“As you can tell, this is a story I can’t let go of,” Talbot wrote in an email to me. That 1974 documentary shows the damage that Vietnam and the Vietnamese suffered after years of bombings and the widespread use of napalm by the U.S. Talbot also made a documentary for PBS called 1968: The Year that Shaped a Generation, which also covers the Vietnam War and protests against it. Year of the Tiger, from 1974, traces Talbot’s own visit to North Vietnam, after the peace agreement was signed and POWs came home after they were long held captive. In 1971, Talbot went on to make DC III, a documentary about the soldiers who belonged to Vietnam Veterans Against the War and who threw away their medals in a public ceremony on the steps of the U.S. It might bring tears to your eyes if you’re nostalgic about the Sixties. After all these years, that film still packs a wallop. Talbot made his first film, March on Washington, which is about the anti-war movement, in 1969-1970, with friends when they were students at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Nixon is, of course “The Madman,” though he surrounded himself with others no less mad and maddening, including Henry Kissinger. It’s scheduled for release in the summer of 2021.
in November 1969, one of the peak moments in the movement to stop the war. His up-and-coming documentary, The Movement and the Madman, examines the big protests in Washington D.C. Steve Talbot has probably covered the Sixties in depth, more often and more creatively than any other living American filmmaker. Karleton Armstrong, one of the bombers, appears on camera in The War at Home, as does former Madison mayor and anti-war activist, Paul Soglin who provides commentary and continuity. The Madison movement, which aimed to “make war” against the war makers themselves, culminated in August 1970 with the bombing at the Army Mathematics Research Center that led to the accidental death of Robert Fassnacht, a physicist. In December 2020, radicals both old and young, gathered on Zoom to discuss The War at Home, a documentary by Glenn Silber that focuses on the decade-long protests that took place in Madison, Wisconsin and that targeted the Dow Chemical Company, which manufactured the napalm used against the Vietnamese. Now, nearly 50 years after the end of the War in Vietnam, anti-war activists and organizers are reliving it, rethinking it, and experiencing it virtually all over again.
In fact, he had secret plans to widen the war, and to use nuclear weapons to stop the so-called dominoes from falling and to prevent Vietnam from going communist. For a decade they-or should I say “we”- raised voices and put bodies on the line against the War in Vietnam, which seemed to have no end, though Nixon claimed he had a secret plan to terminate the conflict. Once upon a time, the protesters outside the White House, the Department of Justice and all across Washington D.C., were mostly lefties and liberals of one stripe or another.