For anyone who lived through the tumult of the late 1960s, this TV movie excruciates with memory. The criminal incompetence and stubbornness of US policy in Vietnam brandished, first, by Kennedy's administration and then fatally in depth by Johnson's, illustrates with discomforting clarity just how the worst of times can be perpetuated by government's "best and brightest." Michael Gambon brilliantly captures the escalating agony, but perhaps not the outsized charm and cajolery, of Lyndon Johnson; he seems to cower here much more than command. And what shocks the viewer here at movie's end is more what is left out than what is spelled out. Even before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, quickly followed by that of Robert Kennedy within two months of each other in 1968, LBJ is shown to have given up his presidency in March of that year. Our military's death toll in Vietnam stood at about 25,000 then, and the peace process was about to start. But only one who lived through the period or studied it closely will recall that seven(7) more years of US fighting and military support in Vietnam followed Johnson's withdrawal, extending right thru the Nixon years, and our death toll more than doubled. The realization of this fact, a footnote after three hours of this film. shocks so much more than any conclusion conjured by a dramatic presentation ever could.
Review of Path to War
