Lynn Novick

Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein’s three-part, six-hour documentary series, The U.S. and the Holocaust, examines how the American people and our leaders responded to one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century, and how this catastrophe challenged our identity as a nation of immigrants and the very ideals of our democracy.

Tells the story of ordinary people in four quintessentially American towns - Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and Luverne, Minnesota - and examines the ways in which the Second World War touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America.

With morale plummeting in Vietnam, President Nixon begins withdrawing American troops. As news breaks of an unthinkable massacre committed by American soldiers, the public debates the rectitude of the war.

U.S. airpower makes the difference in halting a North Vietnamese offensive. After being re-elected, Nixon announces Hanoi has agreed to a peace deal. American prisoners of war will finally come home-to a bitterly divided country.

Kennedy inspires idealistic Americans to serve their country and wrestles with how deeply to get involved in South Vietnam. As the autocratic Diem regime faces a communist insurgency and Buddhist protests, a political crisis unfolds.

North Vietnamese troops and materiel stream down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the South. As an antiwar movement builds back home, soldiers and Marines discover that the war they are fighting in Vietnam is nothing like their fathers' war.

While the Watergate scandal rivets Americans' attention, the Vietnamese continue in a civil war. When North Vietnamese troops pour into the South, Saigon collapses. For the next 40 years, all sides search for healing and reconciliation.