Oliver Stones Untold History of the United States

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Oliver Stone Defends His ‘The Untold History of the United States’

Nov 21, 2012 11:58 AM EST

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, professor of history at American University, defend their new Untold History of the United Statesagainst Michael Moynihan’s critical review in The Daily Beast. They explain why a book like theirs is so necessary and say its history checks out—and that it’s Moynihan who has his history wrong.

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Oliver Stone attends the press conference for the movie “Savages” at Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, Sept. 20, 2012. (Thomas Niedermueller / Getty Images)
When we began our documentary film and book project The Untold History of the United Statesmore than four years ago, we knew we would encounter our share of mean-spirited and dishonest reviews. What has been remarkable and encouraging is that aside from a few far-right diatribes, that hasn’t been the case. As Michael Moynihan disappointedly notes in his Daily Beast reviewof Untold History, the majority of reviews and articles have been positive. But because we know how the right-wing echo chamber picks up on dishonest and meretricious attacks and blasts them out to its Fox News–friendly listeners and viewers, we would like to respond to this latest attempt to block a much-needed conversation about the direction our country needs to go in to counter a century-plus, and we believe disastrous, course of empire, war, and domination. That is our objective in this project, which one would never know from reading Moynihan’s review.

Moynihan is so eager to try to find ways to discredit us that he misreads things that even Groucho Marx’s proverbial 4-year-old child would understand.

Moynihan offers a three-pronged assault on us. First, he says that what we are offering isn’t “untold” history. Second, he questions our accuracy and accuses us of errors and distortions. And third, he charges us with being America-bashing Soviet apologists. Nowhere in his lengthy “review” does he even find time to state our thesis or provide readers with a sense of what this book is really about.







Moynihan is correct to say that cutting-edge scholars have been telling aspects of this history for decades. In fact, contrary to his claim that our frustration is due to the fact that “the revisionist narrative has failed to become the dominant narrative,” the revisionist narrative has become the dominant narrative among university-based historians. As he acknowledges, we draw upon that body of scholarship and cite such historians copiously in our 91 pages of footnotes. Revisionist scholarship has not become the dominant narrative in public schools and the mainstream media and in those parts of America that cling to the notion of American exceptionalism—the fantasy that the United States, as God’s gift to humanity, is, unique among nations, motivated by generosity, benevolence, and altruism as it strikes out in the world. But Moynihan is wrong to say that we have not done additional primary source and archival research. In fact, we had a team of top-notch American University graduate students who assisted in the research, some of which was indeed archivally based. A quick look at the footnotes will reveal just how much of this comes from primary sources. But whether the history has been “untold” or not, the problem is that it has been almost entirely “unlearned.”

Second, Moynihan betrays his ignorance by attempting to debunk our accuracy and choice of sources. He questions our description of the U.S. perception that the Soviet economy was booming in the early 1930s, claiming that we base this assessment on “Stalinist New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.” If one looks at pages 56 and 57 of our book, it is readily apparent that we base this judgment not only upon The New York Times but upon the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, Barron’s, and Business Week. In fact, Duranty is neither cited nor mentioned. Moynihan disputes our contention that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, in committing suicide, was “tormented by his own anti-communist paranoia.” Forrestal was indeed ranting about communists and “Zionist agents” who were out to get him when he was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital. And, as we make abundantly clear, it was popular radio commentator Drew Pearson who alleged that Forrestal was found in the street in pajamas shouting “The Russians are coming!” To any objective reader, it would be readily apparent that we describe Forrestal as suffering from “severe mental illness,” not just anti-communist paranoia.

Moynihan is so eager to try to find ways to discredit us that he misreads things that even Groucho Marx’s proverbial 4-year-old child would understand. He says we quote Henry Wallace’s “somewhat overgenerous” statement that “Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing,” when we state clearly that these were Harry Truman’s words, as anybody even minimally familiar with this literature would know. Shame on the Daily Beast for not conducting even the minimal level of fact checking. Attributing this quote to Truman, as we do, makes the point that Truman was not a blindly unwavering anti-Soviet zealot but a man who grappled with a difficult situation and made, in our judgment, a series of disastrous but not inevitable choices. Moynihan’s misattribution is an example of the blind animus he feels toward progressives like Wallace, and toward those of us today who challenge Cold War orthodoxy.



http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ed-states.html