Over fourteen sprawling hours, The War tells the story of history's greatest war. Rather, it tells enough of it for Burns' audience to consider themselves better informed afterwards. The series was designed for an explicitly American audience, and it interprets history through the lens of four American cities and their occupants.
The episode itself mostly dealt with facts and events that I was already familiar with. That said, I found the attitudes of its American interviewees quite interesting at times.
The War briefly introduces its four towns and then moves on to Pearl Harbor. After the narrator describes the damage dealt by the Japanese attack, a number of the interviewees mention—without noticeable bitterness—that they weren't aware of the scope of the destruction wrought on the American fleet for years afterwards. It turns out that the Roosevelt administration hushed up the number of ships sunk and lives lost for fear that the truth would incite panic.
Such a decision wouldn't fly with the public today, largely because it couldn't fly with the public. If Pearl Harbor happened in 2011, there would be thousands of pictures and video clips of the attack floating all over the internet. For better or for worse, the government could not feasibly suppress the truth about what happened. Generally speaking, governments today must at least pay lip service to a higher standard of transparency than they did during most of the 20th century. It's too easy to put the lie to an official account with a flipcam these days.
That said, even today, the government might attempt to reconstruct the events that led up to the attack in its favor. Some people would argue that the it has in fact done so. The argument goes like this: the administration deliberately coaxed Japan into hostility via its oil embargo and then allowed the attack to go forward, despite having cracked Japanese diplomatic codes, in an effort to involve the United States in World War II without looking like aggressors.The same general set of people who level this charge against FDR and company level a similar one against the Bush administration circa 9/11.
But most of the people who've argued that Japan was provoked in the name of diplomatic expedience have done so in retrospect. To the best of my knowledge, American citizens did not dispute the facts about Pearl Harbor at the time of the incident. By contrast, 9/11 truthers have waged a relentless campaign against the official account of the attack and the events that led up to it for years.
And not only did these interviewees and their contemporaries lack for incredulity, but they didn't even seem mad that they'd been—for lack of a better term—lied to. They trusted that they were kept in the dark for a reason, that their elected leaders knew better than they did. I grew up in the post-Watergate, post-Iran/Contra, post-warrantless-wiretapping era, and this attitude is wholly alien to me. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Mom talks sometimes about trust in government before Nixon. I know she's sincere, but I always grapple with the impression that she's pulling my leg. The concept is alien to me too.
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