American filmmaker Oliver Stone is fascinated by history and those who make it. His JFK, Nixon, World Trade Center and W. have attempted to fill the gaps in our knowledge of what happened and what may have happened at key points in US history. Now he’s filled the gaps in his own timeline in an ambitious documentary called Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States.
The ten one-hour-long installments, shown on the Showtime movie channel since November 2012, feature continuous narration by Stone over constantly changing imagery, real or dramatized, and occasional quotes by historical figures, many of which are spoken by actors. It’s accompanied by a 750-page book that contains 100 pages of notes. Like the series, it was co-written by Peter J. Kuznick, a historian at American University.
The words “untold history” in the title are good for sales, but a more accurate title would be US Foreign Policy from 1939 to 2012. The documentary is not about America at all, but about what the US has done abroad, well-meaning or otherwise. Hardly any of this is untold to anyone living outside the US, or to anyone who has studied at a quality US university. It is fair to say, though, that the story in its entirety is unfamiliar to most Americans.
In clear, linear fashion, Stone explains how and why the United States came to see itself as the world’s policeman, how special interests clouded the judgement of the noble-minded, and how wrong decisions by inexperienced leaders got the US into ever greater international commitments and ever worse blunders. Harry Truman’s presidency at the end of World War II, says Stone, created a path of moral decline that took the US to a darker and darker place — from dropping atomic bombs on civilians to overthrowing elected governments to operating secret torture camps. In short, the United States ended up doing all the things it accused its enemies of wanting to do.
A different view
According to Stone, America’s participation in every war since 1939 — particularly the Cold War — was unnecessary. The enormous US budget for armaments was based on threats that either never materialized or that were the result of “blowback” when America’s own actions backfired. The Soviet Union, he says, always negotiated from a position of weakness; even Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev would have preferred peace to an arms race they knew they couldn’t win. Among the examples he cites is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he points out was actually the Soviet response to the stationing of American missiles in Turkey.
One of Stone’s most insightful conclusions is that by 1945, the US saw the British Empire collapsing and, with it, the global order and stability that the British had imposed. In exchange for America’s (initially reluctant) support in World War II, Britain would learn to accept a world that the US aimed to make more egalitarian but also more friendly to US business interests.
As with Stone’s other films, Untold History is somewhere around 90 percent fact, five percent stretching the truth and five percent conjecture. A lot of what Stone reports was long suspected, but only recently proven as documents became declassified. Almost none of it was known at the time to Americans at large, who were even more susceptible than now to the yellow press and populist rantings. Most of the facts were at least suspected by our leaders, but it’s hard to imagine they were truly certain about any of them. In their mind, the risks of making even worse decisions were simply too great to justify any other course of action.
The series ends with a stern reminder that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. He’s got a point there. The film takes us from the first Great Depression to the second. We’ve just finished the second Iraq War and are threatened with a second Korean War. A second Cold War, on the horizon with Russia or China or both, wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest.
It’s time to update those history books.
R. I. P. Roger Ebert
