Producers of The War say they didn't try to exclude, and with two exceptions they didn't try to include, either
In this response to PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, posted in his online column April 18 [2007], Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, producers of the forthcoming PBS series The War, discussed the controversy raised by Latino groups.
We appreciate being given the opportunity to explain the process through which The War took shape, and to try to shed some light on the choices we made along the way about the stories in the film.
We set out, in 2001, to make a film that would be experiential and anecdotal in nature, rather than a comprehensive or definitive treatment of American history during this period. As such, we envisioned the film as an exploration of the human experience of the War, and of combat particularly. In this regard, The War is and was always intended to be quite different from our other big series, The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz.
As you probably know, there is a card on screen at the beginning of every episode that reads: "The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting. This is the story of four American towns, and how their citizens experienced that war." Our original concept was to focus on one small city or large town, (we did not want to choose a major city such as New York or Chicago) and to try to find veterans from that town who were willing and able to describe their combat experiences. We realized fairly quickly that it was not easy to find living combat veterans who were able to do this in a way that would be effective on camera, for a variety of reasons. Therefore, we broadened our approach to include multiple towns and in each locale our emphasis was on identifying thoughtful and reflective combat veterans who could help us understand the many dimensions of what the war meant for those who fought in it.
Along the way we spoke with (in person and on the phone) close to 500 people, eventually selecting 40 for on camera interviews. We never set out to include any particular ethnic or racial groups, or to include individuals in the film in order to ‘represent’ any groups. Conversely, we never set out to exclude any groups either. We were absolutely open to whomever we could find that could tell a good story about what the war meant to him (or her.) In other words, we did not intentionally set out to include Hispanic, Native American, Filipino American, Italian American or German American veterans or any other group.
We went into each of our four chosen towns and tried to find veterans who could share their stories in a compelling way, and whose stories fit in to the larger chronology of the war that we were trying to cope with. As it turns out, we did not find any Latino veterans — neither did we make any special effort to do so.
The one exception to all of this is that we did consciously seek out and interview Japanese-American veterans — because of the utter uniqueness of their experience. 110,000 Japanese Americans were interned by our government during the war and we felt that the assault on their civil rights (as well as the decision of many Japanese American men to serve in the military nonetheless in a segregated unit) needed to be included in the film. We also, to a much lesser degree, sought out African-American veterans because they, too, were forced to serve in segregated ranks.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
This letter was not published in the print edition.
Web page posted April 19, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee