Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Halberstam delivers the keynote address to the national conference "'Vietnam and the Presidency," describing his experiences as a reporter during and on the Vietnam War and speaking on the war and its effects from this perspective.
Audio and video options are available.
Christian Appy, associate professor of history at MIT, discusses perceptions and memories of the Vietnam War from all possible sides: American civilians, antiwar protestors, and soldiers, as well as Vietnamese civilians and soldiers.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch discusses the final years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, focusing on King's attempts to move the Civil Rights Movement into protest of the Vietnam War and King's calls for broader social and economic justice.
Video and audio options are available.
National Archives senior curator Stacey Bredhoff looks at the process involved in compiling the touring National Archives exhibit "Eyewitness," which focuses on eyewitness accounts of events from World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights' Movement's Bloody Sunday March at Selma.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:
"Most discussions of the Vietnam War consider whether or not President John F. Kennedy could or would have withdrawn U.S. troops from the country, thus avoiding a long and bloody conflict. In this lecture, John Prados, a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., argues that America's path to Vietnam was set long before Kennedy took office. Near the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt allowed the French to maintain a foothold in Indochina (as Vietnam and its neighbors were then known). By the 1950s, when France began to cast its battle with Vietnamese nationalists as a fight against communism, the United States was already, irrevocably drawn in."
Professors Ngo Ving Long and Noam Chomsky detail the U.S.'s oppression and killing of civilians in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, arguing that the U.S. public today has not learned from the war and does not remember it clearly and objectively.
How significant is the Tet Offensive in the overall narrative of the Vietnam War?
Textbooks present the Tet Offensive as the single most important turning point in the Vietnam War. They also argue that the war after Tet was characterized by little more than a wind down of American involvement in Southeast Asia.
There is a plethora of previously ignored sources available that illustrate the U.S. turn towards counterinsurgency in the years 1968-1973. These sources suggest that the U.S. military developed this strategy in an attempt to win in Vietnam even after Tet, and this philosophy became the basic structure of much U.S. military thought by the late 20th century.
Historians argue that the Tet Offensive was a significant watershed event in the Vietnam War. However, many historians also point out that the years of U.S. involvement after Tet, 1968-1973, were significant and that the U.S. developed ideas of counterinsurgency during this time period.
The Tet Offensive has become enshrined as THE turning point of the American war in Vietnam. The shock of “Tet” did cause many Americans to rethink the U.S. role in Southeast Asia. The textbooks also argue that the war after Tet was characterized by little more than a wind down of American involvement. In doing so, however, all of the texts ignore the policies of pacification and counterinsurgency that characterized U.S. military thinking from 1968 to 1973. Such omissions distort and oversimplify the story of Vietnam in such a way as to make it difficult for students to understand the relationship of the Vietnam experience to the history of American involvement in the rest of the world, both before the Vietnam War and in events since.
According to the SpyCast website:
"SPY Historian Mark Stout explores the importance of signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the Vietnam War with retired National Security Agency cryptanalyst Tom Glenn. Glenn served more time in country than any other civilian of the NSA. Hear about the sixth sense that good SIGINTers need to have, the difficulties of working in foreign languages, and how Glenn and his colleagues were able to predict every major Communist offensive. Learn also why American commanders did not always believe them. Finally, hear the wrenching story of Glenn’s last days in Saigon in 1975 as the city was falling to the North Vietnamese Army."
On the occasion of Eugene McCarthy's death, NBC explores the tumultuous year of 1968, when he challenged the Democrats to focus on Vietnam, the issue tearing the country apart.
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This collection presents video and audio oral histories and additional material from American veterans of 20th-century wars. Materials include memoirs (some lengthy), letters, diaries, photo albums, scrapbooks, poetry, artwork, and official documents. The website currently provides digital materials from 4,351 veterans from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan and the Iraq War, and other similar events. The 226 video interviews range from 25 minutes to two hours in length.
The material presented is part of a rapidly growing archive, the Veterans History Project, created by Congress in 2000 to collect stories from the 19 million living veterans. Other sections highlight World War I; World War II's forgotten theaters in China, Burma, and India; and 37 other unique war experiences.