Human Interest

Vietnam veterans recall their experiences on returning home.

A 6 minute documentary on McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

What is McCarthyism? How did it happen?

LBJ and Vietnam: Mark K. Updegrove, director of the LBJ Presidential Library, is the author of “Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency.”

Clip from the film The Red Menace (1949).

An interactive timeline of the Berlin Wall. Click on the dates for films of major events, interviews from the time, plus locations on a city map.

Kevin Boylan: 'Taking their cue from the Vietnam revisionists, Iraq war optimists argued that just as Americans thought we were losing in Vietnam when in fact we were winning, so too were we winning in Iraq despite apparent evidence to the contrary. The problem, the optimists argued, was that — just as during the Vietnam War — naysaying pundits and politicians were not merely undermining popular support for the war, but giving our enemies hope that they could win by waiting for the American people to lose their will to continue the fight. This kind of talk alarmed me because it discouraged a frank reassessment of our failing strategy in Iraq, which was producing that weekly procession of maimed veterans. And I also knew that the historical premises on which it was based were deeply flawed. America did not experience a “lost victory” in Vietnam; in fact, victory was likely out of reach from the beginning.'

“Korea is called the forgotten war, and part of what has been forgotten is the utter ruin and devastation that we rained down on the North Korean people,” said John Delury, a professor in the international relations department at Yonsei University in Seoul. “But this has been ingrained into the North Korean psyche.”

Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Chilean military dictator, born November 25 1915; died December 10 2006.

'Because [the Cold War] was above all an ideological conflict, a contest between two systems, it touched almost every aspect of life: the books you read on holiday, the films you saw at the cinema, the music you played in your student bedsit. Indeed, one of the arguments of our series is that in the Cold War, the decisive weapon wasn’t the atom bomb. It was our popular culture.'

The first episode of the excellent series on the Cold War made in 1998. Narrated by Kenneth Branagh; produced by Jeremy Isaacs and Pat Mitchell.