Roosevelt House welcomes Geoffrey C. Ward, one of America’s preeminent historians. Ward will be in conversation with Harold Holzer, the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House, about his new book, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History, the companion volume to his latest collaboration with filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, a multi-part documentary to be broadcast on PBS in September.
The Vietnam War continues to haunt our national memory. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. The war fractured the country and created deep political fault lines that still divide us. The Vietnam War continues in the tradition of Burns’ and Ward’s critically acclaimed PBS and book collaborations (The Civil War, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History), and draws on dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers and their families, high-level officials in America and Vietnam, antiwar protestors, POWs, and many more. Rather than taking sides, the book seeks to understand why the war occurred, and how we can clarify its complicated legacy.
Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, September 25, 2017
