Not the most informative episode of Firing Line. The title is LBJ and Vietnam, presumably a discussion about what Lyndon B. Johnson knew about the conflict between North and South Vietnam. Johnson in fact brought us into that war as a means of staving off communist expansion in the Pacific Rim, and did so by embellishing and outright lying about an attack on US Naval assets, specifically a 2200-ton Allen M. Sumner class destroyer christened the USS Madox.
But the full light of that incident would not come for some time later. In the mean time Johnson, as president of the United States, involved us in war that was initially a domestic insurrection, almost an uprising, of the Vietnamese people against French colonials. But none of this is even touched on in this episode of Firing Line. The context of the war is understood for the time, but no one, not even Buckley, had the presence of mind to step back and synopsize the background and precedent of the conflict for the lay viewer.
That is most people at the time knew we were in Vietnam to fight the communists who had, allegedly, fired torpedoes at our destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. But nowhere does anyone state why the war was initiated before US involvement.
Things like who should vote, the communist version of rights, their ultimate aims, the rights of minorities in Vietnam, and plethora of tangential issues and even the princible of arming to empower populations to fight back against tyranny, are all touched on. But nowhere is president Johnson's knowledge of and actions pertaining to the war brought forth in this discussion.
That was, in fact, the whole point of the episode, but it is lost, and gets mired in allegorical and simile comparisons the war in Europe that ended twenty years before, which was still highly fresh in everyone's mind, regardless of Vietnam and Korea (the forgotten war).
So it is that this episode of Firing Line fails to deliver on its promise (perhaps not unlike communism's ideals). I can't really recommend it, even as a passing interest into the window of the time. But it may prove a window to the kind of scattered-topic thinking that took place, and with such a lack of focus, the image of how much of America and the rest of the world looked on, seemed weak in that it could not find a point upon which to focus its attention to address the seemingly coming failure that was the Vietnam War.
That is to say you won't see demonstrations, but you will see some of the rhetoric on the goods and ills of the Vietnam War exchanged here.
In that light, take it for what it's worth, but don't say I didn't warn you if you come away with some bafflement.
