The Untold History Of The United States

Oliver Stone's Showtime TV series The Untold History Of The United States (2012) is a flawed but interesting look at American history since WW II. Actually the DVD set has two prequels, Episode A: 1900-1920 World War I, The Russian Revolution & Woodrow Wilson and Episode B: 1920-1940 Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin & The Battle of Ideas, which explain the context for WW II. Episode A was interesting in that it depicted the US military being used to protect US interests abroad as well as the expansion of the US through imperialism at the turn of the century, which is often overlooked in history. The unfettered power of corporations is one of Stone's motifs throughout the series. There are 10 chapters, starting with Chapter : World War II in which he suggests it was Russia not the US that won WWII which is fairly indisputable. Chapter 2: Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace introduces another major motif in the series, missed opportunities. In this instance he singles out the fact that Henry Wallace was cut out of FDR's ticket during his last election and replaced by Truman who would become president and make the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan to end WW II. Stone's point is that Wallace was anti-colonial, a supporter of the common man, and critical of the cold war. Thus, postwar America would have looked very different under Wallace. Chapter 3: The Bomb is one of the episodes that I disagree with. Stone suggest that Japan would have surrendered in August without the use of the bomb and states it as if it were a fact-after all the reading I have done about it, I vehemently disagreed the policy was to bleed out the US during a land invasion and pressure them into signing a more favorable surrender. According to Stone the bomb was only dropped to use as a bargaining tool with Russia-simplistic in my opinion. Chapter 4: The Cold War 1945-1950 looks at Korean War and the escalating cold war with Russia. Chapter 5: The 50s Eisenhower, the Bomb, & The Third World is the prequel to America's humiliating Vietnam episode. First, there is Chapter 6: JFK: To the Brink, one of Stone's great obsessions of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK-the subject of a Stone film. Chapter 7: Johnson, Nixon, & Vietnam is a look at another great obsession, the failure of the US in Vietnam and subsequently the subject of Stone's greatest film, Platoon. In Chapter 7: Johnson, Nixon, & Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune see the humiliating withdraw from Vietnam and Nixon's ignoble impeachment. Chapter 8: Regan, Gorbachev, & Third World: Rise of the Right in which Stones trolls the right by suggesting that Gorbachev was responsible for the break up of the Soviet Union rather than Ronnie. He also is obsessed with American intervention in third world countries-especially Central America and the Iran Contra scandal and war in Afghanistan which will cause the shocking blowback on 9-11-2000. Chapter 9: Bush & Clinton: American Triumphalism has Stone's criticism of the invasion of Iraq and Clinton's center-right politics. The last Chapter 10: Bush & Obama: Age of Terror shows how entrenched in global policing America has become after 9/11, something a liberal President like Obama cannot escape either. It is an incomplete and cursory look at 75 years of history, but is fascinating starting point for a conversation about where America went wrong in the last century.