Sean Wilentz calls Oliver Stone's new history series "cuckoo"

“Come on, that’s such a canard, you know that,” Oliver Stone said. “ ‘The Greatest Generation?’ That was the biggest publishing hoax of all. It’s to sell books.” This seemingly sacrosanct term was coined by Tom Brokaw for his 1998 book of the same title, in which he recounted the lives of ordinary, World War II-era Americans. “I was in Vietnam with the Greatest Generation. They were master sergeants, generals, colonels. They had arrogance beyond belief. The hubris that allowed Henry Kissinger to say North Vietnam is a fourth-rate power we will break. The hubris of that!”

 

We were discussing Stone’s latest project, a 10-part Showtime series and a 750-page companion volume called “The Untold History of the United States,” which begins with World War I and ends with the first Obama administration. It’s an Oliver Stone version of a History Channel documentary, one guaranteed to raise the ires of both left and right and where all roads lead to Vietnam. From where Stone sits, World War II begot the cold war, which landed us in Vietnam, a manifestation of American imperialism, which led inexorably to our current battle in Afghanistan. We have, Stone says, been sold a fairy tale masquerading as history, and it is so blinding it may ultimately undo us. “You have to understand what it was like to be a Roman empire and to find some barbarian tribe riding into Rome in 476 A.D.,” Stone said. “It’s quite a shock. And that’s what will happen to us unless we change our attitude about what our role in the world is. Every story out of most newspapers is ‘the Americans think this, the administration thinks this.’ It’s always about our controlling the pieces on the chessboard. I think what the Arabs have shown us is that we don’t control the chess pieces. And this is a shock to many people. But it’s definitely in ‘The Greatest Generation.’ And it’s in Spielberg’s World War II film, and it’s in Ridley Scott’s ‘Black Hawk Down.’ These are wonderful-looking films, but the message is perverted.”...

 

The screening of “Untold History” during the New York Film Festival early last month suggested that he might have a hit. At the end of the third hour, the crowd roared its approval. The cheers got only louder when Stone sauntered onstage for a postscreening panel discussion. “So much of what I saw today is what we try to do at The Nation,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and editor of the left’s beloved 147-year-old weekly. “To challenge the orthodoxy, challenge the conformity of our history and to speak truth to power.” Jonathan Schell, a journalist who also writes for The Nation, concurred.

 

Stone didn’t seem particularly riveted by the conversation at first, leaning back in his chair, gripping the bridge of his nose as if he had a sinus headache and sometimes closing his eyes so that, owing to his bushy Brezhnev eyebrows, he looked like a Russian premier lying in state. Just when the panel started to feel like a wonky meeting of Park Slope Food Coop members, the historian Douglas Brinkley stirred things up. Even though Brinkley provided the authors a nice blurb, calling the book “a brave revisionist study which shatters many foreign policy myths,” he had a few bones to pick with the project. Brinkley, who has written several notable histories, said he thought the series had gone too far in demonizing Truman. “Truman is one of the most popular presidents in American history, and he’s popular for doing a bunch of things,” he said. Brinkley mentioned how Truman presided over the end of World War II, racially integrated American troops, helped create the state of Israel and airlifted supplies into Soviet-blockaded West Berlin. “The only opening you’re giving him is that he was a naïf,” Brinkley said. This perked Stone right up. He shook his head. “If he’d done something noble, believe me, we’re not looking to cut it out,” Stone said, earning him a round of applause. “I just don’t see any nobleness.”...

 

While to his fans Stone’s alternate histories are provocative, his detractors see them as grossly irresponsible cherry-picking. The conservative historian and CUNY emeritus professor Ronald Radosh said he found himself wanting to do harm to his television while watching the first four episodes, which he reviewed for the right-wing Weekly Standard. Radosh had been blogging skeptically about the Stone project since its announcement in 2010, but now that he’d actually seen it, he said, it was the historian rather than the conservative in him who was most offended. “Historians can have different interpretations, but based on evidence,” he said. “What these other guys do is manipulate evidence and ignore evidence that does not fit their predetermined thesis, and that’s why they’re wrong.” According to Radosh, Stone and Kuznick’s take on the United States’ role in the cold war mirrors the argument in “We Can Be Friends,” a book published in 1952 by Carl Marzani, who was convicted of concealing his affiliation to the Communist Party when he joined the O.S.S., the precursor to the C.I.A. “This Stone-Kuznick film could have been put out in 1955 as Soviet propaganda,” Radosh said. “They use all the old stuff.”

 

Radosh, who grew up as a Red Diaper baby in Washington Heights and only later turned to the right, thinks of himself as intimately familiar with the “old stuff.” But fearing he might be dismissed as partisan, he insisted I reach out to Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who, owing to his strident defense of Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings and to his 2006 Rolling Stone cover article on George W. Bush, “The Worst President in History?” is regarded as decidedly left-leaning. When I spoke to him, Wilentz said: “You can’t get two historians more unlike each other than me and Ronnie Radosh. But we can agree about this. It’s ridiculous.” Wilentz was in the middle of writing a review of Stone’s book. “Always beware of books that describe themselves as the untold history of anything, because it’s usually been told before,” he said. “It sets up this thing that there is some sort of mysterious force suppressing the true facts, right? Glenn Beck does this all the time. It’s the same thing here, except this is basically a very standard left-wing, C.P., fellow traveler, Wallace-ite vision of what happened in 1945-46.” It’s not, Wilentz continued, that the questions raised aren’t worth raising. “Is there a legitimate argument to be made about the origins of our nuclear diplomacy or the decision to build the H-bomb?” he said. “Of course there is. But it’s so overloaded with ideological distortion that this question doesn’t get raised in an intelligent way. And once a question gets raised in an unintelligent way, then you are off in cloud-cuckoo land.”...