In early September, noting that nearly fifty years have passed since President Kennedy's assassination, I sat
down with Oliver Stone to discuss his masterpiece, JFK. My first question for
the esteemed filmmaker was rather broad.
“The president was
murdered in Dallas half a century ago,” I said, “and it's been 22 years since JFK was released. Yet the film remains pertinent to our lives. What
- in the world and in the film - accounts for its ongoing immediacy and
power?”
Mr. Stone responded: “There’s the film, on one hand and, on the
other, Kennedy’s reputation. Mainstream American media have for the most part depicted
him a ‘minor president’ who wasn’t in office long enough to make a difference.
Lyndon Johnson, in that narrative, came in and fulfilled JFK’s vision with the
Civil Rights Act and so forth, and basically continued his policies. I
vehemently disagreed with this view back in the nineties and I continue to
disagree with it as I’ve deepened my own awareness in the last five years while
working on THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE
UNITED STATES. In Part 6, ‘Kennedy to the Brink,’ (co-writer) Peter Kuznick
and I show JFK to be a great
president. Not a near-great or glamorous
one, but a great, great one who, next to Franklin Roosevelt, effected the biggest
change in the U.S. government and its attitude toward the world.”
UNTOLD
HISTORY is a documentary series directed by Mr. Stone for Showtime and
broadcast in 2012. On October 15th,
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will release all ten episodes, along with hours
of previously unaired material, on Blu-ray.
The high quality of these one hour shows – from “World War II” to “Bush & Obama: The Age of Terror” – place
them squarely in a tradition of excellent nonfiction films made by the best fiction
directors. Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST
WALTZ, MY VOYAGE TO ITALY, NO DIRECTION HOME and LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD epitomize this tradition today. But decades
before Mr. Scorsese, such renowned storytellers as David Lean, Carol Reed, John Ford, John
Huston and Frank Capra crafted superb fact-based motion pictures.
Mr. Stone’s program is a direct descendent
of Mr. Capra’s Second World War series, WHY
WE FIGHT. Using voice-over
narration, newsreel footage, clips from feature films, re-enactments, maps
(some of them produced by the Disney Studios in the 1940’s), and original as
well as classical music, UNTOLD HISTORY
pays homage to Frank Capra. Early
episodes feature clips from WHY WE FIGHT
itself, MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and Sergei Eisenstein’s ALEXANDER NEVSKY, which Mr. Capra
“quoted” in his two-part “The Battle of Russia” (1944).
The Showtime series is thus stylistically
conservative, in marked contrast to motion pictures like THE DOORS, NATURAL BORN KILLERS and,
especially, JFK, in which the director
exhibited groundbreaking technical virtuosity. But a mainstream, even old-fashioned approach suits UNTOLD
HISTORY. Partly because of the
show’s Capra-esque feeling, Oliver Stone’s love of country comes across clearly.
Not a jingoistic patriotism or love based on “American exceptionalism.” But a
love of ideals like FDR’s “Four Freedoms” (freedom of speech, freedom of
worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear) and of heroic figures like FDR’s
progressive vice president, Henry Wallace (1941-1945), and, of course, President
Kennedy.
Which brings us back to Oliver Stone’s reflections on the 35th chief executive. “As we show in UNTOLD HISTORY,” said Mr. Stone, “Kennedy was, at first, a typical
cold warrior. From 1952 to 1960, when
Eisenhower’s budgeting cycle was complete, there was a huge build-up of
hydrogen bombs, and JFK supported it. He continued to do so early in his own
presidency. But he changed after the Bay of Pigs debacle and even more so after
the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when the world teetered on the brink
of nuclear war. He changed radically.”
Thus, the director said, “Everyone today
owes the simple fact that they’re alive to JFK. Because the situation created
during the Cold War -- with first strike nuclear capability over the Soviets
and the ’brinksmanship’ policies of Allen Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower in the
1950’s -- made the US overwhelmingly armed, shockingly aggressive toward the
USSR and willing to use those first-strike capabilities to destroy the Soviet
Union and communist China forever.
“(Air Force Chief of Staff) Curtis LeMay
and other generals were ready to go whole hog, urging the president and
Secretary of Defense McNamara to bomb Cuban missile sites. If you’ve seen DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, you know the
scenario. Bombing Cuba would have resulted in the end of life as we know it.
And Kennedy understood that.”
The president expressed his view of
nuclear war concisely but dramatically in a September 1961 address to the U.N.
General Assembly, excerpted in episode 6 of UNTOLD
HISTORY: “Today, (everyone) must
contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under the
sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut
at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war
must be abolished before they abolish us.”
With that perspective, Kennedy stood up to
the military brass. Oliver Stone
explained: “Kennedy -- and UNTOLD HISTORY
goes into detail about this -- actively resisted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
the CIA. Eisenhower weighed in heavily
in favor of going into Cuba, to attack them and the Soviets. So for Kennedy to
say no to the CIA at the Bay of Pigs was enormous. To say no during the missile crisis was
enormous. To say no to the Joint Chiefs of Staff when they wanted to invade
Laos, was enormous.” Kennedy’s leadership
– his fearlessness and forcefulness in the face of nearly rabid, united
opposition -- changed the course of human events.
What emerges, then, from Oliver Stone’s UNTOLD HISTORY and from his dialogue
about JFK is not a rehash of Howard Zinn’s PEOPLE’S
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, which focused on historic contributions of
“common” people rather than high ranking officials. Nor is the Showtime series steeped in leftist
paradigms one might expect from a supporter of Bolivarian socialism. Absent, too, are revelations of conspiracies behind earthshaking
phenomena. Underlying UNTOLD HISTORY,
instead, is a kind of “great man” theory of history.
The theory, popularized by Thomas Carlyle
in the 19th century, holds that highly influential individual
contribute to change by utilizing their special skills or power. But Oliver
Stone’s take on this worldview is not that the actions of great historical
players are fated or predictable. As Jon Wiener wrote in The Nation, UNTOLD HISTORY’s thesis is that “at many
pivotal moments… history could have taken a radically different course. The missed opportunities, the roads not taken
– these are Stone’s central themes, which he argues with energy, passion and a
mountain of evidence.”
Therein lies the “untold history.” Mainstream
texts usually present Henry Wallace, for instance, as a marginal third party
candidate in the 1948 presidential race. The Showtime series, on the other
hand, maintains that had Wallace won the Democratic nomination for a second
vice presidential term in 1944 – which he almost did -- he would have become
president in 1945. As a student of Buddhism, Mr. Wallace certainly wouldn’t
have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the cold war and arms
race might not have ensued.
Similarly, conventional history texts hold
that President Truman’s use of nuclear weapons against Japan ended World War II
expeditiously. The attacks are portrayed
as wise, even humane. But THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
reminds us that Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, along with many of the
scientists who developed the bomb, opposed Truman. They felt his decision was
unwise and inhumane. Hundreds of
thousands of lives would have been saved if the generals and scientists had
held sway.
In the series’ final episode, Oliver Stone
argues that if George W. Bush had heeded a CIA brief entitled “Bin Ladn
Determined to Strike in U.S.,” delivered to him 36 days before the 9/11
attacks, the world would be very different today.
And in episode 6, the writers assert that
if JFK hadn’t been assassinated in November1963, he would have withdrawn all
troops from Vietnam and negotiated an end to the cold war. Which brings us
back, once more, to my chat with the writer/director about President
Kennedy.
“JFK’s position on Vietnam is much
misunderstood,” he said. “He never sent combat advisors there, although that
was recommended repeatedly; he sent non-combat advisors instead. In fact, he tried to keep a distance from the
Vietnamese conflict. In the end, when Kennedy issued National Security Action
Memorandum 263, proposing the recall of troops, he made it clear to his closest
advisors that if he won the election against Goldwater in 1964, he would with
withdraw entirely from Vietnam.
“He was also moving toward the end of the
Cold War with Khrushchev. They signed a
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, of which he was most proud. He tried to end the space race, proposing
that the US and the USSR work together on a piloted mission to the moon. He was attempting, through a secret emissary,
to normalize relations with Cuba. On
every front, Kennedy would have been a great second term president.
“He’s
the only American president since Roosevelt to give a speech about the Soviet
Union – at American University – paying homage to their sacrifices during World
War II. He said that what happened to the Soviet Union was the equivalent of
the United States being blown up from Chicago to New York. He empathized. He
understood suffering because he had suffered his whole life. His brother was
killed in the war, he was injured, and he behaved honorably in combat. That’s
why men with three and four stars on their shoulders didn’t intimidate Kennedy -
the guys who were telling him to go to war with the Soviet Union during the
Cuban Missile Crisis.”
I became aware of the American University
speech while watching JFK. In a clip from the 1963 speech shown in that
film, President Kennedy humanized the Soviet people in a manner unheard of at
the time. He said that the U.S. wanted peace, but “not a Pax Americana,”
because at our core, we were the same as the Russians. “We all breath the same air,” he said, “we
all want the best futures for our children, and we are all mortal.”
Oliver Stone added, “Kennedy was the last
American president who really stood for peace.” Which, Kevin Costner’s character in JFK (Jim
Garrison) slowly realizes, “made him a threat to the establishment.” In the 1991 feature, this becomes motive for
murder. A strong case is made that there was a conspiracy behind the killing
and a cover-up of the crime. The Warren Commission Report is thoroughly
discredited. But in THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, Mr. Stone’s voice-over narration simply states that
the public found “unconvincing” the commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey
Oswald, acting alone, killed the president.
This
isn’t to say that the director has any less conviction that a conspiracy lay behind
the president’s murder than he had when JFK
was released. He made such a powerful
a case in 1991 that Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board to
continue collection and declassification of material related to the killing.
And Mr. Stone still argues persuasively on the subjects of conspiracy and
cover-up.
In a few weeks, Part II of my interview
with Oliver Stone continues with a discussion of the Kennedy assassination and
Mr. Stone’s amazing film on the subject.
