Getting History Wrong: Ken Burns’ Series

[February 28, 2025]  The popular Vietnam War series is back for reruns on cable television. Several years ago, when the series came out, I pointed out that the series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick was playing on long-debunked lies about the war. Yet, many still consider it the “ultimate history of the war.”  Sadly, Ken Burns lost a tremendous opportunity to tell the unvarnished truth, the good and the bad – about the war.

Ken Burns got it wrong. Historian Lewis Sorely, Ph.D., properly critiques Burn’s “history.”  Crucial omissions, a focus on “emotional reality,” a lack of context, poor and biased research, reliance on discredited sources, dependence on sponsors and untrustworthy advisors, and revisionism deeply stain Burn’s product.

“From my perspective, the Burns production had one objective, to reinforce the standard anti-war narrative that the Vietnam war was unwinnable, illegal, immoral, and ineptly conducted by the allies from start to finish.” – Lewis Sorely, Vietnam Vet and historian

Lewis Sorley is a veteran, military historian, and author of A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. In a 2017 episode of The Federalist Radio Hour (link here), Sorley discusses his understanding of the Vietnam War and how Ken Burns’ portrayal of Vietnam is revisionist history.

Burns also focused on the wrongdoing, the suffering, and the brutality of the Americans and the South Vietnamese. Still, he absolutely mitigated the brutality of the North Vietnamese communists who had done unspeakable evil acts to their people. One of the examples is that not only did he just briefly mention the Hue massacre during the 1968 Tet Offensive by the communists, but he also even allowed them to justify what they did rather than confirming that it was purely a barbaric retaliation by killing innocent men, women, children and infants by beating, torturing and burying them alive.

It is important not to believe every glossy media production without a close look under the hood. If we were to do so, we would start to see this series as another attempt to cement the Leftist narrative that “Vietnam War bad” and that it is a “scar on the American people.”  Ken Burns’ documentary is biased and should be widely criticized for it.

But go and read the hundreds of reviews, and you will not see this mentioned. Amazon, for example, shows thousands of reviews of the film and an average five-star rating. IMDb gives the film an extraordinarily high 9.0/10.0 rating. The problem is that the film is wrong from the get-go and provides the wrong lessons for us as a society. If we are to learn from history, we had better get the history right.

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Please read my books:

1. “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
2. “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).