This is what historian Sean Wilentz says Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s revisionist history of the US should be properly entitled. When I first heard about Stone and Kuznick’s book (and documentary) these past couple of months I declined to read about it. Oliver Stone is a fine filmmaker—I’ll see just about anything he does—but when it comes to politics and history, he’s out to lunch. A simple-minded gauchiste given over to conspiracy theories (e.g. his ‘JFK’: good cinema, trash history). But Wilentz has done the dirty work in the latest NYRB and taken Stone and Kuznick’s bullshit to the cleaners. He rubbishes their book. Stone and Kuznick’s interpretation of history was in vogue in the 1970s—when I came of age intellectually and politically—and I adhered to it at the time and into the ’80s, e.g. the argument that the US was responsible for the Cold War (William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko et al). But I evolved intellectually and politically, and left all that behind. But many lefties out there—aging red diaper babies and others, who were stunned and bewildered by the fall of the Berlin Wall—have not. They should read Wilentz’s review.
Thank you Arun for Wilentz’s paper. There was another piece in the New York Times by Andrew Goldman (“Oliver Stone infuriates Historians again”) a few months back.
One minor gripe, however – I would save William Appleman Williams from the onslaught. Not that I am familiar with Lafeber, the Kolkos, or even Appleman Williams’ entire production, but I think a bit better of his work as a diplomatic historian than you seem to do. Just a little thing I would like to bring to the case is this article in SHAFR’s (Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations) newsletter Passport, by the University of Wisconsin’s Thomas MacCormick: http://www.shafr.org/passport/2007/august/mccormick.pdf
I tend to see Appleman Williams as a bit more multifaceted than you make him to be. Not completely right on everything, and certainly carrying a specific, “economic” vision of international relations, but not to be dismissed either as a lunatic, as MacCormick emphasizes.
Louis: Point conceded on Williams. I’m thinking of his 1959 book on the tragedy of American diplomacy but he produced a lot more than that. His revisionism was relatively mild, so far as I recall, and by the ’70s he had been surpassed by others. For the anecdote, in 1981 I attended a public talk he gave in New York to a sizable, left-leaning audience, on images of American empire, or something like that. It left a lot of the audience puzzled (including myself) and I had the feeling that he was already regarded as a has been.