The 1997 film Good
Will Hunting features Matt Damon’s character in a conversation with Harvard
students, touting Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States as a way to better understand the American past. The scene was cringe-worthy for at least two reasons. First, there was something more than a little off-putting about a movie whose lead character demonstrated raw intellectual ability celebrating what amounted to a work of propaganda. Second, Damon’s subsequent insinuation of college students’ unfamiliarity with Zinn’s arguments was ridiculous, given the ubiquity of Zinn’s book on 1980s and 1990s history course reading lists.
I suppose it might be seen as a sign of progress that
this generation’s equivalent of the Zinn book, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, will likely not have much of an impact on campus: apart from Middle East Studies departments, unabashed propaganda is out of fashion in the contemporary academy. Moreover, Stone and Kuznick spend most of their book attacking U.S. foreign policy, asking questions that–despite their far-left, fact-challenged approach–don’t conform to the race/class/gender paradigm that dominates the study of the United States in most U.S. history departments.
A
Story Not Really ‘Untold’
The exception to this pattern appears to be American
University, which employs Kuznick as a professor of history. Kuznick’s website
boasts that he “teaches the path-breaking course
Oliver Stone’s America.” The course, subtitled “Oliver Stone’s Films,” uses “Oliver Stone’s feature films and a forthcoming
documentary film series to explore how the controversial filmmaker has
interpreted the history of the U.S. empire/national security state. The course
compares Stone’s interpretation with those of scholars and prominent guest
speakers, including Stone, who participated in key events.” It’s unclear what
Kuznick means by Stone having “participated in key events”; other than making
the films and offering unfounded conspiracy theories, Stone didn’t participate
in any meaningful way in “key events” related to “the history of the U.S.
empire/national security state.”
As Michael Moynihan has observed, the book’s fantastical
portrayal begins with its title: “This isn’t,” Moynihan notes, “in any sense an
‘untold story’; the authors mine only previously published accounts, having
done no archival research.” The title misleads in another
respect: Stone and Kuznick’s “history of the United States” is confined to the
20th century, and mostly to the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.
The limited coverage offered to events before 1945 primarily introduces the
United States as a villain inclined to treat Soviet Communism unfairly abroad
or persecute radicals at home. And the book’s post-1945 choices are as notable
for what Stone and Kuznick exclude as for the exaggerated (at best) portrayals
of what they provide.
The sources a
historian uses depend on the question the historian seeks to answer; it’s entirely
possible to write a history of Cold War foreign policy relying on
English-language sources–focusing on domestic debates about foreign policy, the
activities of Congress, or a bureaucratic history of the national security
state. But those aren’t the types of questions Stone and Kuznick purport to
answer; instead, they want to explore how U.S. policies affected Soviet decisions. (One chapter and
portions of two others are devoted to portraying Soviet moves in the late 1940s
as consistently defensive reactions to U.S. provocations.) Yet Stone and
Kuznick take this approach without even looking at one Eastern Bloc document. Nor
do they demonstrate any familiarity with those publications that have mined the
archives of the Soviet Union or the former satellite states.
‘Overloaded with Ideological Distortion’
Unfortunately for the
authors, publication of their book all but coincided with Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain, an
extraordinarily-researched volume that uses material from various Eastern
European archives to show how the Soviet Union created a Stalinist Eastern
Europe after World War II. (Spoiler alert: blindly reacting to an overly
aggressive United States was not high on the list of explanatory factors.) A
reader of the Stone/Kuznick publication would be utterly baffled by the narrative
in Iron Curtain; it’s as if Applebaum
was writing about a different century with a different set of international
players.
In an interview with the New York Times, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz termed the
Stone/Kuznick book “ridiculous,” comparing its approach to that of publications
by Glenn Beck. “This is,” he noted, “basically a very standard left-wing, C.P.,
fellow traveler, Wallace-ite vision of what happened in 1945-46”–a work “overloaded
with ideological distortion” that leads the reader “off in cloud-cuckoo land.”(In
2008, Wilentz’s New Republic columns
celebrated the candidacy of Hillary Clinton–he’s obviously not some sort of
wild-eyed conservative.) The ideological distortion Wilentz criticized was most
on display in Stone and Kuznick’s almost embarrassing treatment of Harry
Truman, who the duo casts in the role of an arch-villain, apparently hoping to
further lionize one of the book’s few heroes, Henry Wallace.
Wallace, who served as Vice President during FDR’s third
term, was dumped from the ticket in 1944 amidst pressure from moderate and conservative
Democrats. But for this move, he would have become President, and it’s clear
that Stone and Kuznick see the switch from Wallace (who bitterly opposed Cold
War containment) to Truman as an international tragedy.
The
Soviets ‘Tighten Their Grip’
In 1948, Wallace launched a bid for President under the
banner of the Progressive Party, beginning the campaign with strong backing
from liberals. But his support collapsed, in part due to his fantastical
apologies for Soviet behavior, such as the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia. In a
Cold-War obsessed book with 615 pages of text, the causes of the Czech coup
receive a grand total of one, passionless sentence of analysis: “Early the
following year, the Red Army helped overthrow the Czech government, putting an
end to Czech democracy.” That the Soviets subsequently “tightened their grip”
over the formerly democratic state, Stone and Kuznick imply without ever
specifically saying so, was a reaction to U.S. covert operations in the Soviet
bloc (which they detail in several paragraphs). Czechoslovak foreign minister
Jan Masaryk’s March 1948 death, the duo assert without citation, “would come to
haunt” Truman’s defense secretary, James Forrestal.
Even Presidents whose record could easily advance the
Stone/Kuznick thesis get the cuckooland treatment. Lyndon Johnson, for
instance, left office with more than a half-million men in Vietnam and sent
troops to ensure that a left-leaning coup in the Dominican Republic would fail;
it’s hard to come up with a positive portrayal of LBJ’s overall foreign policy
(though his handling of European and Middle Eastern matters was impressive).
Yet Stone and Kuznick distort Johnson’s record beyond recognition. The duo
implies that Johnson might have escalated the conflict so the United States
could exploit Vietnam economically. (Their source? A throwaway line in a 1954 Senate newsletter.) In late 1964,
“the public overwhelmingly agreed” that American troops shouldn’t be sent to
Vietnam. Actually, throughout Johnson’s presidency, there was no public
consensus at all on Vietnam, and a significant chunk of the electorate consistently
backed a more aggressive policy.
“Johnson dismissed intelligence reports that didn’t
conform to what he wanted to hear.” Stone and Kuznick’s source for this
breathtaking assessment is a quote from LBJ at an unidentified “later” date
condemning the analytical abilities of intelligence officers. In a 30-page
chapter, meanwhile, Stone and Kuznick make no mention of LBJ’s European
policies–despite their earlier obsession with the U.S. role in Europe. Could it
be that the duo struggled to find anything about Johnson’s approach to Europe, analyzed
in a remarkable book by Thomas Alan Schwartz, worthy of heinous condemnation?
The Times quotes
Kuznick, in an appearance at the 92nd Street Y, ruminating on how “it’s interesting to see the early reviews. They’re
all glowing, really. I mean, nobody’s challenging anything we’re saying, either
our facts or our interpretations.” Given how he and his co-author
distort evidence in their book, Kuznick may well describe this essay as one of
the many “glowing” reviews that Untold
History has received.
