Ken Burns: McCain’s best quality? He listened.

In 2017, as Lynn Novick and I were finishing our film on the Vietnam War, I called Sen. John McCain to see if I could stop by his office and show some clips to him. He agreed, and when I asked if there were any sections of the 18-hour film that he’d particularly like to see, McCain said “the Vietnamese parts” — the stories that included the North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.McCain and I had first spoken about the film a decade earlier, just as it was getting underwa