It may lack the subtlety and incredible show-don’t-tell sensitivity of Ken Burns’ epic 10-part masterpiece – The Vietnam War – but this new series retains the power to shock with its exposure of the cynical and self-serving manoeuvring of successive US presidents from Kennedy to Nixon whose lies, captured on the tape recordings made in the Oval Office, led directly to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of US servicemen and millions of Vietnamese.

The USA, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia paid a terrible price for the madness that engulfed America’s leaders – America, and the rest of the world, is still doing so as American democracy continues to crumble with the emergence of the putative autocracy of Donald Trump.

“The America that existed before the United States engaged militarily in Vietnam was a radically different country than the America that emerged after our troops came home,” says director Brian Knappenberger. “That new America that emerged from this conflict contained the roots of a lot of what plagues our society today – widespread alienation, deep cynicism, profound distrust in government, a breakdown of our civic institutions.”

If anything, this is, perhaps, an understatement. Not only were Americans lied to by their governments, hundreds of thousands of them were illegally spied upon, burgled, bugged and phone tapped by the Johnson and Nixon administrations obsessed with proving that the home-grown peace movement was a conspiracy directed from Moscow. It was a course of action that culminated in Watergate and the defenestration of Nixon, who had built a career on lying since his red-baiting days on the House Un-American Activities Committee.

While LBJ and his defence secretary Robert McNamara lied about the US ever being able to win the war and Nixon derailed the Paris Peace Negotiations to secure an electoral advantage over his democratic rival Hubert Humphrey, the CIA was busy secretly overthrowing governments, assassinating opponents in South America, Africa and Asia, colluding in the torture of activists in these continents and denying to the American public what was being done in their name.

Nixon, true to type, would ultimately betray South Vietnam reneging on America’s assurance of providing a backstop in the event of North Vietnamese aggression and, worse still, went on to abandon huge numbers of South Vietnamese who had worked for the US.

As if this was not bad enough, George W Bush did it all again. Lies were told about non-existent weapons of destruction to pave the way for the illegal invasion of Iraq. And when the US pulled out many of their allies were left to their own devices, just as they would be again in Afghanistan.

Little wonder that one of the contributors to the documentary wryly renames his country the ‘United States of Amnesia’.

Conspiracy theories take root in the USA with incredible ease, not just because of the internet but also because of the fertile ground created for cybernutters, right-wing extremists and Russian bad actors by successive US governments. Vast numbers of Americans neither trust nor believe their government and will vote for a known liar because ‘they all lie’.

Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather appears on the programme to opine that the Vietnam War saw American journalism at its finest. It was The Washington Post that published the story of the My Lai massacre, when 500 Vietnamese civilians were cruelly murdered. It was The New York Times that published the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, which proved that Johnson and McNamara knew the war was unwinnable but said otherwise in public. And it was The Washington Post that broke the Watergate scandal bringing Nixon down.

The question is, could a weakened New York Times and a Washington Post under the ownership of Jeff Bezos act with the same bravery and professionalism today?