"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.

"Ken Burns Completes Documentary About Fucking Liars Who Claimed They Watched Entire 'Jazz' Series"

"'This project is going to explore exactly who these dishonest little sons of bitches think they're fooling by claiming they sat down and watched the whole damn thing. There's even some rare footage of a few of these pieces of shit talking about my depiction of Benny Carter, which wasn't even in the fucking film.'"

From The Onion, 2016.

"There's Nothing Else Quite Like It in Our History"

"'Human beings for millenia have been fermenting and then distilling alcohol, and anthropologically it's found in every culture in some way, shape or form,' said Burns. 'This was the first and only time any nonreligious government of a large population attempted to ban its use, and the results were at the least inept and at the most a wrongheaded understanding of our society.
"'You know, the thinking that Prohibition was going to work… you have to wonder, what were the sponsors drinking?'"

Christopher Smith in the Los Angeles Times talks with Ken Burns and Daniel Okrent about the new documentary Prohibition.