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.