Oliver Stone.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Oliver Stone, Hollywood's scourge of the status quo, is back with what might well be his most ambitious work. The Oscar-winning writer and director of radical counter-narratives that focused on death squads in Central America with Salvador, the Vietnam War with Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, high finance with Wall Street and its sequel, the Kennedy assassination with JFK, and the Presidencies of Tricky Dick and Bush Junior with Nixon and W., is now taking on U.S. history through the nonfiction medium.

Stone's documentary series and book, The Untold History of the United States, challenges the myths about the role America has played in global events. Stone rethinks, recasts, and reframes imperial America.

Along with a 750-page companion book, coauthored by historian Peter Kuznick, Stone's ongoing ten-part series, airing on Showtime, exposes the assumptions and myths of twentieth century and early twenty-first century U.S. history. Stone dares to investigate: Who really defeated Nazi Germany? Did Hiroshima and Nagasaki have to be nuked? Who started the Cold War? Its final chapter, "Bush and Obama: Age of Terror," criticizes current Washington policy. Along the way, Stone rescues long lost unsung heroes from obscurity--including a Vice President, a nuclear physicist, a Soviet political officer aboard a nuclear submarine who likely prevented World War III.

I interviewed Stone in his Santa Monica offices. Books by authors such as Chalmers Johnson covered a tabletop and were lined up on the floor. The wear and tear of creating a ten-hour television series was clearly taking its toll on the Vietnam veteran, but Stone took time out from completing episodes nine and ten to talk.

Stone relentlessly unearths what lies underneath, observing that it's his "fortune and destiny" to be not only a storyteller, but more importantly, a truth-teller--the powers-that-be and their ballyhooers be damned.

Q: One of the main figures you've rescued from obscurity is Henry Wallace. Why does he play such a prominent role in The Untold History of the United State?

Oliver Stone: Primarily, we concentrated on the 1944 campaign, which is where Wallace truly had enormous power. He was the popular favorite, overwhelmingly, for the Democratic Vice Presidency. He was bumped by the bosses from Roosevelt's ticket. I think going into the convention he had 65 percent of the Democratic electorate on his side. Harry Truman was a nobody at that point at 2 percent, and it was all reversed at the convention, with back-office politics and last-minute bargains. And that is what interests us, because the whole fate of the world would have been somewhat altered by that event.

Wallace was a compassionate visionary. And Roosevelt knew that--Eleanor Roosevelt loved him, and the progressive...