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The moderator, “the man in the middle,” concluded the discussion by stressing the importance of allowing “conflicting views about the Vietnam war to be presented at a time when the nation as a whole is finally allowing itself a close look at the only war we have ever lost.” We will not review the AIM critique187 or the “debate,” which reiterates many of the charges we have already discussed (for example, Irvine’s sole example of how “the enemy was able to use our free, uncontrolled media to achieve their own objectives,” namely, via the media’s portrayal of the Tet offensive “as a defeat for our side, even though it was actually a very outstanding military victory”). More to the point here are the contents of the PBS series itself, and the fact that it sets the bounds on critical analysis of the “failed crusade” undertaken for motives that were “noble,” although “illusory,” as the PBS companion volume describes the U.S. effort “to defend South Vietnam’s independence.”188

With regard to the American war, the PBS series makes a conscious effort to be balanced, to present all sides, to take no side. The French, in contrast, are treated far more harshly, as brutal colonialists, with no pretense of balance. Peter Biskind comments:

Whereas the narrator referred to Ho Chi Minh and his followers as “rebels,” “nationalists,” or “the Vietnamese resistance,” as long as they were fighting the French, once the Americans arrive they are invariably “Communists” or just “the enemy.” Whereas Bao Dai is the “playboy emperor picked by the French,” Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu are simply the “government.” Whereas French troops just released from Japanese prison camps go “on a rampage, arresting and attacking Vietnamese,” American troops engage in the was-it-or-wasn’t-it massacre at Thuy Bo.

The effort to maintain balance is illustrated, for example, in the narrator’s concluding words to episode 4, covering Johnson’s escalation of the war in 1964–65 and the first appearance of North Vietnamese units in the South in mid-1965. After presenting Lyndon Johnson and other U.S. government spokesmen, the narrator states:

Johnson called it invasion. Hanoi called it liberation. In the fall of 1965, three North Vietnamese regiments massed in the Central Highlands. Nearly two years had passed since Johnson renewed the U.S. commitment to defend South Vietnam. Nearly two years had passed since Ho Chi Minh renewed his commitment to liberate the South. Now their two armies braced for battle . . . For the first time, in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, Americans fought the North Vietnamese—face to face. For the first time, B-52s supported troops in the field. And for the first time, to Americans, Vietnam meant a major new war.

Here we have “balance,” but of a special kind. One may believe, with Johnson, that North Vietnam is invading the South, or, with Ho, that North Vietnam is fighting to liberate the South. We may not believe, however, that the United States is invading South Vietnam, which, we learn two episodes later, it had been bombing since 1961. Rather, we must assume, as a given fact not subject to debate, that the U.S. commitment was “to defend South Vietnam.”

To evaluate this effort at “balance,” we may observe that during the preceding summer (1965), five months after the United States began the regular bombing of North Vietnam, the Pentagon estimated that the 60,000 U.S. troops then deployed faced an enemy combat force of 48,500, 97 percent of them South Vietnamese guerrillas (“Viet Cong”). A few months after the Ia Drang Valley battle, in March 1966, the Pentagon reported 13,100 North Vietnamese forces in the South, along with 225,000 Viet Cong, facing 216,400 U.S. troops and 23,000 third-country troops (mostly South Korean), in addition to 690,000 ARVN troops.189 Considering these facts, and the earlier history, it would seem possible to imagine a point of view that departs from the framework established here, one that is, furthermore, plainly accurate: the United States was stepping up its attack against South Vietnam. But that