One of the problems when we take in outside ideas is that we cast our own imprints onto those very ideas as we absorb them. Basically, this makes is just about impossible for any of us to judge / weigh / analyse anything in and of itself, because of our own pre- dispositions in particular directions.
Please understand I am not knocking you or even all of humanity, merely stating what I believe is how we think, learn and absorb information.
So when watching a documentary, there are three really important things steering heavily in each one's own direction: 1) the data provided. Obviously while an 18 (I think) hour documentary is relatively long, it is a tiny fraction of the actual reality it is trying to represent. So the images chosen, the dialog written to go along with it, the editing and everything else all add up to give a direction to what most good documentary makers hope is a neutral and 'blank canvas'. 2) The actual documentary 'maker'; this may be the director, writer, producer but more likely is a combination of all of these individuals. It is even worse if more than one of those functions are done by the same person, something very much done with Ken Burns productions. And then there is 3), the viewer's biases, all of them. The exact same statement, read by 10 different people, will generate 10 different interpretations of what the writer actually meant.
So all of us will have an opinion on everything but an even stronger one on something like this period of US history because it was so very divisive and is generally seen, at least by Americans, as a period of very poor outcomes for the US.
I guess I have always had an odd view of the Vietnam war (the facet of it between the US and Vietnam) for an American in that I never though the US lost, but instead merely chose to leave because the cost of staying was too high. A good deal of that attitude was being bandied about right here in the US and that was a very powerful part of how things went. But in the end, the US could have stayed in South Vietnam indefinitely, at least going by all the metrics one would measure such an ability; the actual monetary cost, the cost in lives, the cost in persons harmed (rehabilitation, long- term care, etc.) and every other way I know of. We were not forced out, we chose to leave. So I do not view that period as one of failure as much as a painful lesson, learned yet again (history is littered with this same lesson) coupled with the fact that we simply did not get our way.
I think Burns' documentary was very fair and even- handed myself. I was actually amazed to find out that Presidents, and especially Robert MacNamara actually knew that getting involved was risky at best, and an outright mistake at worst and yet felt compelled by many other factors to 'hold the line' in VietNam. And BTW, I am really a pretty big fan of Mr. MacNamara and have studied his career a bit; it was he who worked on the mechanics of how to MUCH more effectively damage Japan through bombing. Put harshly, and as he himself stated it in 'The Fog of War', he and Gen. LeMay found out exactly how to kill many Japanese, much, much faster while minimizing the loss of American air crews..... Those two gentleman basically brought the entire country of Japan to her proverbial knees before the atomic bombs were ever used, and could have and I believe would have continued to do so until an inevitable Japanese surrender in which the use of atomic weapons was virtually irrelevant. But back to the documentary: I personally do not believe there was a right or wrong side of opinion in this country at that time and believe both sides were basically wrong: the anti- war people simply did not have a world view and were fixated on VietNam to the exclusion of all other consideration and so they were simply wrong in that a valid decision could not be based on what was happening in VietNam alone. The facet that wanted to hold the line was wrong in that they thought leaving VietNam would have a great affect on US strength (real or imagined) and world opinion, which would be terrible for the future of the US..... that just was not the case, as we can see all these years later. But each side had what they thought were good, solid reasons why they were correct and that matter was never really resolved, the matter simply ended.
To your point, there were certainly FAR more images of what was going wrong in S. VietNam than N. VietNam, and that itself may be a liberal bias of Mr. Burns, but at the same time, most of the film available from that period was from South VietNam, and no where near balanced between the two countries.
So your view is absolutely as valid as anyone elses' of course, and I am not saying you are wrong. Merely that there are biases on all sides, including the viewer, (of course including me) so it is really impossible to get a truly neutral overview of both the VietNam War itself as well as any documentary made about it. The other problem is that the documentary was made so soon after the actual event, with many of us watching who had actually lived through it; compare this with the Civil War documentary for example, which was produced long after all the participants were gone as well as virtually all their children and even grandchildren. Much easier to take a cold- eyed view of that war IMO.
Brian
Getting back to Burns' documentary for a minute, I've watched up to Episode 5. My impression is he spent an inordinate amount of time extolling the braying of the leftist anti-war "activists" and far less time on the other side of the issue - even painting those, including McNamara, Johnson, and the other hawks, as misguided chumps who eventually saw the evil of their ways.