New Ken Burns' 'Vietnam War' documentary tackles divisive era

Ken Burns, who has produced definitive documentaries on subjects ranging from the Civil War to baseball to jazz, is tackling the Vietnam War, one of the most divisive periods in modern American history.

The 10-part series, directed by Burns and Lynn Novick, will air next September on PBS, the network announced.

The series attempts to look at all sides of the war, examining its impact on Vietnamese as well as Americans on both sides of the war. The conflict spawned massive protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and prompted President Lyndon Johnson to reject a re-election bid in 1968.

“The Vietnam War was a decade of agony that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans,” Burns said in a statement announcing the film. “Not since the Civil War have we as a country been so torn apart.”

The series, called The Vietnam War, features testimony from nearly 100 witnesses. It took six years to complete and includes archival footage and home movies as well as audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations.

“More than 40 years after it ended, we can’t forget Vietnam, and we are still arguing about why it went wrong, who was to blame and whether it was all worth it,” Burns said.

Burns has built a reputation for tackling sweeping historical events and shedding light on their significance, sometimes changing how Americans view history. The Vietnam War divided America like no other conflict and decades later still triggers bitter feelings.

The United States first got involved militarily in Vietnam in the 1950s in an attempt to keep the Southeast Asian nation from becoming a communist ally of the Soviet Union. As civil war engulfed U.S.-backed South Vietnam and communist-controlled North Vietnam, the United States sent in hundreds of thousands of troops to support the South Vietnamese government in the 1960s. Unable to secure victory for the South as anti-war sentiment grew at home, President Nixon negotiated a peace accord, and the United States abandoned the country in 1975, when the communists took charge of a unified Vietnam.

"Ken and I have tried to shed new light on the human dimensions of the war by looking at it from the bottom up, the top down and from all sides,” Novick said.

The series, written by Geoffrey C. Ward, will be accompanied by books and a public outreach to help foster a national discussion over the war and its impact.