The Vietnam War

"It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation." (ep. 1 00:06:47)

"Before the war was over, more than 58,000 Americans would be dead. At least 250,000 South Vietnamese troops died in the conflict, as well. So did over a million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas. Two million civillians, North and South, are thought to have perished, as well as tens of thousands in the neighboring states of Laos and Cambodia." (ep. 1 00:07:46)

"The French conquest of Indochina began with an attack on the ancient Vietnamese port of Danang in 1858. It took 50 years to lay claim to the whole region. Laos and Cambodia, as well as the 1,200-mile-long area that would come to be called Vietnam. All of it was ruled by a French govenor-general from his palace in Hanoi. The French largely lived in plantation estates, and in cities, like Saigon, made to look as much as possible like those at home. Most did not even bother to learn the language spoken by their subjects. Instead they installed a series of puppet emperors, and employed a network of French-speaking Vietnamese officials... mandarins... willing to carry out their wishes. The French put their subjects to work building roads and canals, railroads and bridges." (ep. 1 00:10:46)

"In the spring of 1919, as the victorious Allied Powers met in Paris to rebuild the world shattered by the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson headed the American delegation housed in the Hotel Crillon. One day, a tall, slender, 29-year-old man appeared with a petition for the president [that] he and other Vietnamese nationalists had written. Inspired by Wilson's declaration that the interests of colonial peoples should be given equal weight with those of their European rulers, the man was asking that this principle be applied to his homeland. The president's secretary promised to show it to Wilson, but there is no evidence that he ever did. His name was Nguyễn Tất Thành, but he was now living under an alias, Nguyễn Ái Quốc... "Nguyễn the patriot". During his long, shadowy career, he would adopt some 70 different pseudonyms, finally settling on "the most enlightened one"... Hồ Chí Minh." (ep. 1 00:14:24)

"Hồ Chí Minh was born in 1890, the son of a minor official in the French regime. After taking part in a demonstration against the puppet emperor and the Frenchman who pulled his strings, Hồ was expelled from school and marked for arrest. He left Vietnam and remained in exile for 30 years. He served as a cook's helper aboard a French liner, and visited New York and Boston, where he worked for a time as a pastry chef at the Parker House. He shoveled snow in London, tinted photographs in Paris. There, Hồ Chí Minh joined the French Socialist Party. But when he discovered the anti-colonial writings of Lenin, he became a communist. He was invited to Moscow to study, underwent training as a Soviet agent, was sometimes criticized for being a nationalist first, a communist second, and then was dispatched to China to organize a cell of other Vietnamese exiles and help establish the Indochinese Communist Party." (ep. 1 00:16:10)

"By 1940, much of the world was at war again. Germany had siezed most of Western Europe, including France. Imperial Japan threatened many of the European colonies in Asia, and occupied Vietnam, where they permitted their allies, the collaborationist French, to continue to oversee their colony. To some Vietnamese, the coming of the Japanese seemed to signal a welcome end to white colonial rule. But Hồ Chí Minh, still in exile in China, saw the Japanese as alien invaders, no more welcome than the French. They were only interested in exploiting his country and siezing Vietnamese crops to fill their own rice bowls. The time had come, he said, to rally "patriots of all ages and all types, peasants, workers, merchants and soldiers", to defeat the Japanese and the collaborationist French." (ep. 1 00:17:56)

"Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside." - John F. Kennedy