Tonight, I have the
honor of introducing Mr. Oliver Stone, Mr Peter
Kuznick, and moderating, Bruce Cummings. Mr. Oliver Stone is a three
time Academy Award-winning film director, producer,
and screenwriter. His films touch on a variety
of historical subjects using a lot of various styles. From three Castro documentaries
through a vision of the epic Alexander, from savages
about drug battles with Mexican drug cartels to
Platoon, his autobiographical retelling of experiences as an
infantry soldier in Vietnam, Mr. Stone has
proven time and time again to be able
to rework history into new and engaging
ways for his audiences. Stone, in fact,
has said himself-- I make my films like
you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn. His documentary series
The Untold History of the United States
is a 10-part series beginning with the
First World War and ending with the
Obama administration. Stone himself describes it
as a controversial version of the American
history, some of them at deep odds with
conventional myths. Next, we have Peter Kuznick. He coauthored the 10-part
series with Mr. Oliver Stone, and included a 750-page of
volume written by himself. He is a history professor
at American University and the director of the
Nuclear Studies Institute there, which he himself founded. At the moment, he's
working on a book regarding scientists
in the Vietnam War and how the consequences
of nuclear war have shaped military strategy. Last but not least, we
have Bruce Cummings, history professor here at
the University of Chicago. He will be moderating
this debate. He is specializing in
modern Korean history, East Asian political economy,
and international history. Out of many
accomplishments and awards that we had to choose from
to talk about here tonight, he was the principal
historical consultant for the PBS six-hour documentary
about Korea, The Unknown War. And in 2003, he won the
University of Chicago award for excellence
in graduate teaching. So please help me with around
of applause welcome our guests, and we'll be
starting in a minute. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Well, I'd like to welcome
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick to the University
of Chicago, which made a couple of appearances
in the film we just saw. And I'd like to begin
by-- we're going to have a little
discussion among ourselves for half an hour, and then
the second half an hour, we'll open it up to the
audience and your questions. I'd just like to hear
Oliver and Peter discuss the origins of this really
large project, a very big book and a very big film. I think I'll take that question. I'm a dramatist here
and he's a historian, so I'm going to give you
the dramatic version. When I first met Peter, he
invited me to his class, and it was called
Oliver Stone's history-- Oliver Stone's America. It was a history of film class. History of film, which
I had never seen before. It was fun. And it was American University,
and I really had a good time. Got to know Peter,
and we became friends. And he was always talking
to me about Henry Wallace, this fellow you saw
in the reel tonight. And Wallace, he
wrote a script on it. Not great script. It didn't get made, but
it was a dramatic story. And you keep insisting on that. 200 pages of-- no,
don't worry about that. We'll make it one day, maybe. But this is really the
version of it that I like. And this is really the
character of amazing men. But we never thought this
would get bigger than that, and it died. By 2008, however,
my mind had changed, and I had gone through
eight years of George Bush. Now, I don't know--
you're pretty young, so I don't know if all you
remember what that was like. But 2008 was really--
I was 60 years old. I had lived in this-- I was born
during the atomic bomb, '46. I grew up in the Cold War. I remember that period. I remember the conformity,
and it was the fear. And I just felt like something
was bizarre about this country. It had gone so far to the
right that I was surprised. And I wanted to know more
about American history, because I had never studied it. I had been in film school
and never studied history, but I had always been
fascinated by it. And we did this
five-year version-- five years of drafts and edits. It was so complicated. It turned into a
nightmare for me. It was nonprofit for five years. And I lost my film
career to some degree. And it just involved me. And I found-- I said,
what is this story? Is it Bush? Is he an aberration? Is he a monster? Or is he part of something
that is traditional, or is this the foreign policy
and where it's taking us? And frankly, I thought
he'd be an aberration. He was not. He's an exaggeration of a
tradition of foreign policy that had finally
come to yield itself in this monstrosity of the 21st
century America that we have. That's my point of
view, of course. And I wanted to do this
series, and motivated by it. And we went to it, and it
took that amount of time. And we got it through to
Showtime cable network, which is remarkable in our
opinion and or analysis. But there's also-- as
you know, everything has been fact checked
thoroughly on several levels. Peter had eight graduate
students working with him. So that's how this
thing came about. And it was a nightmare
to get it made. I'm glad we did. Peter, do you have
anything additional to-- Sure. So Oliver was in DC
in the end of 2007 scouting locations for
his movie Pinkville, which never got made, about
the My Lai Massacre. We had dinner together,
and we started talking about history and politics. And Oliver says,
Peter, let's do it. Let's do a documentary. And we were talking about
maybe a 60-minute documentary about the origins of the Cold
War and Wallace and the bomb. And I was on sabbatical. And I figured I could finish it
before the end of my sabbatical was up. And I went to see
him in New York two weeks later to
lay it out, and he now had the idea for a 10-part,
10-hour documentary series. We ended up making 12 episodes,
10 of which showed on Showtime. The other two are
in the box set also. And it took us five years. And midway through
the process, we decided we needed to add a book. Because the amount
of material that we could cover in 58
minutes and 30 seconds compared to the
amount of material we wanted it cover
was incommensurate. So I would write
the first draft. Each one would be at
least three hours' worth. I thought that Oliver
would narrate them like a New Yorker on speed. But you can't do that. And you put it together with
the visuals and the music. And as it, you saw this
is very, very dense. Even my friends
who are historians said they had to watch
them several times to get all the information. So we added an 800-page book. And then we did a book--
The Concise Untold History of the United States based
on the documentary scripts. And we were doing a four-volume
young reader's version for middle school students. The first volume is out. And we're also doing a
graphic novel version. So we're trying to get
it into the schools, reach kids at all
ages, and going around to-- we're very happy to come
to the University of Chicago, because we've been hitting
most of the top universities in the country as well
as in other countries. So this project, as
Oliver said, started off-- it took over our
lives for five years. And now we've been the
last three years going around the world supporting it. Well, I have to recommend
the 800-page book to the audience, Untold
History of the United States, which goes into
all kinds of issues that we'll cover tonight. But I think we should talk
about the film that we just saw. And I guess I'd like
to start by saying that at the beginning
of the film, you rightly talk about American
racism toward the Japanese. And John Dower's book,
War Without Mercy, is still a central
book documenting racism on both sides, but especially
on the American side. And I wonder-- to
either of you, do you think we would have dropped
two atomic bombs on Germany if we had the chance, or was
there an undercurrent of racism that made it easier to do
this against the Japanese? When we decided
that Japan was going be the target,
that was-- I think was May 5th, actually, in 1943. And that's when we made that
decision for other reasons, not because of racism
on the surface. It was because if it
was a dud, the Japanese would get less information out
of it than the Germans would. And the bombers
that were being used were only being
used in the Pacific, not in the Atlantic
in the European war. So those were
ostensibly the reasons. The question, which a lot
of us historians speculate, would we have dropped
them on Caucasians? Or did it make it easier to
drop them on the Japanese, and especially with
Truman as president? But the decision was
really made before Truman when Roosevelt-- you
could say Roosevelt had his own racist tendencies,
and he put 110,000 Japanese in concentration camps
during the internment policy. But I think that under
other circumstances, we would have dropped
them on Germany, too, much as I think, under
certain circumstances, we would have dropped
them on the Soviet Union. And certainly there's that
whole history of the arms race. Most of the countries
we've been threatening with nuclear bombs-- we say--
and as Dan Ellsberg pointed out, the United States didn't
use nuclear weapons twice. The United States has used
nuclear weapons repeatedly in the same sense that a robber
holding a gun to someone's head uses that gun without
pulling the trigger. And that's been the
history of the Cold War and the post-Cold
War period as well. When Obama and the others
say that all options are on the table, that's
exactly what they mean. Truman boasted in
'45 to the Soviets that he'd drop the bomb in
Iran if they didn't disoccupy, get out of there. Right. That was in early 1946. '46, yes. But we don't know. We don't have any further
documentation on that. It was his claim. He claimed that. And Eisenhower followed it up
with Indochina, with Korea. Oh, Korea we can't--
you know more about it. But what about Korea? Well, in Korea, we basically
used the same firebombing techniques that we developed
in 1943, the British and Americans, to destroy a
much less developed country. We also threatened to use
nuclear weapons for three years during the Korean War. And Eisenhower and Dulles,
his Secretary of State, always claimed that it
was those threats that got to the North
Koreans and the Chinese to the negotiating table
and finally ended the war. And the person who took
that to heart the most was Richard Nixon. And Nixon traces
his madman theory to Eisenhower's effective
use of the nuclear threats during the Korean War. Right. I thought-- go ahead. I was just going
to correct Peter. I don't think he left it clear. But I think we feel-- Peter and
I-- that Roosevelt would not, in those circumstances, have
dropped those bombs on Japan, that that was the difference
between Roosevelt and Truman. That's very interesting,
because Truman was advised by the very same
people that Roosevelt was. Well, not all. Not all, but Burns
makes a big difference. But Truman also-- And to add, Truman also
took people like Stettinius seriously, who Roosevelt
wouldn't give the time of day to. So Roosevelt knew enough to-- He was foreign-- Secretary of State for
a months before Burns becomes Secretary of State. And he was a real-- A name lost to history. Yeah, Stettinius. So Roosevelt was so much more
of his own decision maker when it came to foreign policy. And he said to several people--
Frankfurter and others-- he said, well, we would
consider using the bomb after we tried other means
and gave threats and warnings. Roosevelt always hedged
on whether or not they would use the bomb. And when he and Churchill first
signed those documents in-- I think it was Quebec-- they
left it very ambiguous whether they would
actually use the bomb. But Truman didn't know that. The thing about Truman-- I
have some sympathy for Truman, because he was in a
very difficult position. He was vice president
for 82 days. During that time,
nobody spoke to him about anything of substance. Roosevelt met with him
twice and didn't talk about anything of substance. And when he became
president after Roosevelt died on April 12th,
he did not even know the United States was
building an atomic bomb. Nobody had enough
regard for Truman to even tell him we were
building an atomic bomb. And so he's faced with
these monumental decisions, war and peace decisions,
bomb use or not bomb use. As we have there,
Grove saying he was like a little
boy in a toboggan. He was not really
the decision maker. But he took responsibility,
and ultimately, he had responsibility. Well, I think many young
people in the audience don't realize that four or five
months is a very short time, but that's how long Truman
was in the Oval Office before the bombs dropped. And he does come off as a
naive, inexperienced person. But I have to say, this
documentary is harder on Truman than just about
anything I've seen. And I wonder if you're
being too hard on him based on his inexperience, or
do you see maybe a comparison with George W Bush? I do. The fact that Condi
Rice points to him as the greatest president
of the century, and the fact that George Bush seconded that. He did? Yeah. He said that-- well, he
didn't say it in those words, but he said that Truman
was a big hero of his. Yeah. But he is a hero
of a lot of people. You heard Bobby Knight, former
basketball coach of University of Indiana-- last week
in endorsing Trump, he said that he's
like Harry Truman. Truman, he said, is one of
the three greatest presidents in American history,
and Trump will be the fourth great president
of the American history. And why was Truman great? Because he dropped the
bomb on the Japanese. And he said, and Trump
will do the same thing. I don't think he's going
to drop the bomb on Japan, because they've
already gotten it. Who were the other
two presidents he-- That's what I was going to ask. Who were the other two? We probably ought to stay away
from Bobby Knight and Donald Trump. I wanted to ask you about the
plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. Because in your 800-page book,
you quoted several people saying that Nagasaki was
basically a gratuitous bomb. Maybe we wanted to see if the
plutonium bomb would explode. We didn't wait for
even three days to get a Japanese
reaction to Hiroshima. As you pointed out, the Soviet
armies invaded that morning. I just wonder-- in
the documentary, you didn't really say much
about the Nagasaki bomb. I wonder if you think it was
gratuitous or unneeded or genocidal. I'd like to know what
you think about that. I think they were
both totally unneeded and gratuitous and genocidal. So I don't see that-- like
Marty Sherwin in his first book says that maybe Hiroshima could
be slightly understandable, but Nagasaki was a war crime. Telford Taylor say that. Nuremberg prosecutor says that. But I think they're both
equally heinous acts. And Truman knew as
well as anybody else that they were not
needed to end the war. That's why we quote Truman. We quote Truman referring
to the July 18th telegram, the telegram from the Jap
emperor asking for peace. We quote Truman
at Potsdam saying Stalin will be in the
Jap war by August 15th. [? Finny ?] Japs
when that occurs. Writes home to Bessa next day--
the Russians are coming in. We'll end the war
a year sooner now. Think of all the boys
who won't be killed. Truman said things
like that repeatedly. And so he understood that,
and everybody around him understood that. So the question is were
the Japanese the target in any sense, or were the
Soviets really the target. Well, I wanted to ask
you about that, too. Because there's a
radio broadcast-- I think it's August 9th,
maybe the 10th-- in 1945 where President Truman comes on
the radio and tells people that the Soviet Red Army is
marching through Manchuria. And his voice is
just full of praise. And he welcomes this. And it's very hard to
square with the idea that two days earlier
or a day earlier, he dropped the bombs in order
to intimidate the Soviets. Yeah. And he says this is the
greatest thing in history, he goes around telling people. Truman-- squaring that with his
actions, it was about Truman at Potsdam repeatedly
saying we want to end the war quicker before
the Soviets could get in. Because at Yalta,
we promised them significant concessions--
economic concessions, territorial concessions. And so Truman, Burns, even
Stimson and the others all say we don't
need them anymore. Let's see if we can end
the war before they get in. So part of the strategy
would have been, but that's where
there's a disconnect. That's where you see
the irrationality. Because if they really
wanted to end the war before the Soviets got
in, they should have changed the surrender terms. MacArthur says they would have
surrendered in May if we had changed the surrender terms. But in the fog of war there,
I don't think that they're all thinking quite so rationally. But there were some
who did, like Groves. He says from the
minute he took over, he treated the
[INAUDIBLE] Project as if the Soviets
were the enemy. And Groves says
to Joseph Rotblat, the real enemy here
is the Soviet Union, and they're the real
target of the bomb. So then you've got Burns saying
that to Szilard and Yuri and [INAUDIBLE]. So we've got a lot of
that kind of evidence. Well, it's interesting. It seems that within
maybe 24 hours of the Soviet invasion
of Manchuria, suddenly, the Japanese and the Americans
have the same interest, and that is to keep the Russians
out of Japan, particularly, as you pointed out,
Hokkaido, which Stalin asked for in response
to MacArthur's general order number 1. And of course, the Soviets
didn't get Hokkaido, and we got a
unilateral occupation in Japan, which deeply shaped
post-war history, as opposed to a quadrilateral
occupation in Germany. So it's very
interesting, I think, how that developed so quickly. And surprisingly,
no Americans know. In school, we never learn
about the Russian invasion. Nor does anybody
ever mention the fact that it would take until
November 1 for the US troop forces to get to
Japan to invade. And in that three
months, so much was happening every
day in that war. It's impossible for me to think
that three months would have gone by with nothing happening. Well, it's very interesting
that you give first a figure of 31,000 American
casualties or deaths in the invasion of Japan. Then Truman gives
a quarter million. And before you know it,
it's up to 1 million. As far as I know
from the documents we have, the best estimate
was even less than 31,000. It was about 25,000
in an invasion. I think Bart Bernstein, during
the Enola Gay controversy, finally came-- the highest
figure he found was 46,000. That was the highest. And there were some
minor officers who did estimates that were higher. But in terms of the serious
discussion at the top level, 46,000 was the
highest that we found. Well, I'll ask you
one more question and then open it
up to the audience. You tend to see Stimson
as a wise person who Truman might have listened
to if he had more experience or whatever. But Stimson wrote an
article in Harper's in 1947 where I think he used a
figure of either a quarter million or half a million. He used a million,
but casualties. Casualties. So that's maybe
25% deaths at most. But that was the first shot in
any number of justifications for hitting Hiroshima and
Nagasaki so there isn't going to be an invasion that would
kill so many American soldiers. And so Stimson is a somewhat
contradictory figure in post-war history. He wrote that article--
was is the Harper's one? Yeah, that's the one. What did he write, then? He was pressured by
Conant and others, especially after John
Hershey's Hiroshima came out in August of 1946. A lot of people who supported
the bombing, including people who worked on the Manhattan
Project, some of whom were from the
University of Chicago, started to rethink
and finally deal with the moral implications of
what they had been involved in, and public opinion was changing. So Conant says to-- Tell them who it is. James Conant from Harvard, who
was a top science policymaker. Was he president? President of Harvard, yeah,
top science policymaker, he and Vannevar Bush. So they urged Stimson to do it. And Stimson was very conflicted. He didn't want to
write that article. And the people who
knew him the best commented after that he felt
very guilty, very conflicted about that. And he's got a line there at
the end where he basically says, this could be the beginning
of the end for mankind. So that weighed
very heavily on him. And he led the fight, as
we mentioned there briefly, in the cabinet to
abolish nuclear weapons. But the question is--
and this is a question I have a lot with Dan Ellsberg--
should we give Stimson any kind of free pass? He warns Roosevelt-- he
says I don't want the United States to get the reputation of
outdoing Hitler in atrocities because of the bombing policy. But he was in charge
of the bombing policy. It wasn't really Hap Arnold. It wasn't really
[? Lamet. ?] It was Stimson. So Stimson had the
power to change that, and he didn't do so. So yeah, he was conflicted. He was a more decent guy than
Jimmy Burns, you could say. But he's ultimately responsible. It reminds me in a funny-- in
a parallel to Harry Truman's contradictions later in his
life when Kennedy was killed and he met with Dulles,
and he wrote that article that was published in
the Washington Post condemning the CIA, which he
had tremendous contradictory feelings about. He thought it was a gestapo,
an American gestapo. He had created the CIA. So Dulles went to see
him, and they had a talk. And the article disappeared,
basically, from circulation. But we have the original. Yes. It was in one edition
of the Washington Post. To abolish the CIA. Well, he did that. Truman abolished
the OSS in 1945. 12,000 officers in the OSS,
and suddenly there were 2,000, shunted over to a central
intelligence group. It's too bad, from
my point of view, that he didn't continue
with a very downsized CIA. A lot happened in
those two years. Well, we're at the University
of Chicago, which wasn't exactly ground zero for
what we saw today, but it was certainly
part of the story. In December 1942, just over
by the Regenstein Library, the first chain
reaction was touched off by Enrico Fermi and his team. And Leo Szilard, who
figured prominently in the critics of
the atomic bomb, was one of the
nuclear scientists who started the Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists here at the University
of Chicago in 1946. And I don't know whether you
blame Fermi or you applaud Szilard and the others. But certainly, since 1946, the
University of Chicago has had, I think, the central
magazine or journal in raising questions about
the use of nuclear weapons. So it's wonderful to
have you both here. And we will now open it up to
questions from the audience. And the first thing
you need to do is get the microphone
in your hand. We have people who will
bring you the microphone. While we're doing
that, I wanted to say one thing about the
University of Chicago's role. The Frank Committee
was meeting here and put out a very
critical report on the use of the
bomb in June of 1946. But one of the leading
critics of the bombing was the president of the
University of Chicago, Robert Hutchens, who was a
very outspoken critic of the atomic bombing and
was very concerned about this triggering the Cold War
between the US and the Soviets. And an arms race. Yeah. But then you gave
us Milton Friedman. OK. Please go ahead. Hi. Thank you all for coming. My question is just following
up on the conversation you've just been having. So historically, looking
at the internal divisions among scientists-- especially
working on nuclear bombs, thermonuclear
bombs-- what do you think the role is of scientists
into policymaking, into war, and how does that relate to
the policymaking today as well? Peter has written an entire
book about this issue. That I published
with the University of Chicago Press, my first
book, Beyond the Laboratory. It looks at the politicization
of American scientists in the 1930s. The scientists' role-- they're
on all sides of things. During World War I, the chemists
were the leading proponents of chemical warfare. When they tried to ban chemical
warfare after World War I, the chemists were the
fiercest opponents of banning chemical warfare. The physicists in World War II
played a very different role. They were discussed as America's
guilty men after World War II. They felt terrible, many of
them, about their involvement in the bomb project. So the scientific community
was quite conservative in the 1920s, and then
becomes very left wing by the end of the 1930s. In 1938, the AAAS election for
president, the five leading vote-getters were all members
of the Science and Society Movement on the left wing
of the scientific community. And the person who got
elected was Walter Cannon, who was a pro-Soviet Socialist
physiologist from Harvard. So scientists have been on all
sides of issues over the years. Should they be involved? Yeah. I think they should be involved
in decision making, especially when they've got certain
insights into this. Robert Oppenheimer,
as we mentioned here, warned the policymakers
on May 31st, 1945 that within three years,
we're likely to have weapons with between
10 and 100 megatons in destructive capability,
which means up to 7,000 times as powerful as the bomb that
we dropped on Hiroshima. And the reality is, by
1954 with Project Sundial, we had leading
American scientists testifying before Congress about
the possibility of developing a hydrogen bomb 700,000 times as
powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. We were seriously
considering it. So you've got scientists who
are lunatics and mad men, and you've got
scientists who are anti-war like everybody else. But a lot of it had to do
with which disciplines. I'm working now about a book on
scientists and the Vietnam War. And it's fascinating that
the first organized group in the United States to come out
and criticize the Vietnam War was the scientists. In 1965, the scientists--
AAAS came out and condemned the
Vietnam War and talked about the dangers of
what this represented, including the danger
of nuclear war. How come they've been so silent? They've become much,
much more corporate. And even research
at the universities has been subsidized much
more by the corporate sector than it ever used to be. So it's the rise of what we call
the military industrial complex at the major universities,
beginning with MIT, Stanford, and then we saw it at
Hopkins and Harvard. It's spread. Hi. Thank you for coming today. If I could ask a question about
another Cold War topic-- Cuba. Given your work, Mr. Stone,
relating to that country, how optimistic are you that
this current thaw will continue and grow over the years? Thanks. It's a good question, and
I don't have the answer. I do see the American
corporate influence seeing a huge opportunity here. There's a lot of
money to be made. So that is always a factor. And as we become
more corporate, it becomes the linkage between
state and corporate. And this is what Fidel
Castro was warning about, and his younger
brother knows this. So they're playing a-- I don't
know what to say about it. It's like Iran with
the US right now. It's a very tenuous thing. The younger population,
as the Americans hope-- we hope that because
they love our advertising, they love the
materialism, they love the shows-- and who can blame
them that they'll want that? And I think that's what
they're betting on. And we love their baseball. Yeah, we like the baseball. And Oliver is a Chicago
Cubs fan from his childhood. But I think what we miss
in the whole picture of this whole thing,
all from the 1960s on, is that the size of
Cuba and the size of the US. People don't really get it. They think they're
equal nations. They don't understand
that this mouse managed to survive the elephant. And that is like the
Vietnam story again. This is a huge-- and
we won't admit that. We never admit that we
started this monstrosity of an aggression against them. You never see that
our new shows. We never hear any history. It's always, well,
Cuba, human rights. When Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger knocked over Salvador Allende's
government in Chile in 1973, Richard Nixon likened a
red Chile and red Cuba to a Communist sandwich that
was going to squeeze its pincers and eat up the rest
of Latin America. So you've got an island and
an anchovy of a country, and these are the great
threats that Nixon saw. And also Brazil. Our Vietnam episode is
one of my favorites. I love them all, but
it's one of my favorites. And in there, the way we
approached Vietnam was we put it in context. Because what we don't
want people to think is that Vietnam
is an aberration. So we start with
the coup in Brazil that the CIA sponsors in '64. We show the Dominican Republic. We show Greece. We show-- Indonesia, too. Indonesia, bloodbath
in Indonesia. Belgian Congo. And then we go to
Chile afterwards. And again, these
are talking about-- because Vietnam was the
worst example, of course. But the latest Gallup poll shows
that 51% of 18 to 29-year-olds in this country say that the
Vietnam War was not a mistake and it was worth fighting. That, to us, is
just mind boggling. Well, 80% of them are
voting for Bernie Sanders, so they can't be all bad. But they can be pretty
ignorant about the history, and that's what concerns me. Do you really think-- I'm
always puzzled about these poll numbers. If you look at the University
of Texas or Arizona and you see all those kids
out on a Saturday afternoon-- 100,000 of them,
or Michigan-- do you really think that
they're for Bernie Sanders? Well, political scientists don't
usually get results like this. It's been 80% to 20% in
one primary after another, although I don't think they've
been in Texas or Arizona. They've been more in Michigan
and New York and so on. But he is-- That's where the mass of
young people come from that fill our armies and fill
our government posts. So it seems there is
something odd here. There's something
doesn't fit in my mind. By the way, you know
more about this-- just an interesting question for you. Because Bundy-- I
read there was-- Bundy at one point said that it
made no sense, Vietnam, to him. Because Indonesia was the big
prize, and we almost had it. And we got it,
finally, in mid '60s. But he says, we should have
been happy with Indonesia. That was a huge success. I was a first year
graduate student right after that coup was put down
in Indonesia with about half a million Indonesians
killed, really one of the worst
massacres in post-war or any history, really. It was chalked up
as a huge success, but no one knew about it. We had a foreign service guy
come to our class and tell us what a wonderful victory we
had achieved in Indonesia. And he said the
same thing-- it's more important than Vietnam. But that was 1965. A couple years later,
we were deeply-- we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam. But it's such a strange-- Yeah. We're supposed to be smart, but
I never see the results of it. It's true. We have the smartest
technicians now. There's computer people. What's wrong with our country? We're troglodytes when it
comes to questions of force. Could you go over the selection
of Truman instead of Wallace? Why [INAUDIBLE]? Roosevelt thought he
was the best person. Roosevelt thought that Truman
was the better person, not Wallace. And in your history, it
seems like Roosevelt just couldn't make up his
mind or something as a passive actor instead of
I'm picking Harry on purpose. No. It's a different kind of story. You have to go back to 1940
when Roosevelt insisted on putting Wallace on the
ticket because he knew we were on the verge of
fighting a war against fascism, and he wanted a leading
progressive and leading anti-fascist on the
ticket as vice president. And the Democratic Party
did not trust Wallace. The party bosses
did not like him, and they refused to
put him on the ticket. Roosevelt wrote a remarkable
letter to the convention turning down the nomination
for president, saying, we already have one
money-dominated conservative party in the United
States, the Republicans. If the Democrats are going
to follow in their footsteps, they have no reason
to exist, and I'm not going to run as the
candidate in that party. Eleanor Roosevelt went to
the floor of the convention and convinced them that he
was serious about not running, and they put Wallace on
the ticket begrudgingly. But then the party
bosses came back. They wanted their revenge. Usually, I introduce
this episode to put Wallace in a
little bit more context. What people don't realize
from just seeing this without seeing
the other episodes is that Wallace was the second
most popular man in the United States. Wallace's "Century
of the Common Man" speech was enormously popular. He condemned imperialism
and colonialism, and he said America's
fascists are those business interests who think that
Wall Street comes first and the American
people come second. He called them fascists. He was the leading spokesperson
for black civil rights, for women's rights, for labor,
biggest supporter of labor. And so he had a lot of enemies
who wanted to get him by 1944, including the party bosses. And they ran what Edwin
Pauley, the party treasurer, called Pauley's Coup in order to
try to get him off the ticket. The problem was that
he was so popular. Gallup released a poll
on July 20th, 1944, the day that the Democratic
Party convention began here at Chicago Stadium,
and they asked potential voters who
they wanted on the ticket as vice president. 65% said they wanted
Wallace as vice president. 2% said they wanted
Harry Truman. So the question
is how did Truman get the nomination
instead of Wallace at that point when Wallace
was so much more popular. And what happens is there's a
big, spontaneous demonstration on the floor of the
convention that first night. And Claude Pepper
realizes if he can get to the front
of the room to get Wallace's name in
the nomination, he'll sweep the convention. But the demonstration
was actually led by Hubert Humphrey
and Adelaide Stevenson. Stevenson was a very big
Wallace supporter at that point. And Claude Pepper,
as we say there-- I don't know how much we say
it in this episode-- Pepper got literally five feet
from the microphone. And Sam Jackson-- Seven. Five. No, five feet. And Sam Jackson,
who was chairing it, said I have a motion to adjourn. The party was screaming
adjourn, adjourn, adjourn. He said I have a
motion to adjourn. All in favor say aye. Maybe 5% said aye. All oppose say no. Everybody yells out no. He says motion carried. Meeting adjourned. If Pepper had gotten those five
more feet to the microphone, then Wallace would
have been back on the ticket as vice president. And what we argue
is that there would have been no atomic bombings
and possibly no Cold War. At least it would have
taken a very different form. And so that's how
close we came to having a very different history. It's why we think it's so
important to study history-- not just to learn about
the bad things that happen, but also learn about some
of the good things that could have happened and came
very close to happening. That's why we're trying to get
this to the younger generation, because they don't
know this history. I'd just like to
add one footnote. This episode-- that
part of the story breaks my heart, because
Roosevelt is a sick man. And we don't know how sick. There's a new book by Frank
Costigliola, University of Connecticut--
Roosevelt's Lost Alliances. I urge those
interested to read it. Because it really
shows you, almost month by month, the deterioration
of Mr. Roosevelt. He only can concentrate
for three, four hours a day on World War II. And these are key decisions
that are being made. And I really think he was tired
of fighting, tired of fighting these party bosses. And he said that. The board of bosses
met with him in '44. And they kept saying we
have to get rid of Wallace. He's too radical. We can't take a chance. They all thought that Roosevelt
was not going to make it. Roosevelt always thought
he was going to live, so he was in denial. But the bosses knew
that whoever became vice president would be the next
president of the United States. And they were very
frightened by Wallace, because his views
were so progressive. And so finally, Roosevelt
says, look, I'm too weak. I can't do this. I can't run this
campaign myself. You guys have to it. But among the people who
are most furious with him was Eleanor Roosevelt
and all of his children were furious with Franklin
Roosevelt for betraying Wallace, who Roosevelt
says if I were a delegate at the convention,
I would vote for Wallace. But he didn't fight
for him in the way he fought for him in 1940. Who was the Chicago boss? Frank Kelly, Mayor Kelly. I just wanted to say
also, Frank Costigliola is a really fine historian. And last year or
the year before, he produced a diary, a
very finely edited diary of George Kennan. And the reason I
bring this up is because one of the best
aspects of this film is what you said about
David McCullough. Because I'm part of a generation
that got into the archives when the Truman administration's
secret materials were first being released, and
wrote my first book based on the Truman administration. And then 20 or 30
years later, McCullough writes a book called
Truman, and he ignores all of this
new information, much better information than
the kind of stuff he uses. And it's just amazing
to me that he gets away with this time and time again. He gets Pulitzer Prizes. And what he's doing is pulling
the wool over people's eyes rather than writing history. Good for you. Good for saying it. And HBO should be ashamed. That thing was so
powerful and effective. It really convinced
the American people that Truman was some
kind of underdog hero. And McCullough knows nothing
about the nuclear issues that we're talking
about. he knows nothing about the real origins
of the Cold War. Some of the stuff
is useful in there. He's a good storyteller,
and he's a good writer. And that's where I first
learned about Truman's sense of his own personal
inadequacies, which we don't go into here. But Truman, as a kid, was
diagnosed with flat eyeballs, hypermetropia. He said I couldn't rough
house with the other kids, because I was afraid my
eyeballs would pop out. And so he was the kid
in the neighborhood who all the other boys picked on. They would chase him
home after school, called him Harry true
woman, four eyes, sissy. He'd go running home
crying, and his mother would meet him at the door
and say, Harry, don't worry. You were meant to
be a girl anyway. And McCullough has got
a lot of this in there. So if you read
McCullough carefully, you can actually--
because if you want to understand
Truman's psychology, this guy who was a total
wimp now is a tough guy. He's going to
stand up to Stalin. He's going to stand
up to everybody. But he was a little guy. His father, John Peanuts Truman,
was 5 feet 3 inches tall or so, and he used to go around picking
fights with guys a foot taller and beating them up to
show how tough he was. And he really
wanted a macho son. But he's got Harry Truman. The macho one was Truman's
younger brother, Vivian. But Harry was the
neighborhood punching bag. Hi. I have a question related to
this imagination brought up by the possibility of a
Wallace vice presidency. He was vice president
from '40 to '44. Is the 21st century
another American century? What are the alternatives? How could it be, instead, a
century of the common man? What about socialism? To think about some of
the earlier episodes in your series, if Lenin
and Trotsky's imagination offered an alternative
to Wilson's Pax Americana after World War I,
where does any such an alternative stand today? And then finally, how did
Nixon and Mao's rapprochement of the US with China set the
framework for the 21st century? Thank you. There's a lot there. You talk like my daughter. It's hard to understand
all the questions. We'll jump in on a couple. The question of
socialism and the young-- we talk about the
enthusiasm for Bernie, who's a Democratic socialist. Harvard released a
study last week-- Harvard Institute of Politics
released a study last week saying that among the 18
to 29-year-olds, only 18% consider themselves to
be capitalists and only 42% support capitalism. So the younger generation
is questioning capitalism. They're questioning a world
in which the richest 62 people have more wealth than
the poorest 3.6 billion people. There's something fundamentally
wrong with that kind of world. And so there is a new
kind of thinking going on, and I think it's reflected
in the Sanders phenomena. So that's one
little piece of it. What were some of
the other questions? I asked about the imagination
of early 20th-century socialism as an alternative to
Wilson's Pax Americana, and then I also asked
about Nixon and Mao and how their rapprochement
of the US and China set the stage for
the 21st century. Sorry. I know it's a lot. Well, the question
of whether it's going to be a new American
century or a century of the common man is still
a fundamental question that Wallace and Henry Luce
raised back in 1941 and 1942. It's not insignificant
that the group of neocons, when they formed in the 1990s,
called themselves the Project for a New American Century. And in the aftermath
of the Cold War, immediately, you've got
Krauthammer and the others saying that this is
our unipolar moment. The United States is
the world's hegemon, and we're going to set the
stage and do what we want. We're going to overturn
all these governments. They said we begin with Iraq. But if you look
at the other ones they listed-- Iran,
North Korea, Syria, Libya-- they've achieved a lot
of-- they fucked it up, really. But they really
have been toppling a lot of the governments
that they set out to topple at that point. So they see this as a
New American Century very consciously and explicitly. We see this as hopes
for a new century of the common man
along the lines that Wallace envisioned it. The Nixon Mao
rapproachment-- Oliver shows a lot of that in a really
interesting way in his film Nixon. But I'll let you answer that. You're the expert on Asia. Well, I think the way you
put it is exactly right, that that rapprochement in 1971,
'72 set the stage for the US and China to be the two biggest
powers in the 21st century. And China has been, ever since,
either the wonderful China that is developing so quickly
and opening up to the world and adopting
capitalist techniques, or it's China's rise
is a big threat. People compare it to Germany
and Japan before World War II. So we've been-- really
since, I think, 1989 and Tiananmen in kind
of a dual position vis-a-vis China of
being happy that China is opening up and developing,
growing so rapidly. It's a huge market
for American goods. And on the other hand,
seeing it as a threat. Now, if Donald Trump
gets into office, then we're really in
trouble, because he's says he's going to slap a 45%
tariff on Chinese goods. My wife says-- as
a South Korean, she says China has devastated
the economy of South Korea. Well-- But it's South Korea's
biggest trading partner. But I don't want to
contradict your wife. She's not an expert, but I'm
curious how you-- they do undercut prices so much
that we suffer in many ways. Well, I saw a study just
in the last week or two that just in the
last decade, we've lost a million jobs to China. So it's obvious that Trump's
appeal to a lot of people has to do with the hollowing out
of our industrial base in one city after another. Not just Detroit, but if you go
through the Midwest-- Toledo, Canton, Akron,
Youngstown, Moline. All of these cities-- New York State. They look like a bomb hit them. And I think finally,
people are-- well, let me put it this way--
the ground under free trade is-- the political
grounding under free trade is really shifting, and
both Trump and Sanders are taking advantage of it. And Hillary Clinton, because
she has now embraced it. But people who know her say
that she'll go back on that. That's what I think, too. Didn't Russian suspicion
of the United States begin long before
the atomic bomb? After all, the Russians
denied use of their airfields to Americans bombing
Ploiesti, the Nazi oilfields. And when the American
Air Force tried to fly relief into
Warsaw in 1944, they denied the use
of the airfields. So weren't they suspicious
long before the atom bomb? They were suspicious
going back to 1918, 1919 when the United States sent
more than 10,000 troops in to Russia, along
with the British and the Japanese and the others. So the suspicions go way back. We finally recognized
Russia in 1933. And then with the
start of the war, though, the biggest demand
that the Russians made, or request that they made,
was for the United States and Britain to open up a
second front in Western Europe. You have to remember, one of the
big myths in the United States is that the US won the war
war in Europe, which is crazy, crazy, crazy. Throughout most of the war, the
United States and the British were facing 10 German
divisions combined, and the Soviets were facing
200 German divisions. The United States lost
400,000 in World War II, which is a lot, but the
Soviets lost 27 million. And you think at 27 million,
what that number means-- Kennedy said it was the
equivalent of the entire United States east of Chicago
having been wiped out. But 27 million-- in
9/11, we lost a little under 3,000 people. It devastated us. We haven't recovered yet. We invaded multiple
countries, and we bombed lots of countries in response. 27 million is the equivalent
of one 9/11 a day every day for 24 years. And that's what the Soviets
suffered in World War II. That big demand of us was that
we opened up the second front. Roosevelt wanted to do it. He writes to Stalin
and says please sent Foreign Minister
Molotov and a top general to Washington. They came here in May, 1942. We issue a public
statement saying we're going to open up the
second front in Western Europe before the end of
the year in 1942. And then Churchill resists. The American military
leaders are furious. Marshall condemns the
invasion of North Africa, which we substituted
as periphery pecking. Eisenhower, who led it,
said that our invasion is going to be the blackest
day in American history when we invade North Africa. They were furious. But Churchill refused
to go along with it. And we finally opened
up the second front on D-day, June 6, 1944. So the American chronology of
the war point that Oliver makes is that as if the real
war starts on D-day, and that we gradually or
rapidly march into Berlin and we win the war. But that's not the war
that anybody else knows, and it's certainly
not the war-- Oliver is going to be going
to Moscow next week. I was supposed to go,
too, for the commemoration of the end of the war. Our view of that, like our
view of the atomic bombing and the Pacific war
and the Cold War is very, very
dangerously distorted. But the American
students don't know that. I did an anonymous
survey with students, and I asked them how many
Americans died in World War II. The median answer
I got was 90,000. So they were only 300,000 off. I asked them how many
Soviets died in World War II. These are 20-year-old A
students in high school. The median answer
I got was 100,000. They were only 27 million off. They know nothing. They can't understand
anything about the Cold War. They have no idea what's
going on in Ukraine now. If you don't understand history,
you can't make sense out of what's happening. Well, we have just
time for one more question, because we have to be
out of this auditorium at 7:00. And that gentleman right
there has been very insistent, and so I'll give you
the last question. At the end of the
episode, you talked about how the world
would be so much better if we hadn't dropped the bombs. And I'm wondering,
what leads you to believe that it wouldn't have
led to Russia, like they said, taking over Japan and
expanding and becoming a dominant superpower
over the United States? Because that's how
I've been taught. So can you say evidence
to the contrary? Yes. There is quite a bit. Peter, you want to start with
the poverty of the Soviet Union and the bill owed? The Soviet Union was not an
aggressive force at that point. What the Soviets
were concerned about was they wanted a buffer zone in
Eastern Europe between Germany, which they were terrified
of, and themselves. They had been invaded twice
through Eastern Europe by Germany. They did not have a vision for
world domination at that point. So there are so many different
ways to approach that question. The real risk that
we see that was posed was not by the
Soviets at that point. And for example, even in terms
of developing nuclear weapons, do you remember the
Acheson-Lilienthal Plan in 1946 that the United
States put forth? Dean Acheson was
hardly a utopian. He thought it was
a brilliant plan. It was a drafted by Oppenheimer. And he thought we could actually
get rid of nuclear weapons. There's good evidence that the
Soviets would have gone along with an honest deal, not the one
that Baruch finally proposed. And the Soviets
were very excited by Roosevelt's proposal
for four policemen. When Roosevelt in 1942 said
we need four policemen-- the United States, the Soviets,
China, and Britain to maintain peace and stability around the
world in the post-war period, Soviets, I think, would have
loved to play that role. And we could have had--
potentially, at least-- there's no guarantees. We don't have a crystal ball. But potentially, we could have
had an era-- instead of wasting all that money on weapons in the
Cold War, all over the world, we could've turned
that to health care, to housing, to food, to things
that human beings actually needed. We're lucky to have
survived that period. And it was a period--
to me, the Cold War and the subsequent period
has been a terrible period in world history compared to
what human potential could have been. Well, I'd like to thank
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick and the audience. [APPLAUSE] Thank you all for coming. Thank you.
