If Ken Burns actually believes that Americans lost their ordinary trust of the federal government as a consequence of the Vietnam War, as suggested in this interview of him at the Washington Post, his vision of American history is seriously twisted, skewed. As anyone who’s actually looked at the history with an open mind can tell you, not trusting the federal government has been the default position for Americans for most of its history. 1940-1970 was an aberration, the consequence of the one-two punch of the Great Depression and World War II.
It’s not a coincidence that Americans elected Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency four times and Americans had an unprecedented trust of the federal government.
The federal government took that trust and did exactly what you’d expect from it: overreached. That the second-longest war in American history coincided with that period of trust isn’t a coincidence, either.
I have lived through the longest war in American history and the second longest, the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. We have been at war for much of my adult life. Enough.
