by people in their twenties.

Both President Johnson and President Nixon pretended that they took no notice of the opponents to the war. And, indeed, the war continued for four more years. However, as the film made clear, both presidents were highly aware of the antiwar sentiment in the U. S., and many of heir decisions were privately influenced by this sentiment.

Director Talbot has done something that I consider brilliant. This documentary is really aimed at young people. Talbot is saying that peace activism can truly be effective. He doesn't show us old people talking about their youthful activism. Yes, we hear the old people talking, but he shows us images of these people when they were young activists.

This important film is available from PBS, and also (for $5.99) from Amazon Prime. If you have any interest in the Vietnam war, peace, or activism, you need to watch this movie.

P. S. Personal note: My wife and I participated in the D. C. Mobilization of October 15, 1969. That's when we joined the peace movement, and we're still peace activists over 50 years later.

"One week's dead" -- 300 of our boys

[evening1 · 5/10 · 20 July 2023]

An interesting, albeit one-sided account of the movement to end the Vietnam War -- with all the classic protest songs thrown in.

Nixon was well-aware that Lyndon Johnson's presidency had been crippled by protests against the conflict, and he hoped to win the war by threatening Ho Chi Minh with a nuclear attack, we're told. He reportedly hoped the enemy believed he was crazy enough to "blow them to smithereens."

Although Nixon claimed not to have been influenced by mounting pressure from a broad swath of America, he pledged in 1969 to withdraw 25,000 of the 500,000 US troops in Vietnam, but the pullout was slow enough that it would take about five years to complete. The documentary doesn't explain how the antiwar movement occupied itself till 4/29/1975, that notorious day a helicopter lifted off from the US embassy in Saigon.

We see many scenes here of a younger-than-expected-looking Nixon and his foreign-affairs adviser Henry Kissinger. Nixon died in 1994, but Kissinger is now 100 years old. No mention of whether they asked him for an interview. I'd have loved to hear his thoughts.