"While It Can't Forgive the Presidents Who Lied, It's Too Forgiving of Everyone Else"

"The Civil War, which first aired in 1990, can be understood as being tangentially about Vietnam: It was a call for national unity decades after another war tore the country apart. The Vietnam War comes at a time when the nation is as divided as it was in the 1960s and '70s, and is still mired in a number of foolish and enormously destructive foreign wars. Unlike the other documentaries Burns has made (both with and without Novick) about baseball and jazz and the Roosevelts, The Vietnam War deals with living history, which means that he is forced to reckon with politics in ways that he is not used to."

Alex Shephard at the New Republic reviews Ken Burns's The Vietnam War.