The Vietnam War with Mike Wallace

Let's get Le Flaw Grande out of the way right up front: although this boxed set is entitled The Vietnam War with Mike Wallace, a more accurate nom de packaging would be Four Unrelated Episodes About the Vietnam War Culled from the 20th Century with Mike Wallace Series. With that caveat in mind, the programs contained herein are both engaging and informative, with the opener How We Went to War featuring Stanley Karnow (whose 1983 Vietnam: A History was the companion volume to public television's superior Vietnam: A History series [VL-11/87]), Neil Sheehan (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie), and former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, taking viewers back through the labyrinthine series of events beginning in the 1940s that led to America's involvement in the most divisive war since the Civil War. Combining archival clips (featuring CBS reporters Walter Cronkite, Edward Murrow, Charles Kuralt, and Morley Safer), stills, and commentary by Karnow, Sheehan, McNamara and narrator Wallace, the program expertly reconstructs the conflict between South and North Vietnam (which American foreign policy leaders mistakenly misconstrued as a fight between independence and Communist oppression), examines the legacy of JFK's haunting pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden" in the cause of liberty, chronicles the CIA-aided assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 when it became clear that the corrupt leader was not the man to carry freedom's torch, and looks at LBJ's tragic inheritance of the escalating "conflict" in--Johnson's frustrated assessment-- this "pissant little country" (Karnow: "Johnson was not a foreign policy type guy") that would eventually overshadow his significant domestic achievements. In the end, America, which vastly overestimated the worldwide Communist threat and grievously underestimated the North Vietnamese sense of "sacred cause," would pay a dear price, indeed, for its democratic zeal, overweening hubris, and absolutely disastrous miscalculations. The other volumes in the series are: Portraits in Courage: Air War and the P.O.W.s, A Soldier's Diary and Bloody Sieges of Khe Sahn and Con Thien. Although Vietnam: A Television History is still the far better choice (especially given the misleading title of this very incomplete history), the incisive political commentary and primary source footage (courtesy of CBS) on the individual episodes make this a worthwhile purchase. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)