the book tv news letter, sent weekly, is an insiders look at authors and put festivals. and the american history tv weekly newsletter gives you the upcoming programming exploring our nation's past. vision -- visit c-span.org/connect and sign up today. you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation like us on facebook at c-span history. announcer: next on american history tv, historian mark philip bradley of the university of chicago discusses the vietnam war. he explains why teaching the vietnam war has changed, and reflects on u.s./vietnam relations today. we interviewed him at the american historical association meeting and washington, d.c. this is about 15 minutes. >> my father teaches history at

the university of chicago and is -- and as a specialty, so it is a history of vietnam and human rights. i want to talk about vietnam with you. it is the anniversary year. probably has been a good year to be a vietnam historian. how has america's understanding of the war changed over 50 years? >> you know, i think the crucial shift has been more recent and certain kinds of ways. during the war itself, the way academic historians talked and wrote about the war was during a critical mode. vietnam was a mistake, books were set up to understand how that mistake might work. the reagan era brought a different way of thinking about the war. that was a provision is -- revisionist notion that there was a war. and that there was some sort of strategic point. that set up a contentious set of debates between historians who want to recover something out of vietnam that is more positive, and what has continued to be a

mainstream historical perspective in many ways, the war was fundamentally wrong and ineffective. the younger generation comes into all this. as the legs those debates, in some ways, were about our generation or a generation behind us. the younger people come to it from a different perspective. the first set of kids i was teaching, their parents may have served in the war. or maybe they were antiwar activists or had some connection to the war. now, it is a long time ago. i think that is helpful in teaching in some ways. it is a blank slate. that creates its own challenges in trying to fill in what that sleet might be for students. they are able to think about it in terms that are less politicized. reporter: it is not emotional

for them. prof. bradley: it's not. it is also america's -- no longer america's longest war. afghanistan now has that moniker on it. that is also a way that the war was exceptional eyes. -- exceptionalized. there was never a war that long. there was never a war like that. now, you have a generation of people who have gone through iraq and afghanistan and are perpetual war on terror, and it seems normal, rather than an aberration. i think that is the way the younger generation sees it. reporter: the difference, of course, and here we come to the emotional part, is all the wars they have experienced have been fought by people they don't know so well. with vietnam, the war was a more personal thing. when we talk to interns at our company, we try to convey to them how much of the draft impacted everybody's life. what are your students understanding of the importance of the draft on the public perception of the war? prof. bradley: i think that is a very hard thing to recover with

students. ken birds just -- ken burns just did this 18 hour series on vietnam that was controversial in its own. one of the things that series did well, and i'm hoping to use those in working with students, he is good on stories, and he has got long narratives around people who either signed up or were drafted. you see them move through time. we see their families, their you see them move through time. we see their families, their mothers, their brothers and sisters. that kind of thing, i think, is something that can help students begin to understand. if it had been me, this is how it might have gone. but it is very abstract with students. the war is fought by almost a separate class of people in the united states. reporter: one of the big arguments of the war was the domino theory. that if vietnam fell, then southeast asia, etc., and the

great influence of china and russia. with the lens of history and our greater understanding of those two major powers, was that theory -- was it tested and proven that it was that big of a threat? prof. bradley: again, you can interview different people that could answer your question in different ways. the dominant theory was that the war was an extension of the cold war and that we were fighting at the front of the cold war in a hot way in vietnam. we were fighting for reasons that -- because north vietnam has a communist orientation, and increasingly the soviet union and the chinese are supporting them. but it was about independence. dominance theory in that sense kind of don't signify in the way

that they did for mcnamara or johnson or nixon. the second thing is if you get to the other side of it, in 1975, the north had won and it seemed as though the communists were victorious. today in vietnam, we have a market economy that americans had their wildest dreams that vietnam would become, and that is the reality today. history has an odd way of moving in directions people don't anticipate. >> how important was normalization of relationships with the united states to vietnam's development? >> it is, but i think we sometimes overestimate the impact of the united states on small states like vietnam. we had a trade embargo on vietnam which we did not lift until 1990, and once we did,

that moved toward normalization of diplomatic relations. everybody bute, us was trading with vietnam. australia, the french, and south korea. investor in largest vietnam today. you are talking about why the vietnamese economy has been successful, it has a market economy -- one has to look at parts of europe, but more to developments in asia and the united states. our recognition accelerated a set of patterns that were already going on, and i think that is a more helpful way to see it then that our recognition said something going. >> what about the government and how much freedom the people have? >> it is like china in the sense that there is a one-party state that is running the government and the economy at the same time.

the state is not particularly keen on people who don't play by those rules. activists, people sticking out against problems in vietnamese society. there have been celebrated trials where people have been locked up for 10-15 years. way inid, there is a which civil society is engaged in how policies work. there have been peasants in brutal areas where the government was essentially trying to take land away, and they had to back off. these are not in public and are generally not what the press is covering. there are generally pressed blackouts. there is a way that everyday society is making a pact -- making an impact on how the government works. a lot of impact comes back against people protesting that

the government was too close to china on a set of issues, and the government had to push back in some ways there. in general, the rules for open conversation are not -- but iere are these spaces, and think it is the case in china as well. >> another legacy is large vietnamese population centers in the united states. how is our country changed question mark -- how has our country changed? given that it was only 1975 and later that people were coming over -- you have people in government, in the military. in fact, the first american ship vietnam to came back to her three years ago was captained by a vietnamese-american. you have a vietnamese-american coming back and working with the military in vietnam.

this was the impact of vietnamese americans in the united states and a friday of fields. other been different for -- in a variety of fields. different for other people coming from cambodia and laos.m -- cambodia and for the cambodian situation, it is a different story. certainly with the lao community. the vietnamese have been more successful. >> you are here to push for -- on the can burns series, and you, in fact, earlier -- , andf the things i read the reference this, the reliance in the series of oral histories not involving academic

historians. what are the pluses and minuses of that? in telling the vietnam story. we like to think we command and interest from the might --ublic, in a more compelling way. and they are absolutely brilliant interviews that go on. people we follow across time, so you get a sense of knowing the people. not another quick interview that is up, but the deep, granular way of thinking about it. but one of the fears is, will it be balanced in such a way that it would not have a point of view? i did not get a sense that it was particularly balanced in the end. it really did represent a strong critique of american involvement in vietnam during that time.

one of the ways i think burns does it is using the tapes. he does it with kennedy, nixon, johnson. essentially, the american state hangs itself. as you listen on one hand, publicly saying all was well and privately, over time, that it was all falling apart. but you have that in the words of the actors themselves, and it takes us out of having to make that argument, where the contention often comes. but what do you do when you've got it on tape? that is what you are hearing. combining the tapes together really does it in a compelling way. >> this network is a post-vietnam creation, 1979. we've had generations of journalists, members of congress, and historians who have been part of the experience and served, and are now aging out. country hear about the

absorbing the lessons of vietnam as we approach current policy. as a historian, have the lessons of vietnam successively been absorbed -- successfully been absorbed into our policy? >> i would say no. afghanistan and iraq don't show lesson hasietnam been learned. the notion that we can intervene in a place and politically or socially engineer a transformation, it doesn't work. all you would have to do is tilt backward in time to think about the british believed they could do that. the british believed that, the french believed that they could do that as an imperial power. this whole notion that these kind of interventions can achieve a policy goals that we isgine as possible

fundamentally flawed. and yes, we seem to do it over and over and over again. when i first started teaching, i did believe this could never happen again. people have seen this and learned this lesson. the last 10 or 15 years would suggest the other way around. , as atory gives us society, an opportunity to revisit these questions. what are some of the significant ways you are observing these next couple years of anniversaries are being observed? >> i think the anniversaries are good in putting people's attentions and focus back on vietnam. in some ways, i think that has ebbed. it is an opportunity to go back and perhaps rethink some of these issues. tet year, it is the anniversary. that is almost the perfect event to thank in kaleidoscopic ways about the war.

if you were to remember, at the moment, it looked as though it were a major defeat for the united states. people were seeing pictures of the american and embassy, etc.. then it turned out that within two weeks, the americans had pushed the vietnamese back and it appeared it was not the defeat that it was. but then it turned out that the north had a kind of bloody inner party battle about whether to do tet or not. that put aside a set of more moderate actors in vietnam that -- it turned into a more conventional war after 1968. it is one of those events were so many things happened as a result that it is a good way for people to understand the level of complexity involved. >> it is a complex history and

we have a brief time. thank you for talking about vietnam then and now. you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter for more information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. a case about student free speech. in 1965, 5 students from des iowa, wore black armbands to school to protest the vietnam war, violating school policy. -- challenged the school board's free street prescriptions -- , and --ech restrictions

established that students keep their first amendment rights on school grounds. -- was 13 at the time. a pediatriccades as nurse, she began working as a free speech advocate for students, touring nationally at schools and youth centers, and eric jaffe -- with experience at .he supreme court a clerk for supreme court justice clarence thomas in 1996. atch landmark cases monday 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span and join the conversation. tag is landmark cases. we have -- or background on each case. we had the companion book, a link to the national constitution center's interactive constitution, and the landmark cases podcast.