Book Review

The Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

Untold History is a vastly ambitious collaboration written by two people who, once upon a time, couldn´t possibly have imagined themselves working together. Yet, like in all buddy-cop films, the duo eventually settles their differences and gets on with fighting crime, or in this case imperialist oppression. The fruit of this ambitious yet unlikely joint endeavor is, at least according to Mikhail Gorbachev indispensable. And he ought to know what he´s talking about.

Untold History aims to tell the American story in a way that is has never been told before, exposing common misconceptions and proposing an entirely different view than that told by most school textbooks. Shunned by most of the mainstream media, publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post have savaged the book in their reviews and more or less implied that Stone and Kuznick are closet pinkos who can´t get over Vietnam. I don´t doubt that Stone may have woken up on someone else’s lawn in 1971 with a bottle of Jack Daniel´s, but one rather gets the feeling that they don´t want to address the big picture when their reviews are mostly filled with loose slander.      

Stone and Kuznick´s backgrounds are as different as they could possibly be. His father a staunch anti-New Deal conservative, the young Oliver Stone served on the front lines in the Vietnam War. He was wounded twice and awarded with a purple heart for his service. Kuznick´s parents were both left wing intellectuals, and he spent the Vietnam War leading protests and manifestations against capitalism and imperialism. Over the years Stone gradually changed his mind gained a more nuanced view of the world, something similar to what happened to his main character in his 1990 film Born on the Fourth of July. Despite making a slew of critically acclaimed films like Wall Street, Platoon and JFK, Stone has always been something of a renegade, never fully part of the glitzy establishment in Hollywood, and always questioning those in power. This is something Untold History definitely won´t change. The two men met at the university where Kuznick was teaching a history class called Oliver Stone´s America, centered around the critique of American society that most of his films revolve around, but it wasn´t until many years later that they both started working on a massive feature series on television, later aired on Showtime, and the book was released as a companion to the series.

Starting with colonial wars in South America in the late nineteenth century and finishing with Barack Obama´s divisive presidency, Stone and Kuznick treats the reader to a thorough revision of US history, mercilessly shattering your vague conceptions of Nixon and the first George Bush being more or less decent presidents. Untold History leaves no stone unturned. In a fashion not entirely dissimilar to the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, the deeper you delve into the sordid mess of imperialism, and the more heinous acts you uncover. As Stone himself puts it “When George W Bush said that he admired Harry Truman more than any other president…I knew there had to be something wrong with Truman…And as it turned out, I was right”.

The story of Harry Truman and the atomic bomb is the focal point that the whole premise in Untold History revolves around. Here we meet one of the central protagonists in Stone and Kuznick´s story, a man named Henry Wallace. Serving as Secretary of Agriculture during the New Deal and Vice President under Francis D. Roosevelt, Wallace very nearly became the 33^rd President of the United States. “There is no one more American than Henry Wallace” as FDR is believed to have said. Yet despite this ringing endorsement, Wallace´s political views were decidedly unpopular among conservatives and centrist democrats. Wallace called for a common man´s revolution, where the fruits of science and technology where distributed to the many in order to ensure peace and prosperity. Any conflict with the Soviet Union would be fought without weapons, the winner being the one whose citizens´ enjoyed the highest standard of living, liberty and public health. This bold vision was diametrically opposed to that of conservative newspaper magnate Henry Luce, who declared that the coming century must be an American Century, where the USA dominated the world militarily and economically. As the 1944 election drew near, 65% of democrats preferred that Wallace remained vice president and only 2% supported Harry Truman. The stakes were high since Roosevelt´s health was poor and many believed that he would not survive the next for years, making it almost certain that his VP would succeed him before long. Kicked of the democratic ticket by corrupt party bosses who were later sentenced to jail for corruption, Wallace was replaced by Truman, an insecure man who was easily manipulated by the hawks and anti-communists in his party.

This controversial election made sure that Truman became the 33^rd President of the United States. This was to have dire consequences, the authors argue, since it was Truman who made the final call when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Most school textbooks say this was because Truman wanted to spare the many American lives that would be lost if Japan was invaded, but the Stone and Kuznick makes a credible case for the fact that Japan desperately wanted to surrender even before the atom bombs were dropped. I myself remember how surprised I was when I read Stalin´s General, by Geoffrey Roberts, and discovered that the Russians did in fact invade the Japanese held province of Manchuria shortly after Germany had capitulated, and smashed Japan´s last intact military formations. The atom bombs, contrary to popular belief, were meant primarily as a deterrent towards the Soviets and as a way for the US to tell them that they were now the ones who called the shots. With Wallace at the helm, Stone and Kuznick argues, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved and the cold war might have been avoided. This is of course impossible to know for certain, but one cannot help but wonder how different things could have turned out had Wallace become president instead of Truman.  

As the pages keep on turning and you read about CIA sponsored coups overthrowing democratically elected leaders in Greece, Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentine, El Salvador, Indonesia and countless other countries, it is easy to become jaded and slightly depressed. As the book makes abundantly clear, US interests does not mean the interests of ordinary American citizens, but rather the interests of large corporations. This is amply illustrated by the CIA led coup in Chile in 1954 that replaced the democratically elected leader Jacobo Árbenz Guzman with a military junta. The coup was necessary since Guzman’s ambitious social reforms jeopardized the profits of the United Fruit Company, who practically had a monopoly on the country´s produce and also had plenty of friends in high places.

It is worth mentioning that the prologue clearly says the book focuses on the dark parts of US history, leaving the details of the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, the Lend-Lease Act and other, nobler deeds, for other scholars to write about. Neither is it America itself or it´s people that are the culprits, but moneyed interests and neoconservative fundamentalists. Because America won the war they are right, and because they are right they are therefore just. That kind of thinking doesn´t allow for any nuance or any other perspective. That is the point that Stone and Kuznick tries to bring forward, as their eight hundred plus page brick delves into what so drastically changed about the United States after the second world war and what could have happened instead. A key point that I miss in the book is what they say in the last episode of the series. Despite smug pundits and politicians who think that they always know what´s going to happen, the curve of the ball can break differently. Such as when Henry Wallace nearly became president or when Mikhail Gorbachev saw the madness of the cold war race to the bottom. These moments can come again, Stone and Kuznick argues, it is up to us to be ready when they do.

Although many people may disagree with Stone and Kuznick, Untold History is fascinating, controversial and thought provoking. Some facts, as The New York Times and The Washington Post have gleefully pointed out, are wrong here and there, and well informed readers probably already know about some of the “untold” stories. None of this diminishes the central point that Stone and Kuznick are trying to make, and their magnum opus of recent US history is, just like Mikhail Gorbachev have said, indispensable.         

                   

Book Review 

The Bully Pulpit – Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

These days’ political debates tend to be rather dull affairs. The candidate wearing a blue tie says more or less the same thing as the candidate with the red tie seated across the table. There are very seldom any fistfights or chanting throngs of die-hard supporters and the chances of a riot breaking out among the crowds are slim, unless the moderator has just announced that the debate will last an hour longer than scheduled. Larger than life characters are in short supply and no one running for office will have been a decorated war hero, a cowboy or a big game hunter. Theodore Roosevelt were all three of those at some point in his life. He also served as a State Assemblyman, New York City Police Commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, Vice President and President of the United States. Since spare time is for the faint hearted, Roosevelt also published a wide body of text and novels covering many different topics and edited the Outlook Magazine.

Just like he did in real life, the towering and almost comically charismatic and masculine presence of “Teddy”, crowds out everything else. That´s why I have to hurry and tell you about Mrs. Kearns Goodwin’s magnificently splendid new book before I lose the plot and start to talk about Theodore Roosevelt again.

Charting the lives and fortunes of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, two fascinating men who would both serve as commander in chief and play a major role during the so called “Progressive Era” in the United states, The Bully Pulpit also tells the rags to riches story of one visionary publicist and his equally visionary magazine, McClure´s, which played a major role in influencing public opinion at the time.

Taft and Roosevelt both came from privileged backgrounds and they were both staunch Republicans of a sort that you wouldn´t find in today’s political landscape. Despite these similarities they were as different as two human beings can possibly be. The young Teedy was the runt of the litter, a weak and asthmatic little boy whose odds of surviving infancy looked slim. Yet the future Rough Rider refused to give in, and embarked on a strenuous regime of exercise to hone and strengthen what little nature had seemed fit to give him, in time becoming the epitome of masculinity and indeed of the American outdoorsman. Taft, on the other hand, was born in the pink but squandered his health and struggled with obesity for most of his life, a condition which sapped his energy and stamina. Roosevelt was known for being indefatigable, and once delivered nine campaign speeches on a single day, without showing the slightest sign of tiring. Roosevelt loved to get physical with his opponents and never shied away from a tough debate, while the introverted and analytical Taft despised politics. He only became president thanks to an ambitious wife and was much happier serving on the Supreme Court after he had left office. Where Roosevelt pummeled his opponents mercilessly and used the bully pulpit of the presidential office (as the name of the book implies) to rally public opinion, Taft frowned on such displays and preferred to in the same subdued and diligent way as he did when working as a prosecutor in Hamilton County, Ohio. His friendly and genial nature made him friends with everyone he met whereas Roosevelt’s larger than life character tended to divide people in two camps, those who revered him and those who despised him.

Sam McClure was born to abject poverty in Ireland but immigrated to the United States with his family at an early age. Like Roosevelt he was a larger than life character and had a highly gifted mind, but his mercurial tempers and volatile psyche meant that he was just as likely to act like a raving madman as he was to come up with an idea that was pure genius. With these flawed gifts McClure stated McClure’s Magazine, which became the leading progressive voice in the United States and published such a wide body of investigative journalism of such quality that it makes you wonder what The New York Times have been doing all these years. Mr. McClure´s magazine employed several of the most gifted journalist of the time, who became known as “Muckraking Men” due to their ceaseless habit of uncovering corruption and injustice.

Regrettably, corruption and injustice were not exactly rare occurrences in the early days of the twentieth century. Most of the country´s wealth was tied up in the business empires of a handful of powerful men, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil being the foremost of these and a major antagonist throughout the book. The progressive era saw a downtrodden American populace revolt against the conservative business interests and Roosevelt, Taft and McClure’s all championed the popular cause. Roosevelt, aided by his vigorous constitution and the bully pulpit of the presidential office, managed to pass several pieces of landmark progressive legislation. Bitterly regretting his decision to resign after his second term even before it had been made, he anointed Taft, his secretary of war, as his successor. Even though Taft was a progressive, albeit a more moderate one than Roosevelt, their close friendship soon withered. Returning from a yearlong African safari, Roosevelt shortly threw down the gauntlet for the republican presidential nomination of 1912. Far from being a high minded debate about the issues, the struggle quickly became a brutal, blood and guts affair where no quarter was asked and none given. When Roosevelt lost the nomination, largely because of cronyism and a conservative Old Guard in the GOP, he proceeded to start his own party rather than throw in the towel. In the ensuing showdown, the former friends tore each other apart, shattered the progressive wing of the Republican Party and secured a victory for the Democratic challenger, Woodrow Wilson.

That the film rights have already been sold to Stephen Spielberg is no surprise, the 1912 presidential election is only the final thrilling chapters of an eight hundred plus page epic that will have you laughing and crying as the pages disappear in a blur of love, friendship, war, drama and intrigue. Occasionally Mrs. Kearns Goodwin delves a little deeper than necessary in the minutiae of parliamentary procedures from the early 1900s, but her autobiography is both skillfully written and staggering in scope and ambition.

                                                                    

                                                                                                              

Book Review

After Empire, by Dilip Hiro

November 9^th 1989 must have been a fairly good time to be George H.W Bush. After nearly five decades of Cold War, America and its NATO allies were finally victorious. As The Berlin Wall came tumbling down, thousands of East Germans poured over to the west, eager for blue jeans, Coca Cola and Rock & Roll. Historian Francis Fukuyama even called that momentous occasion the end of history. Like a victorious demigod, Bush 41 now towered over the rest of the world, and America was the world’s sole superpower. Historians were suddenly out of a job as the only thing left to record for posterity was the onward march of western capitalism, or so it seemed at the time.

Dilip Hiro is one of the world´s leading experts on the Middle East and Central Asia and has written several critically acclaimed books on global affairs. After Empire aims to explain what type of world we can expect to inhabit in the coming decades and what this will mean for global affairs.

During the Cold War we lived in a bipolar world. That meant that there were two great powers who squared off for global dominion, The Soviet Union and their Warsaw pact allies against The USA and Nato. With the fall of the Soviet Union The USA became the world´s only superpower and proceeded to briefly lead a unipolar world. This dominion, however, proved to be short-lived, and as Mr. Hiro explains, US dominion had in fact been declining steadily since the end of WWII. This might sound alarming some people, but Mr. Hiro argues why this is not a doom and gloom prophecy. Rather, he points out, it´s unavoidable that The USA, who controlled half of the world economy immediately after WWII, would see their share of global wealth shrink as war torn countries and the third world starts to grow and develop.

In After Empire, Mr. Hiro gives his candid account of the key regions of the world, The USA, South America, Europe, Russia, China and Iran. He retells their recent history and gives his predictions over what the future will hold for each of them. Most writers who write these types of books are inevitably Anglo-Saxon and unabashedly cheer for team star spangled banner. Mr. Hiro´s account offers a somewhat different perspective. Although I should add that I feel he is sometimes a bit too zealous in condemning the USA. Russia, Iran and China get off the human rights violations hook relatively easily, while the USA is judged much harsher consistently throughout the book. Iran and China, however, have never claimed to be global superpowers, and that is quite possibly why the USA is subjected to the most intimate scrutiny.

A large part of Mr. Hiro´s narrative concerns the tumultuous first decade of this century. When Bush 43 was handed the keys to the car, he inherited a surplus budget and the only superpower in the world. A detailed analysis of the two terms Bush 43 served as commander in chief is outside the scope of this review but it will suffice to say that when Mr. Obama was sworn in as president he inherited a massive deficit, the largest financial crisis since The Great Depression and a catastrophic quagmire in Iraq that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The family station wagon had crashed into a tree and was gliding into a ditch. These unfortunate events were not the cause of The USA no longer being the undisputed master of the world, they simply accelerated the underlying trend, Mr. Hiro argues. A country that makes up one twentieth of the world’s population cannot hope to reign supreme forever.

Although Mr. Hiro methodically goes through each part of our blue planet and gives his best predictions for what a multipolar world will mean for them, the main narrative inevitably centers on the somewhat less than cordial relationship between China and The USA.

When Mr. Hiro writes about China, he chronicles the spectacularly rapid rise of a sleeping dragon. Staying truthful to Deng Xiaoping´s maxim “Hide your capabilities and bide your time”, China has strived to grow in prosperity and stature without becoming engaged in costly foreign entanglements. The Chinese have instead adopted a Confucian strategy of using all the means at their disposal, diplomatic, paramilitary, cyber, subterfuge and military, to blunt and diminish The United States influence. Like a rampant red dragon barring it´s fangs and hissing menacingly at a bald eagle with a bad hip, it requires no detective work to understand what the writers opinions are of the current state of global affairs.

While China is the only other Country that in itself can become a serious rival to the United States, the future global order will be a patchwork of regional actors, sovereign nations and imperial pretenders. Before the First World War, the writer reminds us, this was more or less what the world looked like. Back then a number of global actors and regional powers wrestled with each other for supremacy, all of them keen to make sure that no single nation became powerful enough to subdue the others. This prediction doesn´t come straight from Mr. Hiro, it´s partly yours truly having to fill in the blanks, since the writer tends to loose himself in the minutiae of global politics. This makes the overall picture somewhat blurry and uncertain at times. While I´m complaining I might as well point out that Mr. Hiro must have written the chapter concerning Europe on a Friday afternoon when he was eager to nip down to the pub. It´s mostly a depressing account of the Greek sovereign debt crisis and doesn´t really address any of the more fundamental problems that Europe faces. This might be because Mr. Hiro was unable to understand the byzantine bureaucracy of our dear European Union, or because Europe is simply too boring and since he lives in London he figures that in the near future he might not be part of it anymore.

After Empire is well worth reading, since it gives an interesting and refreshingly nuanced account of global affairs, even if you sometimes drown in all the details and the author could have taken a step back and looked at the bigger picture a bit more often. When he does so, however, the book offers many valuable insights.