I still haven’t watched The Vietnam War but I’m getting up to it. From the comments I have seen, if nothing else, Burns seems to have shifted the Vietnam narrative to (or perhaps back to) where it belongs, with the Vietnamese and particularly the South Vietnamese.
It is a very complex picture.
For too long, the Saigon government has been just a part of the furniture, if it was acknowledged at all. The communists of course vilified it as the “puppet government,” and this has become the accepted picture everywhere. It was far from that and it might have been better at times if we had actually had more control over it. It was riddled with corruption and graft but even that changed and varied with whomever was in charge, and there were periods of real hope.
The “evil Saigon regime” is a simplistic caricature. Diem was very bad but he was killed in 1963. There was a period of chaos from which the flamboyant but competent Nguyen Cao Ky emerged as strongman. He was unable to hang on and was out-maneuvered by rival Nguyen Van Thieu, who was perhaps the most corrupt of all but who was more palatable to Americans than the “wildman” and “cowboy” Ky. Thieu’s cronyism was a direct cause of the military stalemate and the failure of “Vietnamization.” The Saigon government, our ally and client, was not a monolith whose every action is worthy of condemnation and contempt. The “evil Saigon regime” did not make the outcome inevitable for there was no single entity to which that label applied over the whole course of the war.