The Untold History of the United States

The Untold History of the United States #1-2

by Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick

Director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick examine the dark side of American history, from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the Obama administration. They ask whether America's involvement in countries around the globe really reflects its much-vaunted democratic ideals, or self-interested action for poliitcal and economic gain. The Untold History is a meticulously researched and shocking picture of the American Empire, and its influence on the century's defining events.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, The United States Of America, American, United States

750 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2012

About the author

Oliver Stone is the multiple Oscar-winning writer and director of Platoon, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killer, Midnight Express, and many other films.

Reviews

[Mahmut Homsi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't forget when the author said:
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other religions were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."
That sums up everything and truly makes sense..

[JBradford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am very sure that I would normally take a very dim view of anyone who would review a book without having read it — I belong to an online recipe group, for example, and I am routinely incensed by people who will give a rating to a meal and say they are going to try it, which means they have not tried it yet and therefore have no idea what it actually tastes like. In this case, however, I have some idea, because I have had a taste. This is a 750-page book (including the bibliography and index) that I grabbed off the “new books” shelf of my local library but did not get around to before I got an email from the library saying it was time to bring it back. I managed to renew it for another week, but I was very much involved with a few other books at that time as well as with various and sundry other pursuits of my life, and it turned out I did not get around to actually looking at the book until I got the second request to bring it back, this time with no chance for renewal. I read the first chapter, and found myself absolutely intrigued. I then read through the last chapter, and found myself intrigued again. The first chapter effectively commits Republicans to perdition, and the last chapter does pretty much the same thing for Democrats — and somewhere in between, I gather, the authors want to tell us how we really screwed up by not electing Henry Wallace as president; since I feel very much the same way about Hubert Horatio Humphrey, I felt this was my kind of book.

My concept of the star rating system for Goodreads is that three stars should be awarded to books that are entertaining, enjoyable, and informative … that two stars therefore should be applied to books that are less than that (hence, something that you shouldn’t bother with if there is a three-star book around to read instead), and that four stars should be applied to books that I better than all that (hence, something that you really ought to read if you get a chance) … and that a one-star rating accordingly should be applied to books that one should not bother with it all, while five stars, conversely, should go to books that you really must read — books that are so important or valuable that your life will be deprived if you don’t read them. It is important to note, therefore, that some books that get a five-star rating are not necessarily entertaining or enjoyable, but they are always informative. (Needless to say, I am not inclined to give five-star ratings to works of fiction, but I have found that I had to do so several times.)

That is certainly true of this book. I certainly am not going to suggest in any way that I agree with everything that the authors say, and I am almost sure that during the course of reading the book I will come to the conclusion in some places that they have twisted the meaning of what people said or did, stretching it into meaning something other than reality. Despite that fact, I am already aware that the major push of the book is to tell us things we did not know about the political goings-on of our past and present, with these claims being backed up by validated statements and writings of the people involved. I am well aware of how dangerous this can be; I have seen too many examples of how such things can be twisted by opposing politicians in such cases as Supreme Court nominees. Despite that, the continuing refrain in my mind as I read through the first chapter and the last was “I did not know that.”

I have friends that I know without a doubt would be completely turned off by this book and would decide very quickly that they did not believe a word of it. I cannot discard it that simply, however. As a matter of fact, my reaction when I received the second letter from the library was to take the book back to them posthaste … and then to go online and purchase my own copy, which is even now in the mail. I justify that because this is not a book for weekend reading; it is a book I will want on my library shelf so that I can return to it again and again for reference.

I presume that after I received the book, I will eventually get around to reading it (I have no intention of taking it with me on my upcoming vacation cruise), and that I will at that time come back and make a more complete report. Meanwhile, you are to go get your own copy!

[Alastair Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Untold History of the United States
By Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

Being raised in Australia, my late father instilled in us a love of America and all it stood for, freedom, democracy and above all, capitalism. He genuinely believed the ‘Communist domino’ would fall from Vietnam to Melbourne and the only nation that could prevent it were the noble Americans. I remember his rants against Russia and China, and had I not been a voracious reader, I may have followed his political leanings. But fate stepped in when I was ten and I read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and I realised even at that age that history depended very much on who was telling the story. I too came to admire America but it was not the USA that my father adored. I came to view people like Jane Fonda, Daniel Ellsberg, and Oliver Stone as true patriots; my father saw them as traitors.
The Untold History of the United States is a bit of a misnomer, as the promo for the X Files goes, ‘the truth is out there.’ It has been out there for decades but either unreported or under reported, until now. Stone and Kuznick’s history starts with the illegal annexation of Hawaii and takes us through America’s invasion of the Philippines, her entry into both World Wars and her emergence at the end as a global super power. They take us through the Cold War and tell us who started it and chronicle the White House’s love affair with right wing dictators, death squads and Islamic fundamentalism. It leaves us with the questionable legacy of the Obama administration and the inevitable conclusion that all is not well with this house of cards.
I would take issue with those who think it idolises the Democrat party. On the contrary it does reveal the shortcomings of the Democrat administrations. Only Kennedy gets a good word in the lead up to that fateful November day but before that the authors don’t hold back on Kennedy either, so the Democrat bias as far as I can work out doesn’t exist in this book. Each administration is held up to the light of day and each one fails to come up to the standard. It could be argued that American foreign policy was also affected by British and Russian policy, amongst other nations but to chronicle another nation’s descent into madness would have made for a much larger book and to be honest, it’s a history of the USA not the world. It feels very much as if the authors have opened the windows and doors to a dark house of horrors, and maybe even knocked down a couple of walls to reveal the double dealing and corruption at the heart of the American Dream.
To those like myself who have always distrusted the traditional print media the book won’t reveal that many new truths, to those who have tended to side with America it may even be inflammatory because the authors don’t hold back in their criticisms. The main focus is on foreign policy, one of the things successive administrations have usually failed at, but it also veers onto domestic policy with issues such as America’s complete lack of a national health service, making it truly unique in the industrialised world. Its love affair with big business and the unholy marriage between the corporate elite and Congress is laid out warts and all for the reader. At least thirty percent of my Kindle version is dedicated to an extensive bibliography, which invites you to explore different periods at your leisure and with over a century of American dominance the subject matter would probably fill a couple of libraries.
It strikes me as I read it that this book should be read by foreign policy experts, particularly those in the White House. Sadly I’m not sure they do much reading at all but still one can still hope. With such a bloated military budget and an almost complete lack of credible threats one can’t help but wonder if a later edition of this book might be retitled, The Rise and Fall of the United States. As any student of history will tell you, an empire either collapses under its own weight or is subsumed by another empire.

[Scottnshana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the utility of this book lies in what it is not. It's not all-encompassing, but a history of the 20th Century. It's also not objective, but everyone knows that when he/she sees who wrote it. I don't know if it is more comprehensive than its companion TV series, because I don't have cable and probably won't see it. I can say that it does hold a satisfactory argument that US foreign policy in ther 20th Century would be better served by Realism than by Wilsonian liberalism. I think there are also some good observations here that need to be communicated. The US needs a free, unbiased press, and if we ever had one we have some hard work ahead if we want to return to it. I also share the opinion that there were plenty of nefarious characters in the 20th Century who manipulated the country into war by bringing up the words "Munich" and (especially) "Appeasement," which is a bit like hitting the Easy Button for mobilizing people who learn everything from the TV. I think the book succinctly tackled Nixon's career and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and if you don't want to invest the time in Rick Perlstein's and Bob Woodward's books (respectively) on these topics, "The Untold History of the United States" will fill the bill. The book has some perspecives, though, that I just cannot embrace. First of all, the argument that the world would have been a much better place if FDR had picked Henry Wallace instead of Truman for his Vice President. In Chapter 4: "Wallace would have become president in 1945 and the course of history would have been dramatically altered. In fact, had that happened, there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War." This is a speculation that is more suited to the Marvel Comics "What If?" series and should be treated the same way as questions like "What if the Hulk tried to pick up Thor's hammer?," "What if Wolverine was a woman?," and "What if Al Gore was President during 9/11?" These questions stimulate debate amongst certain segments of society, but they rarely accomplish anything useful and anyone who says he has the definitive answer can be immediately dismissed as full of it. I guess Mssrs. Stone and Kuzick can rationalize this with their gentle treatment of Joseph Stalin; yes, the Soviets lost more territory and people in WWII than any other combatant, but Stalin and the people around him were some VERY nasty characters and President Truman scared the crap out of the battle-hardened Soviet Politburo--period. The Iron Curtain ended up where it did because Western leaders stopped it from moving further, and the Germans and Japanese preferred this for some pretty compelling reasons. I also think repeated implications that Truman was a bigot are a little disingenuous in light of his support for integrating the military and establishing the state of Israel. I'm also not real comfortable with the book's criticisms of Secretaries Clinton and Gates, nor do I view Private Bradley Manning, who broke his oath to protect US state secrets, as someone worthy of my sympathy. This book is useful, I think, as a foil to Max Boot's history of US participation in small wars. I don't particularly favor Boot's perspectives, either, but I do think that somewhere between Stone's characterization of the US as imperial exploitation engine and Boot's Neocon musings on America's foreign policy lies the truth.

[Frederick Gault · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a worthwhile read. That being said, it was one of the most distressing and depressing books I've every read! We live in the Matrix. Most think America is a bastion of freedom and democracy. This is not at all the case. It is a story we tell ourselves. The facts show something very different.

I wanted to stab my self repeatedly in the eyes with a rusty screwdriver! My rage was towering. Spinal fluid leaked from my ears as I sputtered in impotent anger. Nixon was worse than I thought! How is that even possible? This nation is ruled by greedy violent psychopaths. What's worse is they are not very bright. The violent blundering carnage over the last 100 years - and right up to today - is breathtaking. The only thing the plutocrat kakistocracy does competently is steal money and bamboozle the credulous with bread and circuses. I include Obama in this pack of bumblers. The current president has empowered the Military Industrial Complex and spy agencies in way that Dick Cheney could only dream of.

Lest you think I exaggerate; I counted three instances where (in my lifetime) we were seconds away from a full on nuclear launch! When we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan they were desperately trying to surrender! Our government has routinely tortured people over the last century. The fight against Communism was a cure far worse than the disease, in lost lives, and lost freedoms. We've had rogue administrations that sold weapons and drugs to Iran to prop up fascist bastards in Central America.

This depressing list of facts goes on and on. Everyone should know these things and almost nobody does. Perhaps the grim meat-hook reality is such a downer that most people would rather not know.

[Owlseyes · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Watchin' Dr Strangelove...in 2015)


When past is prologue...

‘The Putin I knew was rational, calm, always acting in the best interest of the Russian people’
Oliver Stone, April 26th 2022

Like Chomsky*, Stone is entitled to interpret and write down the dark side of, part of, the USA history.

Stone likes global history, not (the) one central player called USA. I guess so. He likes, as if, all players at the same level. No exceptional players allowed.

UPDATE

While in Romania, he gave an interview to a Portuguese newspaper (JN). He affirmed: “A Rússia quer dar-se bem connosco. E Zelensky quer a III Guerra Mundial”, which means "Russia wants to get along with us. E. Zelensky wants WWIII".

IN: https://www.jn.pt/1139944492/oliver-s...

*Interesting view on the war in the Ukraine: "WAR in Ukraine is "AN INSANE EXPERIMENT" by the USA" (Check on Youtube)

[Donald]

This was an incredible book! Although this is a bit of a tome, coming in at 615 pages, it was fast-paced and incredibly interesting - no, it was incredibly SHOCKING! The book moves chronologically from World War 1 to the Obama administration. The emphasis is usually on how each Administration reacted to the American Empire, which was initiated in 1898. Much of the material centers on the US-Soviet relationship and how there were numerous occasions that that relationship could have been vastly improved and the Cold War avoided, along with the nuclear nightmare which still haunts us.

One of the heroes of the book is Henry Wallace, the 3rd Vice president to FDR. At the Democratic convention for FDR's 4th term, the Backroom politicos decided that Wallace was too Progressive for their tastes. Through a lot of skullduggery, Harry Truman was chosen, a choice that, the book shows, poisoned the rest of the century for the US. Truman was much like GW Bush, an arrogant, self-important cretin who couldn't "walk and chew gum at the same time." Truman was a machine-party hack whose political mentor spent Truman's presidency in Federal Prison. Wallace, on the other hand, was a visionary whose writings can be read today with the same power as when they were originally written. Wallace was a thinker and a problem solver, not the sort of ideologues that have so utterly destroyed the United States.

Truman, like his successors, completely failed to understand the Soviet's concerns during and after WWW2. The same ignorance is being repeated in the 'War on Terrorism."

My biggest surprise in the book - other than the Wallace/Truman revelation- was that a political officer on a Russian Sub during the Cub an Missile Crisis actually saved Humanity by not responding to the effect of a depth charge and releasing his nuclear rockets.

I very Highly recommend this book. Would that it be mandatory reading in High School and a prerequisite before stepping into the Voting Booth.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A health warning is due on this book. It is a polemic linked to a documentary. Usually that should be cause enough for caution but it is generally well written and researched, valuable as a corrective to the standard internal narrative about US foreign policy which is somewhat Pollyanna-ish.

Stone's propensity for conspiracy theory and a curious hagiography surrounding the John F. Kennedy who might have been (reflected briefly in this book) is corrected by a solid research team clearly under the able direction of Peter Kuznick and, no doubt, guided by Stone himself.

The result has flaws - too kind to the Russians while the balance shifts into contemporary polemic in the final chapters on Bush and Obama. We have mentioned the over favourable approach to JFK. But these flaws, denying it five stars, do not detract from the achievement.

This is a book that I would like to see in every American high school library, not as the main set text but simply as an intelligent corrective to the conformist almost totalitarian educational training of Americans in the myth of their own cultural and political beneficence.

The best recent history of the US that I have found was critical but measured and by a fellow Brit - David Reynolds' America: Empire of Liberty - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... - but Reynolds' vision is definitely not that of Americans themselves.

This is why Stone and Kuznick have done their fellow citizens a service in the age of Sanders, Clinton and Trump. They have held up a mirror to American foreign and international economic policy and shown us an imperial system out of educated democratic control run by psychopaths.

It is rare that I feel much emotion in reading a book nowadays but I found myself seething with anger at times - on the decision-making around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the murderous assault on Gautemalan freedom and, of course, the lunacy of Vietnam and MAD.

I used the term psychopath. It is a term I usually avoid using because it over-simplifies the brutal things some people have to do in existential situations and is too easily applied to people stuck in a system like bankers or brokers but here the term often applies.

Some of the activities of the American State, often deliberately obfuscating its actions before the democratic process, often manipulating and subverting it and often backed by legislators whose ignorance can only be put down to the force of ideology, are, frankly and simply, evil. Yes, evil.

This is not to say that most American public servants are evil but then I suspect most ordinary Communist apparatchiki or Nazi civil servants were not intrinsically evil but all served systems that accepted evil acts against civilians and lies to their own people as normal and right.

You will have to make up your own mind after reading this catalogue of horrors and lies but, before getting over excited, you should balance the book with some reading of other texts with a more sanguine view of American exceptionalism and belief in its being a 'beacon on the hill'.

The honest truth is that this book falls precisely into the American trap of seeing everything as black and white rather than many shades of grey. It is the dark to the sunny light of the standard American narrative but that does not make it right. One yearns for a balanced view.

Yet facts are still facts. It is hard to reason away many American State actions which were the more criminal in being based on bad intelligence, poor judgement and the taking of risks that might have led to the immolation of our species let alone tens of thousands of passing peasants.

OK, so the US won and the spectre of communism has now degenerated into a few elderly socialists who can't muster majorities anywhere but the price, as I read it, was too high. It degraded America itself decade on decade until degeneracy became the national norm. Victory was Pyrrhic.

Forgetting the overblown tirade against Obama here (although it is true that he is now mere creature of a system created by his predecessors), each President, perhaps excluding FDR and Clinton I, is held up to scrutiny and found wanting. Bush II was far from uniquely dodgy.

Indeed, one of the benefits of this book is that it cuts through the partisan nonsense and shows us that Democrats and Republicans are really not much better than each other when push comes to shove - though the silence here suggests Clinton I was perhaps a bright point through inaction.

If this is an argument for Clinton II, however, I can't find it in her pronouncements or the text. For some reason, she is a 'hawk' far to the Right of Obama and not quite so different from the world of Bush II as naive Democrats would like to think. She terrifies me ...

As for Trump, words should fail but at least he has the merit of possibly, just possibly, not being answerable to an establishment machinery backing sustained state violence, one that is clearly horrified by his candidacy. If the system is horrified by him, he may have merit!

The American propensity to concentrate on the individual (the President) misses the point that he is always embedded in a system and that this system is imperial, concerned with economic loot and highly militarised. The noble gestures and rhetoric are just icing on a mouldy cake.

The Generals answer to the Commander-in-Chief but he is trapped into compliance with the cultural expectations of competitive but closely knit networks made up of surprisingly few ideologically motivated people with an axe to grind.

Stone and Kuznick bring out the continuities where a few hundred ambitious careerists, lost in abstract models of foreign policy, float like trash on a registered electorate of 153 million souls and coldly and blithely dispose of the lives of others without any existential self-questioning.

One suspects that the system both attracts and promotes a personality type perfectly fitted to serve it as all such systems do - just as the Roman, British and Soviet Empires created their unself-reflective 'types'. There is no reason why the US should be different in this.

What seems to be lacking in the contemporary historiography is an analysis of careers, patronage, ideology formation, interests and connections, such as Lewis Namier once did for the eighteenth century British Parliament - ideology is not top down but centred in group-think.

As with Namier, such a historian might find that this closed elite shared a 'weltanschauung' but pursued self interest within it - questioning nothing but seeking to combine through allegiance to networks (parties) that scarcely differed from each other except in their competition for benefits.

Namier's analysis of a grasping and self interested elite left little room for ideas but eighteenth century Britain did not 'progress' to the American situation where ideas, linked existentially to identity, might become weapons of advantage. Ideas have here paradoxically displaced humanity.

The question is whether Americans who read the standard narrative, the non-American neutral narrative and the dissident native narrative (this book) would still want to change a decayed system that thinks its eighteenth century constitution is sufficient protection against evil.

It was in 1973 that Arthur M. Schlesinger coined the term for the Imperial Presidency as something uncontrollable and prone to exceed constitutional limits. Yet it is that constitution that permits those excesses - taken even further by Bush II and even (as the authors argue) by Obama.

What either Clinton II or Trump could do with these excessive powers (of which a first taste lay in that most sinister of Democratic 'progressive' Presidents Woodrow Wilson) is perhaps what is keeping many centrist liberals awake at night with reason. Neither fills one with hope.

The truth is that liberal Americans are still stuck in their eighteenth century and 'rights' paradigm as Roman intellectuals were once stuck in their republican and 'virtu' ideology as they lurched stage by stage towards Tiberius and Caligula.

In the end, all a Roman could hope for was that the Emperor be a good one. American liberals have found themselves in the same situation, hoping against hope that the next President will be a 'good one'. As Stone and Kuznick show, that is not a likely outcome.

Even Carter gets a coruscating treatment here that does not allow his later saintly persona to get in the way of the facts. Perhaps Clinton I's scarce mention only arises because he was uninterested in foreign policy and Bush I (the best since FDR) had done all the work in apparently taming Russia.

So, all in all, with the caveats, an eye-opening book that might further radicalise the young but not, I hope, into a futile faith in some man in a white hat appearing in the Oval Office but into beginning to think like a European and move from individuals to a critique of the total system.

There is something eighteenth century even today about a monarchical/imperial executive capable of great and monstrous crimes that yet seem not to stir the consciences of the vast number of Americans. Obviously many radicals who voted for Sanders were stirred but he lost!

Americans might be engineered to be horrified by Aleppo perhaps because it is the Russians 'doing it' but not enormously by Falluja or Gaza. One suspects the complaints about Vietnam owed far more to the fears of narcissistic hippies than concern for the slaughter of the Vietnamese.

Sometimes the US was existentially threatened: we must respect its desire for survival and cohesion. Sometimes it acted out of for greed which at least is comprehensible. Sometimes it killed for a theory or a dream or an idea. Frankly, that last makes it not much better than the Soviets.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

In response to Henry Luce’s 1941 famed “American Century” article, US Vice-President Henry Wallace (my grandpa) countered with his “Century for the Common Man” which advocated banning colonialism and economic exploitation – but Luce’s hegemonic vision won out. Samuel Huntington eloquently explained it as “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” Europe and its colonies controlled 67 % of the planet by 1878, but by 1914 it was up to 84%. After WWI, US businessmen swooped into Cuba and bought 1.9 million acres at 20 cents an acre. McKinley wanted a canal and took Panama from Columbia, then quickly recognized Panama’s “independence”. United Fruit needed complaint governments leading to banana republics beholden to US interests over their own citizens.

In 1914, an abysmal 1% of Brits were graduating from high school; even the US beat them with a paltry 9%. What made the US choose sides in WWI? That’s easy – the Allies owed the US $2.5 billion while the Central Powers owed only $27 million. A war fought by the US for money, not morals. In 1918, Iowa banned the speaking of ALL foreign languages under the racist Babel Proclamation. Across the US German composers were dropped from repertoires, hamburgers became “liberty sandwiches”, German shepherds became “police dogs.” Perhaps if the US had loaned more $ to the Central Powers, speaking the Queen’s English would have been banned in the US, ha ha… In 1934, “much of the electorate was to the left of the New Deal.” “More than 13 million people died under Stalin’s despotic rule.” US communists left the party in droves at that point. “The Nye Committee investigations showed that (Woodrow) Wilson had, in effect, lied the country into war (WWI).” “The United States entered the war knowing the spoils had been agreed upon.”

Hitler banked correctly that the West wouldn’t stop his invasion of the Rhineland, otherwise he’d have to retreat. The US did nothing to stop fascism from overtaking Spain because “the Republic had made enemies among US officials and corporate leaders by its progressive and tight regulation of business.” Putting your people ahead of US business? How dare you! “Roosevelt did nothing to assist the Republic (although he tried to covertly help the Republic in 1938 but too little too late).” Meanwhile Texaco gave Franco all the oil he needed AND “on credit” – in fact Texaco also provided Hitler with oil. “Winston Churchill sympathized with Franco’s Fascist rebels.” FDR did however recognize that it was the Soviet Union and not the US that was winning WWII and clearly told General MacArthur so (p.102). In fact, “General MacArthur credited the Red Army with ‘one of the greatest military feats in history’.” But instead of directly helping the Soviets, “US and British troops headed off to North Africa”, and later landing in Sicily, so Soviets would longer stay burdened by the Nazis (as was Churchill’s wish). Landing in Normandy was 1944, where 9,000 Allies died in their Johnny-Come-Lately attack. “Until the invasion of Normandy, the Red Army was regularly engaging more than 200 enemy divisions while the Americans and British together rarely confronted more than ten. Churchill later admitted it was “the Russian army that tore the guts out (80%) of the German military machine.” The US dominated World Bank and IMF were then created.

Fun Facts: Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895” and then kicked Russia’s ass a decade later in the Russo-Japanese war - it was the first time since Genghis Khan an Eastern power had defeated a Western one. The US provoked Japan in 1939 by killing a treaty and cutting the flow of “vital raw materials and banning US exports critical to the Japanese war machine.” A 1939 Gallup poll showed 95% of Americans wanted the US to stay out of the war. FDR never told Truman about the Atomic Bomb (when my grandpa already knew a lot about it). Stalin demanded of Truman surrounding buffer states for “security”. A 1945 Gallup Poll “revealed the 55% of Americans believed that the Soviet Union could be trusted to cooperate with the United Sates after the war.” “By 1943, US factories were churning out almost 100,000 planes a year, dwarfing the 70,000 Japan produced during the entire war.” In 1941, FDR and grandpa learn in a meeting that the A Bomb would be ready within two years (p.134). Truman was chosen by “corrupt party bosses” in a “backroom deal” to replace grandpa because he was “innocuous” and wouldn’t “rock the boat.” The authors call McCullough’s bio of Truman “hagiographic”. Truman’s mom told him he was meant to be a girl which led him to want to stand up to Stalin. Truman was “always bigoted and anti-Semitic” and even “sent a $10 check to the Klu Klux Klan”. Such a role model. When Pendergast was asked why he chose Truman to run for Senator he replied, “I wanted to demonstrate that a well-oiled machine could send an office boy to the Senate.” Truman then became known as the “Senator from Pendergast”. In a 1944 Gallup poll, 65% chose Henry Wallace as their Vice-President. Claude Pepper got within five feet of getting Wallace nominated on the platform instead of Truman when party bosses intentionally adjoined the proceedings. Had Wallace been nominated the author writes, “history would have been dramatically altered” with “no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War”. The chairman the next day apologized to Pepper explaining, “I knew if you made the motion, the convention would nominate Henry Wallace.” The chairman had to obey corrupt party boss Hannegan. Then FDR died.

Hiroshima & Nagasaki: One reason for T dropping the A bomb was unnecessary was that the US “had broken Japanese codes” even before the US had entered the war. Negotiations w/ Japan broke down because they wanted to keep their emperor, but in the end, Japan kept their emperor, so WTF? The real reason to drop the bombs was to stop the Soviets from entering the Japan war and getting a seat at the table (p.148 and p719) and that the bombs were dropped as Candy Grams to the Soviets – this could happen to you too Guys so watch out. Churchill, Truman, Byrnes, and Stimson admitted as much later (p.164). General MacArthur called the A bomb droppings “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” saying the Japanese were “already beaten.” Some of the 23 US survivors of Hiroshima (POWs) were beaten to death by bomb survivors. Thank you, Truman. During the war, Time Magazine wrote, “The ordinary, unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing …indicates it.” Not to be outdone, Truman called Jews kikes and Mexicans as greasers, and his biographer said he always used the N word for blacks. It took the US 40 years to apologize for the Japanese internment centers in the US. In 1945, LeMay sent 334 planes to drop incendiary bombs on the largely wooden Tokyo. Had the US lost, they would have been on trial for war crimes as Robert McNamara (then on LeMay’s staff) later admitted. The Soviets including Stalin knew b4 the A bombs were dropped that Japan was finished so the Soviet Union was the real target. The Japanese knew if they didn’t immediately surrender the Soviets would soon take Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto and Hokkaido. Telford Taylor at the Nuremburg trials said he never heard a “plausible” justification for the second bomb by the US at Nagasaki. Admiral Toyoda said surrender happened because of Russian participation NOT the A bombs, while General Ikeda agreed: Soviet entry meant “our chances were gone.” Leahy agreed, adding “wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” Tell that to Israel today. Eisenhower MacArthur, LeMay, Nimitz and Admiral Halsey all agreed with Admiral Leahy that the A bombs were NOT needed to end the war. But they gave Truman an erection, so everybody back off. The authors say, “Nor did dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki make the Soviet Union more pliable.” Even Oppenheimer told Truman “I have blood on my hands,” after that heartless Truman would call him the “cry-baby scientist”. Oppenheimer told grandpa his fears, and grandpa later recounted, “the guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.” After that Truman referred to grandpa as a “Red”. Even Churchill thought the two bombing were wrong. The authors believe there is no way my grandpa would have dropped those A bombs (p.180). “In early 1946, a Gallup Poll found that only 26% of Americans thought the Soviets sought world domination.” Truman would quickly have to lie his pants off to get most Americans to change their minds.

One year after FDR’s death grandpa (Henry Wallace) gave a critically important speech at NY’s City Hall where he countered Churchill’s bellicose vision and basically said, a war w/ the Soviets won’t show the world who is right, but who is left. Therefore, we must show by example to the world which system (capitalism vs communism) better benefits the common man (p.194) w/o bloodshed. He added, “Let’s make it a clean race, a determined race but above all a peaceful race in the service of humanity.” Grandpa wanted the US and Soviet Union to work together as they did during the war. Truman fires grandpa as Secretary of Commerce for his remarks but Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein defend him. Without him as a counterbalance, the US plunges into the Cold War. Senator Vandenberg tells Truman to start the Cold War he will “Have to scare the hell out of the country”, and he does. The authors say grandpa leads the opposition. Did you know that the head of British intelligence deployed Roald Dahl (creator of Willie Wonka, Matilda, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) to spy on grandpa? How dare grandpa oppose British colonialism? Truman takes the fascist side in Greece and the US tests out ideas it will use in Vietnam like destroying unions, “torture, napalming villages, forced mass deportations to concentration camps w/o trial or charges,” imprisonment, execution and censorship of the press. Pause to wave the American flag. Clark Clifford later admitted, “the president didn’t attach fundamental importance to the Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such he had to recognize it. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured.” Many Hollywood stars paid the price for opposing the Cold War like Kate Hepburn, Groucho Marx, Benny Goodman and Henry Fonda. If you took grandpa’s side, you were called a Commie. The authors say the worst red baiters were liberals (like Truman who created the Cold War) not conservatives (who didn’t create it). “Mobs broke up Wallace rallies (when he ran for President in ’48). Wallace groups were banned from campuses (just like pro-Palestinian groups on today’s campuses)”. W.E.B. DuBois “actively” supported grandpa’s presidential bid. Grandpa said, “This dramatizes the hypocrisy of spending billions for arms in the name of defending freedom abroad, while freedom is trampled on here at home.” Truman invoked the classic domino theory w/ his Cold War: If we lose Korea, then we lose Asia, then the Middle East, then Europe. Manufactured paranoia is such an ugly thing. Such paranoia turned the nation: “Gallup found that, by 52 to 38 percent, the public supported using atomic bombs, reversing earlier poll results.”

At the Tokyo war criminal trials, the members of Unit 731 received immunity by sharing what they learned from their sadistic experiments on 3,000 humans in Manchuria. After WWII, the US sought to dramatically increase its share of Middle Eastern oil, of which Iran was another prize. Truman’s Byrnes pointed fingers at the Soviet Union, Molotov rightfully pointed back fingers at the US in Greece, Italy and Japan.

Future Israel: Arthur Koestler called the 1917 Balfour Declaration, “one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation.” Saudi King Ibn Saud artfully said, “amends should be made by the criminal (Nazi Germany), not the innocent bystander (Palestinians).” The US recognized Israel only eleven minutes after it declared statehood in 1948.

China & USSR: In 1949, the USSR tests its first atomic bomb which immediately decreased the imaginary dick size of Cold War liberals. “Almost every major city in North Korea was burned to the ground.” After the US napalmed one North Korean village killing everyone, a dead housewife was found still clutching a page from a Sears-Roebuck catalog for a “bewitching red jacket.” Pretend your enemy is different from you so you can kill them. Soon most American disapproved of that war – as war criminal LeMay said “a lot of people can’t stomach it.” Could Jeffrey Dahmer have said it any better? Eisenhower becomes president, then Stalin dies of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953 and is replaced by Malenkov.” “The Joint Chiefs recommended and the NSC endorsed atomic attacks on China.” Imagine how the world would have hated us for doing that then. Nixon used that insane thought to create his Madman theory – make countries believe you are batshit crazy enough to do something like that and “Ho Chi Minh will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.” The Korean war ended when Eisenhower pulled the Madman theory on the Chinese. Nixon later said of Eisenhower’s action, “It worked, it was the bomb that did it.” In 1954 SAC came up with a plan to kill 80% of the USSR population “with 600 to 750 bombs”. Imagine this being taught to us in schools.

McCarthy Era: Mary McCarthy said of the hearings were about “the principle of betrayal as a norm of good citizenship”; I.F. Stone said they were about turning “a whole generation of Americans into stool pigeons.” McCarthyism “decimated the US Left.” The US does atomic testing in the Marshall Islands killing many from radioactive fallout – unaware “children played in the radioactive fallout.” Local fish became inedible. All this led Nehru to say publicly that US leaders were “dangerous self-centered lunatics” who would “blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy.” Go Nehru! The Washington Post ran an article that says, Many Americans are now aware …that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary.” The 1955 Bandung Conference was about non-aligned powers calling for neutrality, decolonization, and countries protecting their own resources. The Soviets send the first satellite into space; the US counters with a crappy satellite that gets airborne for two seconds and at a max height of four feet. Newspapers quickly dub it “Stayputnik”. Did u know JFK ran for president as a hawk attacking Eisenhower for allowing Castro to take power (replacing the US supported Batista dictatorship)? JFK said Eisenhower risked “our very survival as a nation” by opposing increasing the defense budget. When his advisors counselled otherwise, JFK shouted, “What are you? Peaceniks?” After the botched CIA Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK threatened to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces.” Well that shattering sure went well, ha ha…

Iran: The US screwed over Iran big time – Brits got rich stealing Iranian oil while its people “lived in poverty.” We then removed its elected leader Mosaddeq who had a backing of 95-98% of his country in 1953, by the CIA buying up powerful Iranians and setting mobs loose. Then – bingo – Mosaddeq was replaced by the dictator Shah and the US, not the Brits, controlled Iranian oil. This was the first country the CIA had overthrown, and it soon moved on to remove Arbenz in Guatemala for round two. All for the crime of valuing one’s own citizens over US corporations. How dare they! Guatemala then also gets a US installed dictator, forty years of fascist tyranny and 100,000 dead Guatemalans – thank the CIA for that.

JFK: JFK asked McNamara how big the missile gap with the Soviets was. Three weeks later he found there was no gap, and still wanted to pretend it existed but McNamara publicly said it didn’t exist. Robert Kennedy then made overthrowing Castro “the top priority”. So much for those two being men of peace. Bobby actually said, “My idea is to stir things up …with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by Cubans themselves.” The job was to destroy Cuba’s economy and assassinate Castro. Then came Operation Northwoods where the US planned to shoot down a civilian airliner (“the passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday”) and blaming Castro. Pause to wave your American flag. JFK recognized the Soviets won WWII, and “most Americans looked askance at British imperialism” and its actions in Greece and India. Then Vasili Arkhipov saves the planet by single-handedly stopping his Soviet superior from using a nuclear torpedo while under US attack. Then JFK became human again and wanted to stop the Vietnam War (p.316) and gave his famous anti-war speech at American University (all Americans should find and read it). And, daringly, he realized Cuba wasn’t the enemy saying “In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.” Did you know 4 of the 7 members of Warren Commission “harbored serious doubts about the lone gunman and magic-bullet theories”? LBJ, Governor Connelly (who was shot) and Robert Kennedy all had serious doubts yet today if you join any of them, you’ll STILL get called a conspiracy theorist.

Vietnam: South Vietnam was (like Israel today) held together only by US arms, money and political will. Had LBJ focused only on US social reforms he would have been one of our greatest presidents, but he was obsessed that he “was not going to lost Vietnam.” He was hostile to reports that the war going badly, so, he “used a fabricated incident in the Gulf of Tonkin as an excuse to escalate the war” and bomb North Vietnam. The press bought it hook, line, and sinker. The CIA surveilled anti-war activists comically for communist involvement. Apparently if you even shared a joint or a bong, you were a communist. Black rioting became a thing in ’67. After the Tet offensive Johnson’s presidency was shot and he didn’t run again. Then comes the “Mann Doctrine” w/ the US coddling dictators and military coup governments to protect US Latin American business interests.

The rest of this review of this amazing book continues in the comment section (Goodreads does not allow long reviews) look for below. Be sure to read that as well if you want to learn more what this great book teaches you. Cheers...

[Josh Liller · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me, but I felt very reluctant to read it because Oliver Stone is synonymous with shoddy history. I don't equate Showtime with historical accuracy either (the cover bills this book as the companion to the Showtime documentary series). I decieded to start with the topic I knew best: the decision to use the atomic bombs against Japan.

Stone is clearly anti-bomb, but I feel he leans too heavily on Gar Alperovitz' "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of An American Myth" and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's "Racing The Enemy" and doesn't give enough credence to Richard Frank's "Downfall" and, unless I missed it, no attention to Max Hasting's "Retribution". I think there is also too much psychoanalyzing of Truman and the discussion of Japanese internment (intended to show anti-Japanese racism, I guess) feels very tangential. This book is quick to dismiss Truman and others for self-serving defense of the atomic bombs after they happened, but doesn't seem to appreciate many anti-bomb people in high places had their opinions formed after the fact. Who knew what in the case is less important than when they knew it; it's easy to revolt in horror of atomic warfare after you've seen it but nobody at the time truly knew what they were dealing with until after the bombs had been dropped.

For me, this chapter was a litmus test and I feel it has failed so I wont be reading the rest of it.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

First they stole the words, then they stole the meanings." George Orwell: 1984

Oliver Stone calls Trump 'a disaster'

Watch here

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can't do it... I just can't finish reading THE UNTOLD (not really) HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.
Look, Oliver Stone is arguably my favorite film director, but, as a historian, his views are skewed by his unwavering devotion to a pro-socialist/anti-capitalist agenda. His simplistic tendency to blame everything on capitalists gets old after a while.
When comparing the "facts" in this book with conflicting information found in other historical accounts, Stone & Co. (to me, at least) always seem to wind up with the weaker argument--partly because the book covers too much ground to be able to back up its claims with the proper factual support. Often, the writers just throw something out there and expect readers to accept it at face value.
Now, I'll admit there's an awful lot this book gets right. Its treatment of Woodrow Wilson, for example, was excellent. On the other hand, I would call Stone's deep regard for Franklin Roosevelt misguided to say the least (read THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL).
So, I'm quitting the book early. Life is just too short to make reading this 900-page tome worthwhile.

[Kamil Salamah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would start by saying it could also be titled:

" The Rise and Very Serious Highly Probable Impending Fall of the Empire of the Age: that has refused to recognize it's imperialistic designs". The Yale historian Paul Kennedy spelled it out;" From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an IMPERIAL nation, a conquering nation."

What a great unraveling of a timeline of history's most POWERFUL EMPIRE ever; dwarfing all others that have come before it.An Empire that sky rocketed at tremendous speed and and is facing the flicking of its sheen and glamor: perhaps will go in history being one of the shortest( considering others).

It made its imperialist designs be felt going back to its annexation of the harbor of the Pacific island of Pago Pago in 1889 and built a new navy between 1890 and 1896.Fast forward to the 21st century, this Empire has over 1000 bases strung across the planet. In 2012, anthropologist David Vine confirmed this: costing $250 billion annually. Still the official party line is " We Americans are NOT IMPERIALISTIC"!!!!

America has declined because of this. it is suffering massive financial debts to its nemesis:China. Why?.. because of their unofficial design of being "the Empire": a costly enterprise. America has long been highjacked by its elites and its military: the corporate industrial military complex.In 2010, it spent $1.6 TRILLION over revenues in its $3.8 budget. debt service alone cost $250 billion annually; mainly to China( who now is the 2nd world economy and has America by the throat).

The military budget is over $1 trillion. Actually the USA spends over $1.2 TRILLION out of its $3 TRILLION annual budget on defense. This approximately equals what the rest of the world spends. U.S. military spending consumes about 44% of ALL U.S. tax revenues: moneys taken away from the good common American citizens. This has inflicted MASSIVE suffering and pain on the lives of the American public to live their normal civic lives.

Again, this book proves that HUBRIS and "Overreach" is the DEATH sentence of ALL nations that are bent on EMPIRE building: a system that has consistently FAILED by ALL who have tried it.

Respect of other nations, races, cultures, religions,and coexistence in harmony is what humanity DEMANDS. Aggression and blood shedding NEVER amounted to PEACE. It only proliferates MORE hatred, aggression, death and destruction.

As an American Congressman noted," Did all this spending make Americans safer?"

[Alexandru · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first thing that needs to be known about this book is that it is not really the history of the US, but rather a history of the foreign policy of the US in the 20th century. The book is a companion to the TV documentary directed by Oliver Stone which I have not yet seen but will definitely be watching it.

The positive of this book is that it shows the history of America from another, lesser known perspective. The mainstream view was that America was a selfless power that intervened in WW1 and WW2 in order to bring freedom to the world. Of course this is definitely not the case, as any other world power America pursues its self interest which in many cases will not align with the interest of the many small countries with which it interacts.

There were a lot of interesting and lesser known facts about American history such as the terrible crimes committed by the US in the Philippines during and after the Spanish-American war, the involvement of some American companies with Nazi Germany up to 1941 and even beyond that using their subsidiaries as well as the countless US interventions in Latin America which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. It also has an interesting perspective on the Obama presidency which despite its many achievements was heavily sponsored and influenced by powerful Wall Street lobbyists and corporations.

With all of its positives one would wonder why I only gave this book 2 stars. That is because it is a heavily biased book when it comes to the other Great Power of the age the Russian Empire/Soviet Union. The authors seem to completely gloss over and rationalise all of the crimes committed by the Soviet Union simply because they were opposed to America.

The authors go so far as to be apologists for Stalin and his deal with Hitler as well as the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union in 1939. Stalin is portrayed as a fairly benign ruler whereas Harry Truman is psychoanalysed and deemed to be incompetent and out of depth.

It quite staggers the mind that a state that killed and enslaved millions of people (both of its own citizens as well as the citizens of other countries) is given a free pass simply because it was Communist and it opposed the United States. There seems to be a double standard in terms of the measure by which the United States and the Soviet Union are judged.

This book would have been a five star book if it would have been more objective. Instead it is a book that does not paint a complete picture and should be read alongside other histories of the period in order to get a complete picture.

[PaddytheMick · Rating 5 out of 5]

cannot recommend highly enough.

if there were parts of american history that didn't quite make sense to you, this book will help in that regard. after all, how can you learn anything by just reading celebratory hagiographies?

much more interesting and comprehensive than the documentaries on showtime (although they are a good addition). i can see how the "fox nooz" type may not like this book, but it is certainly worth reading. the best i've read in a long time.

[Jackie Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book enthralling. It provides an entirely different outlook on the past presidents and their times. It also left me extremely angry that most of the presidents and the people under them caused so much havoc in the world and at such terrible cost that could have been put to constructive use elsewhere - even to alleviate poverty in the United States. I think all Americans should read this book.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goes out of its way to be revisionist, and never leaves the boot not put in... Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger, the Reagan and Bush slam-dunks, Obama and Afghanistan - none are spared, and it's entertaining to read such a sustained case against them all, perhaps over a liberty sandwich and freedom fries. Now I need to go and read something else to get a more balanced view.

[derwoineinembuchwasliest · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 ⭐️

[Tadas Talaikis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book in one sentence:

"India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru publicly described U.S. leaders a “dangerous self-centered lunatics” who would “blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy.” House of Commons Debate, fifth series, vol. 525

O.M.C., I almost went crazy posting so many U.S. crimes on my FB. The "funniest" thing is when "liberals" (Hillary Clinton) are back to back with war criminals, like Henry Kissinger. They're all f*cked up psychopaths, no wonder American people don't even have universal health like any other ("socialist") nation does. This craze with "our way of life" goes too far away. As a "psychologist" I can understand that, - people, due to their croc-brains, approve authorities. The harder some alpha-crocs ("hitlers") cream about some fanatic fantastic idiocy (some nonsense ideology, any ideology), the more approval you get from submissive infantile or aggressive beta-crocodiles.

My illusions about sanity in U.S. vanished even more. Let's see if we would not awake one day and not find theocratic dictatorship, like in The handmaid's tale, forcing to sleep with "commodores" (of god) for the "higher cause". People are f*cking blind, where their ideologies and beliefs go. Always been.

On philosophical note, why do people/did I believed in America's values? Simple - media propaganda. Everything is clogged with Hollywood sh*t and CNN bulls*it. A lot of time was required to decrypt everything (trading helped a lot, because in trading no ideology or belief would work) into more realistic terms - crocodiles love power (and money, that also gives some power). We're genetically programmed killer animals. Everything else is just comfort fantasies. That's why I consider Hominids revolutionary, it paints a much better picture than we have today. Probably all aggressive animals should be castrated. That would make a world better place, but the means are still wrong, probably. Like Ayn Rand said, everything evil is after "higher (better world) cause".

So, a lot had happened in my head during those days, when I read this book, would probably also watch the series, too much to be said here, so saving time I will only note. We already have 1984, or Animal Farm or Brave New World. Sex redefined by Clinton, freedom redefined by Bush and hostilities redefined by Obama. What's for people, like us? Forget democrats and republicans, liberals or conservatives, those are wrong ideologies. All ideologies are wrong, like all models in trading are wrong, and only, as beliefs, help to power-seekers, not you. Power for the people. American empire is on decline already, no one does what U.S. dictators want anymore.

How much imperial industrial military complex can go with its wasteful economics? I don't know, but history tells stories about people overthrowing them, when life becomes unbearable.

Once again, US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II.

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing can be said right away:
If you are an "America is the best ever" person, this book will be your nightmare.

However I do not quite understand why, since the authors don't really say so much new stuff actually, they simple put what was previously told in several books into one and especially Stone's name gave it wide attention. They have a lot in it that is technically known simply overshadowed by a lot of myths, which makes books like this one important. However I think covering such a long time period comes at the cost of never going into detail (e.g. if a fellow German is reading this and happens to be Sinti… yeah forget it, the book ignores you like most do), but I don't think you can blame the authors for it since the book covers more than 100 years of USA history and it already has more than 650 pages of text, not counting notes and bibliography. Going into more detail would probably turn this into a book 3-times the size of the Bible.
So like I said, they do not go into too much detail except for big turning points but rather are concerned with the patterns that emerge and continue. And I think in that way they are doing a pretty good job, you can question their conclusions and since this was coauthored by Oliver Stone I am sure many will mistrust his methods, but not the facts; and in my eyes that is no different to any other author of history books.
What this book tackles in its basis is the myth of American exceptionalism and I guess that might piss a lot of people off since it really doesn't shy away from doing it, ever. Reading this there is a good chance that you will find a lot of your views are challenged, which I liked about the book but others will probably hate.
However I am sure most will agree where the book is undoubtedly good: The writing and reading flow. Despite all the information it never felt boring to me and the reading experience was without a doubt good and made this very enjoyable, a lot of history books should do it like this.
There are some problems with it though, for instance they say in World War II 27 Million Russians died, which wass actually Soviets (which they did right in the documentary series, where they had the forced mass migration that was missing here), which I think was due to the common trap of equating Soviets with Russians, others would be the Tiananmen square massacres whose numbers are contested and also it treats it like just a student's massacre, which is not true since most died all around Beijing, however the info on that is usually scarce so maybe that is the reason. It also looked as if they regarded Japanese people as dark-skinned and if that is what they did then I wonder what they consider light then. But these were minor things.
Also, despite what many say, this book was in some way actually even nicer to American foreign policy than it probably should be, e.g. it never mentioned the thousands of instances of rape in Okinawa by American soldiers or the collecting of body parts as trophies (which might be linked to the practice of scalping during the Wild West) and glossed over a few things about Vietnam. So like I said it's actually nicer than many think.
Also not all chapters do equally well, the passages on Bush & Clinton may have been the worst with 9/11 getting stronger again, but the prologue was also very good and made me interested in history more.
But despite its flaws, again nothing new for me regarding history books, I think is definitely a recommendable book. At the very least it would get readers to rethink much of what they thought they knew about USA policy, and possibly their own country's policy, over the last century.

[Public Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally finished this monster! The documentary series was good. This is better.

Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is one of the most important books I've ever read. It opened my eyes to the mythologizing that frequently passes for US history. Another important book that built on those insights was Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, who noticed what sets American history class apart from the rest of an American's education. In chemistry you have a textbook called "Chemistry." In math you might have a textbook titled "Trigonometry" or "Calculus." In US history class you're likely to have a textbook called "Land of Promise," "Rise of the American Nation," or "The Great Republic." The myth-making starts right there on the cover of the book. The traditional story of American history is never a warts-and-all recounting of a checkered past. Most often American history is treated as a celebration and a triumph. Most often American history is a whitewash that reveals nothing.

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik is a continuation of efforts by people like Zinn and Loewen. Stone and Kuznik try to build a counter-narrative that acts as a sort of antidote to the traditional History Channel version of American back-patting.

Picking up around the turn of the 20th Century this book tells a winding tale of American imperialism and domination that is elided in the mainstream version of events. Heroes like Henry Wallace emerge and are sidelined at crucial moments. Prominent forks in the road that could have seriously changed the course of history are highlighted. This is a fascinating look both at what actually happened and what might have been if different choices were made.

I learned a great deal of new information about World War II, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, the Vietnam War, and even modern history featuring the War on Terror and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I'm glad I put in the time to finish reading this book.

Howard Zinn once said, "History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it." It is important to know the true history of this country. You can't learn from the past if you don't know about the past. The American people are deliberately discouraged from learning the truth about what our government has done in our name because the people in power know we wouldn't like it. Read this book. Start learning the truth. Only when we know our true history can we begin to move in a new and better direction. Otherwise, as the old cliche says, we are doomed to repeat it.

[Dee Halzack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, though upsetting book. Some of it I knew, some I didn't.

Worth reading for anyone who wants to understand our relationship with Iran, Russia, Japan, and Latin America.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific book! You never get the chance to hear so many voices, stand up.and chatter, as in a book like this ... you get the "yeah, yeah, yeah" feeling about most historical events & characters all of us harbor in our heads, but this book gets you past. Most of the quotes on the back of the book are true (enough ... or, fair to SAY). The authors have done the work for you, and you feel like you can see one side of the zipper and then the other side of the zipper, and then they zip it up for you, paragraph by paragraph, line by line, page by page, never losing their focus (or yours -- the reader's). It's a terrific book. Funny timing with Christopher NOLAN coming out with an "Oppenheimer" movie, too -- there he is, with the porkpie hat. Plus, here, here's why PYNCHON wrote Gravity's RAINBOW:

The war proved that controlling oil supplies was central to projecting and sup- exercising power. Great Britain and Germany tried to cut off each other's of supplies during the war. Great Britain, hurt by German attacks on its oil supply ships, first expressed concern about an oil shortage in early 1916. The Allies also blockaded Germany's access to oil resources, and British Colonel John Norton-Griffiths attempted to lay oil supplies in Romania to waste when Germany moved to seize them in late 1916. Underscoring the importance of these developments, Britain's Lord Curzon pronounced soon after the armistice that "the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil." The United States was key to that victory, having met 80 percent of the Allies' wartime petroleum needs. But once the war ended, oil companies were poised to grab whatever 134 new oil-rich territories they could. As Royal Dutch Shell asserted in its 1920 annual report, "We must not be outstripped in this struggle to obtain new territory...our geologists are everywhere where any chance of success exists."

Or, maybe this is why:

The war proved demoralizing in a myriad of subtle ways as well. The prewar march of civilization grounded in a faith in human progress had been negated by a war that seemed to showcase barbarism and depravity. Put simply, the faith in human capability and human decency had disappeared. This was understandably evident on both sides of the Atlantic. Sigmund Freud, who became a household name in the United States during the 1920s, is a case in point. Freud's prewar emphasis on the tension between the pleasure principle and the reality principle gave way to a postwar pessimism about human nature grounded in his focus on the death instinct.
Negative views of human nature were reflected in a loss of faith in essential human capabilities. The army presented psychologists with a vast laboratory on which to conduct experiments in human intelligence and the 3 million inductees provided an extraordinary pool of human guinea pigs. Working with army personnel, many of whom were trained in testing at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, psychologists administered intelligence tests to 1,727,000 recruits, including 41,000 officers. The data accumulated about educational levels were eye-opening. Some 30 percent of the recruits were illiterate. 150 The amount of education varied widely among the different groups, ranging from a median of 6.9 years for native whites and 4.7 years for immigrants to 2.6 years for southern blacks. The results of intelligence tests were even more sobering. The tests-albeit crude and culturally biased-found an astounding 47 percent of white draftees and 89 percent of blacks to be "morons."
Nowhere was the subsequently degraded view of human intelligence more evident than in postwar advertising. The 1920s is often viewed as the golden age of advertising the decade in which the industry really blossomed into the principal capitalist art form. As Merle Curti showed in his study of the advertising industry journal Printer's Ink, before 1910, advertisers, by and large, assumed that consumers were rational and self-interested and could be appealed to on that basis. Between 1910 and 1930, however, the majority of comments indicated that advertisers were viewing consumers as nonrational. As a result, advertisements increasingly abandoned the reason-why approach and appealed to fantasies and emotions. A speaker at a 1923 advertising convention in Atlantic City captured this sense when he warned, "Appeal to reason in your advertising, and you appeal to about four percent of the human race." This sentiment became accepted wisdom among advertisers. William Esty of the J. Walter Thompson agency instructed colleagues that all experts believed "that it is futile to try to appeal to masses of people on an intellectual or logical basis." John Benson, the president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, observed in 1927, "To tell the naked truth might make no appeal. It may be necessary to fool people for their own good. Doctors and even preachers know that and practice it. Average intelligence is surprisingly low. It is so much more effectively guided by its subconscious impulses and instincts than by its reason."

Anyway. Here's the seeds planted, for the rest of the century, in three paragraphs:

Despite their indebtedness, the Allies balked at Wilson's terms. Having paid such a high price for victory, they had little interest in Wilson's lofty rhetoric about making the world safe for democracy, freedom of the seas, and "peace without victory" They wanted revenge, new colonies, and naval dominance. Wilson had already betrayed one of the central tenets by intervening in the Russian Civil War and maintaining forces in the country. More betrayals would follow. The British made it clear that they had no intention of abiding by Wilson's call for freedom of the seas, which would have limited their navy's ability to enforce British trade routes. The French made it equally clear they would not accept a nonpunitive treaty. France had lost well over a million soldiers and Great Britain just under a million. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George noted that in the United States "not a shack" had been destroyed." The French also remembered their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, further fueling their desire to debilitate and dismember Germany.
Twenty-seven nations met in Paris on January 12, 1919. The task ahead of them was enormous. To varying degrees, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires were collapsing. New countries were emerging. Revolutionary change was encroaching. Starvation was rampant. Disease was spreading. Displaced populations were seeking refuge. Visionary leadership was desperately needed. But Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando found Wilson, who considered himself the "personal instrument of God," to be absolutely insufferable." Clemenceau supposedly commented, "Mr. Wilson bores me with his 14 Points; why, God Almighty has only ten!" Lloyd George took great pleasure in Clemenceau's response to Wilson: "If the President took a flight beyond the azure main, as he was occasionally inclined to do without regard to relevance, Clemenceau would open his great eyes in twinkling wonder, and turn them on me as much as to say: 'Here he is off again. I really think that at first the idealistic President regarded himself as a missionary whose function was to rescue the poor European heathen.' Lloyd George applauded his own performance under the difficult circumstances, 'seated as I was between Jesus Christ and Napoleon Bonaparte?'
Few of Wilson's Fourteen Points remained in the final treaty. The victors, particularly Great Britain, France, and Japan, divided the former German colonies and holdings in Asia and Africa, along the lines established by the secret 1915 Treaty of London. They also carved up the Ottoman Empire. They sanitized their actions by calling the colonies "mandates." Wilson resisted but ultimately went along. He rationalized his acquiescence by arguing that the Germans had "ruthlessly exploited their colonies," denying their citizens basic rights, while the Allies had treated their colonies humanely-an assessment that was greeted with incredulity by the inhabitants of those Allied colonies, like French Indochina's Ho Chi Minh. Ho rented a tuxedo and bowler hat and visited Wilson and the U.S. delegation to the conference, carrying a petition demanding Vietnamese independence. Like most of the other non-Western world leaders in attendance, Ho would learn that liberation would come through armed struggle, not colonialist largesse. Mao Zedong, then working as a library assistant, expressed similar frustration: "So much for national self-determination," he vented. "I think it is really shameless!" Wilson went so far in compromising his principles that he even accepted a U.S. mandate over Armenia, leading Clemenceau to comment wryly, "When you cease to be President, we will make you Grand Turk."

Can you believe it?? Read this book. It's like the way certain nonfiction books are easy to recommend, because they're like a long newspaper item, or magazine article: you just eat them up, and eat and eat and keep eating, even at this one's 600 pages, whereas even adjusting to the voice of say Don DeLillo you have to be careful what you recommend to people, they might not want it, you might be intruding (I, personally, have a copy of Mao II out of the library, to get to, as we speak -- and as for the less-than-FOUR-hour of White NOISE, I could say, "Read the BOOK!!!" but in this case it'd be a little like saying "Swing only at the plate ... and when there's a ball there!!!" #duh #bringbacktheGRETAGERWIGthatwasCOMFORTABLEWITHNUDITYsoSYDNEYSWEENEYdoesnthavetodoitALLBYHERSELFwhathappenedtoMUMBLECOREimeanBARBIEandyetanotherLITTLEWOMEMwhatsnextSTRAWBERRYSHORTCAKEandtheSMURFS #HUUUUUUH ) -- it's hard to say. Read Calvino. Read MURAKAMI! Read Bolaño, of course -- and of course, Kafka, or course Kafka. But read this book.

It's easy!!!

And you'll be better OFF ...

Class dismissed!!!

#ha

[Josep · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si no fos una obra exhaustivament documentada, es podria pensar que estàvem llegint una novel•la de terror……
Es repugnant adonar-se de que la nació més poderosa del món, líder del “món lliure” ha estat (i està) dirigida per presidents incompetents manipulats per una cohort d’assessors obsesionats amb paranoies i deliris de grandesa, només preocupats per incrementar la despesa militar fins a l’infinit per defensar-se d’enemics que no existeixen o als que se’ls presumeixen unes capacitats exagerades.

El llibre exposa com des de finals del s. XIX, els EEUU van imposar la seva hegemonia basant-se en molts casos en mentides convenientmet preparades (des de la Guerra contra Espanya fins a la invasió d’Iraq), aprofitant l’ autodestrucció d’Europa en les dues Guerres Mundials). Com van abusar (i abusen) de la seva superioritat militar, comportant-se com un abusador de nens petits qualsevol per tot el món.

Es documenta com, en defensa dels seus interessos han recolçat dictadures sanguinàries, han aplastat governs elegits democràticament, i sobretot han causat dolor i patiment indescriptibles a milios de persones arreu del món.

Tot això amb un pressupost militar que no para de créixer malgrat que no tenen rival en el món i que tenen capacitat per destruir el món i a tots els que hi vivim diverses vegades, mentre al seu propi país la pobresa i la desigualtat no paren de créixer.

Espero que al seu país la gent llegeixi el llibre i obri els ulls al que són i al que van deixant pel món per obligar als seus governanta a fer un canvi de rumb en benefici de tota la humanitat.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Wow, so I read The Untold History of the United States over a four month period, reading a couple of pages every day. After spending so much time with the book, I've probably lost a good deal of objectivity in evaluating it, but here we are, anyway.

If you expect this book to be impartial, look for another book. Just like the name suggests, The Untold History of the United States truly seeks to publicise elements of US history that are often overlooked. Stone and Kuznick really focus on the presidents from World War I onwards, and present both domestic and foreign policy for critique. The only president who really gets away unscathed is JFK. Even Obama's chapter (which focuses on his first term, given the book's 2012 publication) absolutely condemns many of his actions, which I personally hadn't expected.

I can't really speak to the quality of research in this book, but Kuznick is an academic, so I suppose it has to be pretty good. Of course, it is all used in a very partial way, but Kuznick and Stone never pretend like impartiality was the goal. In highlighting the "untold history" of the US, the book was always necessarily going to be a critique of the US government and especially, US presidents. It doesn't try to balance the bad with the good any given president might have done, it just presents the bad as it was (and it could be pretty bad).

Overall, I can't say that I loved spending four months reading The Untold History of the United States, but I definitely gained from it. Reading this alongside my studies in international relations and international security was very helpful and I certainly think I'll return to this for reference in the future.

[Joseph Valoren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Please note that this book is meant to be a companion to a documentary series of the same name which I haven’t seen. I’m reviewing this book on its own merits, as a work of historical nonfiction and journalism.

I have never seen a book that eviscerates and lays bare so many ugly scandals, secrets, and dirty dealings also manage to be so painfully fucking dull. I’d be impressed if I thought it was intentional.

Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States is a work of historical nonfiction that purports to shine a light on the darkened corners of our nation’s history and provide the reader with an unbiased and unflinching exposé of information that those in power would prefer remain unspoken and unexamined. In this, it’s moderately successful. The book could have been more appropriately titled The Untold History of the Presidency, since the central focus of every chapter is on the executive branch, and especially the actions of the executive branch as they relate to America’s role in various theaters of warfare, from World War I through the Obama administration. So immediately, this book is a misnomer twice over: the “history” barely pays any attention to the 18th and 19th centuries, and it is less the history of the United States then of the presidency and United States imperialism.

And let me just say, this book is comprehensive. Arguably to its own detriment. Stone has penned a massive tome that is overflowing with direct quotations, photographs, and letters, which is appropriate given its status as a companion piece to a documentary series. Unfortunately, a good deal of context is lost in the process of unpacking all this minutia. One walks away with the vague impression that all our presidents have been bastards for one reason or another and that America has been on a quest of imperialism that happily grinds the lives of non-Americans into grist for more than a century. One could refer to the book to come up with compelling evidence to support these assertions if prompted, but under the weight of this over 700 page news article, what’s lost is a sense of gravity and context but I believe the authors could have easily achieved if they had made the effort. As it stands, the entire book feels a bit like listening to someone drone on about a negative experience with a mutual acquaintance and expecting you to share their outrage. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but it would be more effective if the actual story was a bit more engaging, and if the call to action was clearer. But unfortunately the prose of this work is dense to the point of monotony, and the call to action - that is, the thing which the writer hopes that you will think, feel, or do after having read this work - is a wafer-thin afterthought. As a work, it seems to presuppose that aggravating your sense of outrage that these things happened at all will propel you to…I don’t know, vote? Not vote? Riot? It isn't made very clear.

Furthermore, for being “untold”, much of the content in this book is fairly common knowledge to all but the rosiest, jingoistic patriots. Examples include the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the fact that Russia was overwhelmingly responsible for defeating the Nazis, the fact that most wars the United States has participated in have been acts of imperialistic resource grabbing, and that a handful of wealthy oligarchs continue to rig the game of politics in their favor so that they can never lose. There was a great deal within this book that I didn’t know already, certainly, and it’s far from useless, or even bad. It is, however, tremendously bloated, dull as dishwater, and sorely lacking in context that would have imparted upon this work some meaning greater than the sum of its parts, and something greater than the disquieting knowledge that the office of the presidency requires a great deal of unfortunate compromise, and that America has been ever concerned with extending its power and grasp via the use of the military-industrial complex. Since the average reader does not exert any influence over either of these institutions, both of which remain a continuous source of influence upon the lives of most citizens, the fact that this book basically ends nowhere is especially disappointing.

I’d recommend this book if you’re very keen to learn about American history, especially the history of the presidency and of America’s wars from the perspective of somebody who is not an apologist for American imperialism. Read as a companion to Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States, I think this book could really shine as a way of showing the causal relationship between what those in power were thinking and feeling at various episodes in our nation’s strained history, and then referring to Zinn to see how those policies actually unrolled on the ground. On its own, The Untold History of the United States is a frank and comprehensive exploration of American imperialism from the perspective of someone who is very critical (not undeservedly so) of American expansionist ideology. It’s a dreadful shame that so salacious a subject should be given such a boring treatment.

[Христо Блажев · Rating 4 out of 5]

Премълчаваната история на САЩ или как бе съградена и приватизирана една империя: http://knigolandia.info/book-review/p...
Режисьорът Оливър Стоун и историкът Питър Кузник (личното ми мнение е, че това е основно книга на втория) се съсредоточават изцяло в XX и малко от началото на XXI век. Разказът тече леко, без да задълбава и се съсредоточава изключително във фактологичната страна на нещата, без наличие на сериозни анализи. Заложено е силно на обрисуването на водещите исторически лица като хора – а портретите за някои са доста черни – освен вече споменатите Буш и Обама, Рейгън е изтипосан по много различен от популярния му образ: като арогантен невежа, чиято войнствена риторика събужда позадрямалата надпревара във въоръжаването. Любопитно е – и това е недостатък, – че съветските лидери са представени почти изключително в позитивна светлина, което ми е силно неразбираемо, историята не е черно и бяло, едните не са добри, другите лоши, но нейсе. Огромната част от книгата е просто описание на събитията от американската история – въвличането в двете световни войни, ползите, които бизнесът има от тях, вътрешните вълнения (на Мартин Лутер Кинг и движението срещу сегрегацията не е обърнато точно никакво внимание) са малко по-неглижирани, изключвам пацифистките движения, пространно са описани множеството военни намеси в Централна и Южна Америка, забъркването във Виетнам и унизителното поражени��, за да се стигне до Пустинна буря и 11 септември. Стоун и Кузник изцяло застават зад официалната версия за атентатите, та не очаквайте да четете поредната конспирационна теория.
Издателство "Милениум"
http://knigolandia.info/book-review/p...

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this book has taught me one thing it is the lack of knowledge I have on America history. Or for that matter the history of the last 100 years. Based on this book the last good President was Franklin Roosevelt. All the rest have been captured by right wing zealots including Obama. If only Henry Wallace has still been the Vice President when Roosevelt died. Then the world would have been a better place. Instead since then all the Presidents have been captured by business and the wealthy.

The scary thing is the insanity of building more nuclear weapons and they were considered for so many wars. Also how America due to its incredible badly informed policy decisions is now distrusted basically globally. Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, well just stick a pin in a map. The one hero that comes out of this book is Gorbachev. If only Reagan at the Iceland conference had accepted his plan.

The book lacked a bit of detail on the Clinton presidency and others but overall was excellent. This analysis of the American Empire and its failure to live up to its own democratic ideals is an eye opener.

[Stewart Tame · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow. Some of this wasn't new to me, but having everything together under one cover makes it more overwhelming. Drags a bit in spots, but that's about par for the course for me with a history book. Certainly a different view of history than I remember getting in school. I did roll my eyes a bit at the photo of a young Oliver Stone in Vietnam. It seemed a bit gratuitously self-promotional, especially since the photo isn't referred to in the text. It appears in the chapter dealing with the Vietnam war but that's about its only relevance. The right wing will dispute this book, but many of them probably won't even read it in the first place given Stone's name on the cover and all.

[Ben Everhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive and thoughtful primer on the massive stranglehold the military industrial complex has on our modern world. This isn't a book laden with conspiracy theories or secret uncovered documents -- this is all heavily foot-noted, backed up and triple checked history that brings the reader from the early 20th century all the way into the Obama era. But the revelations within the pages are startling nonetheless: the economics of war have been driving the machine and the sad truth is that the hawks don't need to mount a massive conspiracy because the majority just aren't paying attention. A good start to what's been really going on is reading this book.