Ken Burns' New Doc Exposes the Emotion Behind War

Documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are essentially detectives, exposing new layers of entrenched facts about facets of American history, whether it’s the Civil War, World War II, jazz, Prohibition or baseball. Their latest film—a typically exhaustive 10-part, 18-hour inquiry into the Vietnam War, written by Geoffrey Ward—turned out to be the most challenging project of their careers, involving 100 interviews over a period of 10 years.

The duo had no way of knowing when they began the project that their documentary would be released during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose short, controversial tenure has been compared to that of Richard Nixon, accused of escalating the Vietnam War,, “What if I told you I’d been working on a film about mass demonstrations against the political administration occurring across the country, about a White House in disarray, about a president convinced that the press is lying and out to get him, about document drops of classified material, about an asymmetrical war and accusations that a political campaign reached out to a foreign power at the time of a national election?”