Ronald Radosh: Once Again Oliver Stone Hypes his New TV Documentary: Time to Tell CBS to Cancel It

Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a  Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. He is a Presidential appointment to the Public Information Declassification Board, for a term extending from 2007 to 2010.  He is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Rosenberg File (1983 and 1997);  Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (2001) Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (2001); Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party (1996) and Red Star Over Hollywood:The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (2006).

A few years ago, I wrote on these pages about a forthcoming documentary series for Showtime, produced and directed by Oliver Stone and co-authored by American University left-wing historian Peter Kuznick. You can find what I wrote here and here. I also took Stone on about this project in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and you can also look at my op-ed.

Now, in an interview appearing in the January issue of Rock Cellar Magazine, Stone announces that the 10 part series will air on the network this coming May, and in late April, the companion book written by Stone and Kuznick will be published by Gallery Books, the same publisher that ironically published Dick Cheney’s memoir.

Now, Stone argues this history documentary will be “a liberal progressive history of the U.S.” Titled The Untold History of the United States, the information Stone offers us about it first shows how disingenuous the title is. Rather than never being told before—at least the title was changed from the first version that it would be the “unknown” history—it is a repeat of a very old and now stale leftist version of our past that dates not from the work of the late Howard Zinn, but from the old CPUSA “scholars” like the late Herbert Aptheker and the secret KGB agent and American Communist activist, Carl Marzani, who in the early1950’s wrote a book titled We Can Be Friends, the very first “Cold War revisionist” account that blamed the then ongoing Cold War not on the aggressive policy of Joseph Stalin, but on American imperialism and the warlike anti-Soviet policy of the “fascist” president, Harry S. Truman....