Oliver Stone’s History of the United States

oliver stoneAcademy Award winning director, screenwriter and producer  Oliver Stone has become known for his incredibly popular and controversial films, many of which focus on his interpretation of major events in American history.   It would be hard to say which films he is best known for.  “JFK”,”The Doors”, “Nixon”, “Talk Radio” and “Natural Born Killers” are just a few of his most loved and most controversial films.  He also won three Oscars– for his work on “Born on the Fourth of July”, “Platoon” and “Midnight Express”.    He stopped by the SiriusXM studios recently to sit down with Ron Bennington and talk about his documentary miniseries “The Untold History of the United States” and the re-release of “JFK” on the 50th anniversary of the  President’s death. Excerpts of the interview appear below. You can hear the interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.

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Oliver Stone Talks About Basis for  “The Untold History Of The United States” 

Ron Bennington:  When you go over this stuff for “The Untold History of the United States”, it’s such a massive, massive project. 

Oliver Stone:  Yeah. That’s why we made…well, we did the movie first. The 12 hours flow very nicely. I think it’s really a big project. It goes from 1898 to 1913. The book substantiates in detail what we’re saying. So, we wanted this thing to be taken seriously. I am not the historian. I am the dramatist. And my historian / co-partner was Peter Kuznick of American University, director of nuclear studies, Institute of America – and his graduate students did a hell of a job. But we’re building on the work of the revisionist historians of the late 50s and 60s, (D.F.) Fleming and William Appleman Williams, (Gabriel) Kolko, Lloyd Gardner, Gar Alperovitz – these people examined the Truman administration, examined the atomic bomb – raised all these questions about what the American empire was about. I’m just saying we are on those shoulders. We’re working off those shoulders. We didn’t reinvent this as some critics would say.

Ron Bennington:  But whether you’re reading the book or watching it, you’re going to have to hit pause every once in awhile and just go – what the hell took place here? I mean it’s so overwhelming that you want to do most of the stuff just piece by piece. You have to let it sink in. 

Oliver Stone:  You have to. That’s why you have to spend the 12 hours and if possible, read the book, but definitely the 12 hours. There’s also an audiobook out by the way. You want to make it accessible, but you can’t simplify this history into a National Enquirer kind of thing where you’re just shooting out sound bites.

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Oliver Stone Talks About Nostalgia For The 1950s 

Ron Bennington:  People tend to look back at the 1950s with some kind of nostalgia. 

Oliver Stone:  I don’t know why. (laughs) Not from the Guatemalans, the Iranians or the Indonesians.

Ron Bennington:  But don’t you think even a lot of that thing, the nostalgia people – was almost sold by Hollywood. That maybe, it never really existed at all.

Oliver Stone:  Well, there was a material prosperity, absolutely.

Ron Bennington:  Because we had destroyed everybody else. 

Oliver Stone:  Well, the United States was the leading producer, owned 50% of the wealth of the world. Every other country was devastated. Most of all, was the Soviet Union which had taken some 25 million plus casualties. They were poor, broke, desperately in need of money. They were waiting for the $10 billion that had been promised by Roosevelt and they were hoping for it. It never came to be. And we, of course, reconstituted the world. It was our world to remake. The Marshall Plan was part of it. And we gave the money to the European countries for recovery. Part of our big plan was to reconstitute West Germany. That was a very important part of it and of course, was very scary to the Soviets because they had had 2 great wars with the Germans and lost in World War I too. So, the Soviets had always objected to Germany being put back on its feet. We go into the depth of that. We can’t argue it here, but the point is, the United States took a very aggressive position after World War II. Not only in Europe, but also in Asia with Japan and all the occupied islands. We put bases in Okinawa, the Philippines. We kept a very strong military presence in the Pacific.

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untold history

Oliver Stone Talks About How History Is Taught In This Country

Ron Bennington:  What is it about Americans that keeps us from wanting to be part of the world? 

Oliver Stone:  There’s a certain self-love I think. A certain lack of self-examination. I think that the Socratic goal is a good one. To know thyself. And part of that is knowing your own history. And I think because our school children are not taught authentic history – they’re taught a part of our history, but they’re not taught the whole thing. Our history is a correction of that and it says – look, we have to look at our bad deeds as well as our good deeds. We don’t want to make this a Disney movie. And the way we go to school now, we’re taught like a Disney history. It’s like a History Channel or a Ken Burns movie or something like that. It doesn’t help you to see the world in a global light and I think this is very crucial. When they did that national report card a couple of years ago, they found that the American high school students were not the weakest in math and engineering and science as the news keeps reporting. They’re the weakest in history. Far weaker than in math.

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Oliver Stone Talks About American Exceptionalism

Ron Bennington:  If you go back, and anyone listening, remember where you first heard – “this is the greatest country in the world”, was in first grade. And George Washington was flawless. Lincoln was flawless. So, you’re sitting there at the same time that you’re learning about religion and whatever mythology is there – and you’re hearing these things and you obviously just accept them. And they’re tough to get rid of at an early age. 

Oliver Stone:  Oh very much so. They call it in historical terms – “American Exceptionalism”. The concept that partly God is on America’s side, that we are divinely ordained. Partly that comes from the Pilgrims, the Puritans that came here from Europe. They were persecuted. They came here and they founded a new land, a new Jerusalem. The city on the hill. The shining city. Ronald Reagan referred to it. And it’s a lovely concept because most immigrants run from fear. And sometimes they forget that the old country, “Old Europe” as (Donald) Rumsfeld called it, becomes evil or bad or the place of dark ideas. And I can understand some of that, but you have to grow up and change too in life. Many Asians came here from China. They created our railroads. They built up our country as much as us. But the Asians also felt persecuted by the Americans too. But we do have many different strains of people that came to our country. Hispanic, African-America, European. It became a melting pot and it’s a very confusing melting pot. Some people believe in God, some don’t. It doesn’t matter. We are a new country and we felt like there was a moral purpose and I think everyone celebrates this new country. My mother is an immigrant, so I have feelings like that and I’ve contributed to this country, but I think that’s our strength is the immigrant strain. At one time, it becomes a driving force for new energy. And I think most of the decadence of America comes from the power elite. People who give birth to their own children who become, with some exceptions, become a decadent class on the country. And it becomes a white minority often. A very strong white minority that wants to keep out immigrant strains, wants to keep out the Blacks, wants to keep out the Irish, you want to keep out the Polish, you want to keep out the foreign born. It becomes that kind of a situation. Right now, with the Republicans in Congress, sometimes I wonder if that’s what’s really going on. Is there a white minority here that’s fighting off this colorization, this mongrelization of our race.

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Oliver Stone Talks About How His Time In Vietnam Affected His Career

Ron Bennington:  Do you think that the fact that you went to war as a young man also keeps…?

Oliver Stone:  It also helped me. And also, the fact that my mother was French. But going to Vietnam…I was born conservative and raised Republican. My father hated Roosevelt and supported Dwight Eisenhower ferociously. I was anti-Castro growing up. All that stuff – went to boarding schools. In Vietnam, it didn’t change me. It just numbed me out and alienated me. I came back to this country and took me another 10 years of seeking, talking to people, enlightening myself, evolving. And I started to make more and more progressive films. I went back to Central America to do “Salvador” in 1983 – 84 and I saw a world that was so similar to Vietnam again where we were supporting the death squads. We were supporting the military. We had American boys and girls in uniform there. Honduras. And we were supporting the war in Guatemala and Salvador. Our intention was to go into Nicaragua and destroy that revolution which Reagan considered communist. Any way, it was Vietnam redux. At that point, I committed myself to make “Salvador”, “Platoon” – I started to make more and more progressive films.

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Oliver Stone Talks About The Build Up To War With Iraq

Ron Bennington:  Here in New York City, …because the World Trade Center was here, we weren’t waving a bunch of flags in New York City. And there were giant marches, hundreds of thousands of people who did not want to see us go to war because a lot of people said -‘I saw this in my yard.  I don’t want this to happen somewhere else.’ And I would leave some of these marches and go home to turn on CNN to see what it looked like on TV – nothing. Nothing or just a small blip. So, there was definitely a feeling across the board that we need to do this with the Republicans, Democrats, the media, everybody. 

Oliver Stone:  I remember there were protests. They were worldwide by the way. They were also in Italy and Australia, Germany – huge protests. Millions of people protested against it because they knew it was nonsense. This WMD Bush lie. But it went out, why? Because it was pushed by who? The power elite. People who control the press in this country, the media. The people in government. Most of them voted for it. Hillary Clinton voted for it. Let’s be honest. We never learn from these mistakes. We should get rid of these people. That’s why I turned on…I went for Obama because I thought he would be…he was against the war in Iraq, but I thought that he would be a way to reform. A way back. I guess, I saw in him traces of John Kennedy or Roosevelt, but I there was a moment there in 2008, he had a mandate. He gave up the grassroots mandate. He took the private money instead of taking the public option on the finance and by taking the money from Wall Street and the corporations, he….actually McCain took the public option, you know that? And McCain did not take private money. Obama did. That was a shame. And I think he started something that he could never get out of. Something changed between his election and his inauguration.

Ron Bennington:  And he certainly never went back to that. There’s not even been glimpses where…

Oliver Stone:  Oh, there’s been glimpses.

Ron Bennington:  You think so?

Oliver Stone: I think he’s a more educated and smarter man and a better manager of our empire than actually Bush was because there was so much corruption in the Iraq war and there still is in the Afghanistan war. So much wasted money. But still, I think he’s a better manager. But being the manager of this thing is not the solution. And I don’t think he’s in control of all these recent NSA revelations. I think the military, as with the atomic bombs, they build something or they take it and they’ll take it as far as they can because it’s in our nature to use what we build. No one seems to have a reign, any kind of reign on this NSA. All of a sudden, Bush says – you’re either with us or against us. He jumps from a band of 2,000 terrorists called al Qaeda. He calls them the enemy at first and then he broadens it out to be 60 countries. He says – you’re either with us or against us. We’re looking for terrorists everywhere. Terrorism has always been the basis for an authoritarian government everywhere. Hitler used it. Every country country looking to consolidate its hold over its people will cry terrorism.

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Oliver Stone Talks About The End Of The American Empire

Ron Bennington:  Well, I will tell you this about the media. You can’t sit and deliver the truth at the same time that you’re looking at ratings. The fact that that’s a corporate entity like any other, it always comes down to money. And it’s the one thing that we will forgive anyone of, is money. Sean Penn wants to talk about Haiti, everyone’s like – shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. But if he goes on TV and sells watches, we’ll buy into it because he’s getting paid. 

Oliver Stone:  Well then, we don’t deserve what we have and we’re bound to fall. How we fall or fail, will be interesting. As a dramatist, I would be curious to see how that happens. We could go the Roman Empire way which takes hundreds of years. There were many locations of civilization as it was falling apart. Many people were doing very well in Greece and various countries in the Roman Empire for centuries, but will we be an empire that will be…how do you say it? Because of our hubris, because of the pride that we have, will we lash out?  Are we going to strike in Syria? Are we going to strike Russia? Are we going to find a basis to go in somewhere? Will we be undone by our military spending? Will there be an economic tsunami? History has shown us that the curve of the ball can break differently. I was in the Soviet Union writing a screenplay about dissidents in 1983. It was the most dead morbid society I had ever seen in my life. People had no hope. There was no economic incentive. There was no compassion. People didn’t care for each other. And out of that system, within 2 years, rose Gorbachev. He was a pure product of that system. He was like Henry Wallace in this country. He was chief of agriculture. And he saw what a mess that was, the agriculture. And he set about reforming it. And as president, he set about reforming the country. Communism fell by 1991. In our lifetime, you’re old enough to remember, you could never have predicted that springtime.

Ron Bennington:  No, never. 

Oliver Stone:  Those 7, 8 years, the world seemed like it was going to go on a more peaceful path. And of course, George Bush the father, right away went into Kuwait on trumped up charges. Because remember all those exaggerations about Hussein being Hitler. And “I remember Hitler”. He was always using the Hitler thing again. And we put 500,000 men on the Saudi Arabian peninsula. It was a huge mistake. It was not really thought about. It was done in that bold spirit of like the world is now ours to makeover. And nobody questioned it. Nobody fought Bush on that one and as a result of that we stayed in the Middle East and became a mess with the terrorists attacking us, largely because of that issue. 500,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East. That was as big an involvement as Vietnam. And that was done in 1992 which made it approximately 20 years after we had left Vietnam. We didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam because Reagan in his history classes kept telling us that the Vietnam War was a noble cause. The control of the past.

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Oliver Stone Talks About The Importance Of Getting History Right

Ron Bennington:  And you get accused of rewriting history.

Oliver Stone:  Well, I’m rewriting history. I hope for the good reasons. I’m trying to tell the truth about it. And I think that’s really crucial. If we don’t know our past, we’re lost. I’m not rewriting history. I’m telling history. They’re the ones that are rewriting it.

Ron Bennington:  “The Untold History of the United States” is out now on Blu-ray and the paperback edition of “The Untold History of the United States” is available in stores and online. And the 50th anniversary and special collector’s Blu-ray comes out on Tuesday of “JFK”s anniversary. That’s November 12th in stores and online. Thank you so much Oliver for coming in. 

Oliver Stone:  I really enjoyed it Ron. Thank you.

Ron Bennington:  So did I.   See you next time. 

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 Order “The Untold History of the United States” on Amazon.com.  Follow Oliver Stone on twitter @TheOliverStone