Late last night I couldn’t find anything good to watch and was just channel chasing. I found myself on a Showtime channel which was playing Oliver Stone’s ‘documentary’ Through the Looking Glass with ‘new’ information about JFK and the assassination. I figured what the hell; maybe it’ll put me to sleep. I sat through roughly six minutes of Donald Sutherland’s narration and stock footage until I reached the point of implausibility – the theory that UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who died in a mysterious plane crash in 1961, was actually assassinated by the CIA. I then realized that Oliver Stone had gotten older but no wiser.
The tragedy of Oliver Stone is that for awhile he really was one of the greatest writers and directors in the history of film. Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July are two very different messages on the tragedy of Vietnam and the soldiers who fought there. Wall Street was clearly years ahead of its time and its key message is misunderstood even today and Salvador was one of the most scorching political satires of all time. But in a sense, Stone has never truly recovered from the message he tried to tell in JFK more than thirty years, either as an artist or as a historian. He’s been trying to tell the same messages over and over, insisting he telling us something we haven’t heard before. And he doesn’t know that he’s a victim of the flawed messaging of the past and he clearly doesn’t seem to care how much wreckage he’s done to our culture as a result of his ‘truth-telling’ Since his work involves a mix of television as well as movies, and a large amount of American History I feel I’m qualified to talk about it. I’m not going to express my own views; I’m only going to focus on what Stone seems to believe.
In 2012, Stone made a documentary series for Showtime, modestly called Oliver Stone’s History of the United States. In trailers for the series, he constantly repeated: “These are stories that have never been told.” There was a reason for that. While I’m willing to acknowledge that there was a fair amount of truth in it, so much of it laid bare the bias of Stone and his views that its very hard to argue it was impartial.
And to be clear, the eight-part series wasn’t a documentary in the traditional sense of the term. Certainly not Ken Burns or even Michael Moore. There was no footage of historians being interviewed, there was no footage demonstrating any of the statements he was making. What we what got was essentially eight hours of stock footage with Stone disconnectedly narrating what he considered facts with almost no independent verification. The basically concept was the same for all eight hours – America is a country that is drawn more towards empire, that will interfere in the destiny’s of other nations for it’s own benefit and almost every American President is compliant in that corruption. Given what we know about history recently, it’s hard to argue he wasn’t being logical at these assumptions.
What I took offense at was basically that Stone seemed to view every that didn’t fit his view of the message as proof. In the agreement at Yalta, Stone seems to argue that Stalin was trustworthy and basically an agreeable person. Leaving that aside, he seems utterly unwilling to admit that the America military or politicians had any reason to distrust Stalin. The fact that he killed millions of his own people, purged his own military and killed off all people considered disloyal is either not mentioned or shrugged off. Stone seems to say later the American complex never trusted the Soviet Union solely because of their impressions of Stalin. That really seems to be giving Stalin mountains of the benefit of the doubt, none of which he deserved then or now.
I also take offense with his idea of how presidential politics worked during the war. Of particular note to him as an example of anti-communist behavior is how the ‘bosses’ arranged to get Henry Wallace of the Democratic ticket in 1944 because they thought he was too soft on Communism. Truman is just a blind patsy in this scenario. He conveniently leaves out: 1) that the bosses didn’t want Wallace on the ticket in 1940 and would’ve pushed him out had FDR not insisted, 2) that FDR could’ve kept Wallace on the ticket had he wanted, but he didn’t real care and, 3) Truman never wanted the job either of Vice President or President. All of this to Stone was just a way of his attacking Truman, a man he had made clear in previous interviews he thought was a terrible President.
Indeed, in the entire documentary there are only two President Stone thinks tried to stand against the tide of empire. One was Jimmy Carter, the other, of course, was Kennedy. He spends almost no time in the documentary on Carter, because the idea of being good at something is irrelevant. He spends an entire episode on Kennedy.
Now, as everyone knows, the mythology of JFK and his presidency began pretty much a week after his assassination. It is the deification that basically has made everybody who grew up with ignore all of his flaws – which were manifold – and focus on his achievements – which were nearly non-existent. Stone is just as guilty of this in both JFK and his History. The fact that his was a mobster and a bootlegger, that he ran for President on a nearly non-existent resume, that he was the both unfaithful President arguably of all time, that he almost certainly stole the 1960 election from Richard Nixon – none of that comes into play. Neither does the fact that in the campaign Kennedy actually ran to the right of the Nixon, that he did almost nothing on civil rights in his entire administration and had no plan too, and all the credit he gets for resolving the Cuban missile crisis is basically a mythology built by his own brother. All of this doesn’t enter into why Stone and my generation deified. It’s because they believe with every fiber of their being in what he didn’t do – or at the very least, didn’t get to do before he was killed.
Stone has had thirty years to come up with more evidence than he did in JFK that Kennedy was going to withdraw soldiers from Vietnam. Based on what I saw in the documentary, he’s still harping on one lone intelligence document. The fact that a major leader in Vietnam was killed two months before Kennedy’s death, the fact that there is no real proof in all the other documents we have off Kennedy of this, even the fact that Bobby Kennedy himself really thought they were going to get deeper involved in Vietnam later, is irrelevant. The theory is basically this: LBJ got us deeper into Vietnam. Kennedy wouldn’t have. The fact that LBJ basically did so against his own better judgment in tapes that we hear him talking to his mentor Dick Russell about (a Senator who also urged Kennedy in further involvement in the war) is irrelevant as well. In this sense Stone is a very simple filmmaker. The story needs a villain and Johnson is it. The fact that LBJ accomplished far more domestic legislation than Kennedy ever did doesn’t matter to him. He sees no reason to let the facts get in the way of this. And anyway, domestic policy never really enters any aspect of his History.
This is actually the core of his follow up film Nixon, a far messier film than JFK but more coherent. Indeed, Stone went out of his way to try to give Nixon credit for things he had no business being credited for. He tried to make Nixon a ‘victim’ of the system, and basically said all the horrible things he did were part of ‘The Beast’. There’s actually a bizarre scene where he meets with college protesters and one of them actually says: “You couldn’t end it if you wanted to.” Now either Stone didn’t know that in the days before Election day Halderman and Erlichman did a backchannel with the Vietnamese urging them not to come to the negotiating table with LBJ in order to get better terms with Nixon – unlikely, considering how thoroughly he researched the rest of the movie – or more likely, it didn’t fit in with his subtle narrative of the film which was that there were forces in the government that Nixon couldn’t control. Either way, it goes against the previous message he was trying to tell in JFK and neither makes Nixon looks better.
I really don’t understand how Stone is the kind of person who can make movies like Nixon and W. where he goes out of his way to humanize these horrible presidents and explain if not justify their flaws and then say in a documentary series that they were horrible Presidents and don’t deserve one iota of our sympathy. It doesn’t speak very highly of him as either as a filmmaker, a documentarian or a historian. But that really doesn’t surprise me because Stone isn’t really any of these things. He’s a conspiracy buff.
That actually gets me to my final point. Back in the early 1990s Comedy Central showed a sketch comedy series I loved immensely Almost Live, a smart, intelligent and witty show that satirized every element of life. (One of their classic bits ‘White Ineffectual Middle-Management Suck-Ups’ who couldn’t decide to help a choking friend without taking a vote.) One of their sketches I’ve never forgotten was the ‘Oliver Stone Encyclopedia Commercial’. (You know, back when encyclopedia sets were still a thing.) The set basically makes it clear that every single aspect of life is a government conspiracy – including rainbows, which are created by the military industrial complex. Big laughs at the time.
Now consider what’s happened in the thirty years in between. Hilary Clinton having Vince Foster killed, 9-11 Truthers, the ‘birther’ movement, and on and on until we’re now electing people to Congress who cheerfully admit that wildfires in California are caused by ‘Jewish space lasers’.
To use a lyric that Billy Joel was using around the time Oliver Stone was filming JFK, ‘he didn’t start the fire’. And considering just how manifest the internet and social media are, Stone’s believes in the Kennedy conspiracy are almost quaint by comparison. But the fact is filmmakers like Stone gave a lot of these people credibility in the decades to come. He didn’t light it, but he’s done nothing to fight it. Even now, with Through the Looking Glass, he’s still quietly throwing gasoline.
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