PBD Podcast | EP 133 | Legendary Film Maker: Oliver Stone
FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/
PBD Podcast Episode 133. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Adam Sosnick and world-renowned director, Oliver Stone.
Follow Oliver on Twitter here: https://bit.ly/3tWCsjM
Buy Olivers book Chasing the Light: amzn.to/3pY2vpq
See Olivers latest film, JFK Revisited: https://amzn.to/3pTWiL6
Buy JFK REVISITED: Through the Looking Glass: https://amzn.to/3taQCyp
Watch The Putin Interviews: https://amzn.to/36dXTV8
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
About:
William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Stone won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as a writer of Midnight Express and wrote the gangster film remake Scarface.
About Co-Host:
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Connect with him on his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com
0:00 - Start
2:51 - Oliver Stone's background
15:51 - Why Oliver Stone is such an interesting person
25:11 - Oliver Stone reveals who assassinated J.F.K
32:26 - How the Russians really won World War II
36:47 - Did Lyndon Byrd Johnson organize John F. Kennedys assassination?
47:22 - Ukraine under fire
1:04:26 - Discussing Oliver Stone's interviews with Vladimir Putin
1:17:34 - Oliver Stone gives his thoughts on Joe Biden
You know the word, when people drop the word legendary, you're not going, oh, he's such a legend.
But then we dropped that loosely.
Today's guest is a person that will be full-on qualified as a legend.
Couple things you need to know with our guests today, Oliver Stone.
He may be.
Odds are you have seen, you've seen probably a handful of his work.
Let me kind of walk through a couple of them and then you tell me.
He was a writer for Midnight Express, okay?
Writer for Conan the Barbarian.
Writer for The Scarface.
If you've ever seen Scarface with Pacino, Euro the Dragon, Platoon, he was a writer and director.
Wall Street, writer and director, born on 4th of July, writer, director, producer.
JFK, the movie with Kevin Costner, writer, director, producer.
Let me continue.
Natural Born Killers, writer and director.
Nixon, writer, director, producer.
Avida, any given Sunday.
Alexander, do you want me to keep going?
World Trade Center, W, Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps, Savages, Snowden.
He's done three documentaries, I believe, on Castro.
He had a four-episode interview.
It was 57, 58 minutes each with Putin that came out with Showtime years ago.
Good for Showtime for actually doing that.
Ukraine on Fire, which I recently watched.
And he's got a book that somebody I just had a chance to meet out there who got the right credibility to say this.
She says this may be one of the best books she's ever read.
If we can put this up there as well so everybody can see it.
It's called Chasing the Light, Writing, Directing, Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and a movie game, Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light.
Let's put the link below for people to order as well.
Having said that, Oliver Stone, thank you so much for being a guest.
Thank you, Patrick.
It's a nice introduction.
Yes, it's great to have you on.
Yeah.
I also did in interviews.
I also did a documentary, big one, with Hugo Chavez.
You forgot him.
Oh, I forgot that one.
Well, if I cover all of them, I mean, your resume is...
And by the way, here's what's crazy about it.
Everything you're saying here, on top of this, like the stuff that really matters with life, you could have avoided going to Vietnam.
You didn't.
I think you were a school teacher in Saigon.
I want to say, if I'm saying that correctly, you know, your upbringing, how you were raised with your father, and then, you know, finances, the debt and his philosophies, and it kind of led you to your own.
You went to Yale a year later, you dropped out.
I mean, you know, you have a very rich life.
You know, we sometimes see the final product, but coming up to it is what's really interesting.
Do you mind taking a moment and sharing with the audience, before Oliver Stone became Oliver Stone that we know about, who was Oliver Stone?
A conforming, scared young student in school who didn't want to get into trouble, went to boarding school, tried to behave.
The wild streak was from my mother, and it was in me, but it was buried and took some time to come out because I didn't know what I, I was an only child, so you have to figure it out step by step, as you know.
You don't have an older brother, older sister to teach you the ways of the world.
I had to bump into the furniture to find my path.
And I suppose it started with their divorce when I was 16.
That was pretty, I thought they were the happiest couple in the world.
They were so beautiful together.
My father was, I thought he was rich.
He was on Wall Street, and they had a beautiful marriage.
She was French, and he was American.
He met her in World War II during the war.
On the street, in the street in Paris, he picked her up on a street corner.
Not that she was, not that she was a hooker.
She was on a bicycle and he stopped her.
Thank you for clarifying that, Mr. Stone.
And he was – anyway, that divorce set me on a path of aloneness because my family life with three people, it disintegrates when you don't have your – so I went off to boarding school and then from there to Saigon, no, to Yale.
And at Yale, I was not happy there.
It was the same environment as a boarding school.
And I found that the entire socioeconomic drift of the college was towards Wall Street, towards capitalism, towards competitiveness.
It was not at, you know, put it this way, in my class at Yale was George Bush, okay?
George Bush was a C student at Yale.
He admits it.
But he was entitled.
And that was a sense of entitlement that I saw in boarding school in many people, and also at Yale.
So there were no women at that point either.
I dropped out.
I dropped out and went to teach, as you say, in Saigon, in Cholan, actually, to Chinese, Vietnamese Chinese students, huge classes.
I taught for two semesters.
And it was a fascinating experience to be there and living in the back alleys and getting used to a country I didn't know.
I didn't know a soul there.
So it was for me an eye-opening experience.
Came back eventually in the Merchant Marine.
I was a wiper.
I always wanted to go to sea.
So I joined as a wiper.
They allowed me to go, not as a union, because you can get a card when these ships were going over to Saigon.
They were losing the crews because the guys were jumping crews to make money in Saigon.
There was a lot of money to be made in combat zones.
So people were jumping ship.
And I sailed back on an empty ship to Coos Bay, Oregon.
And then I re-enrolled to Yale for my sophomore year, dropped out a second time.
Dropped out a second time.
Second time.
So one time wasn't enough.
I flunked out a second time.
Okay, God.
I really was.
It was clear that I had no future here.
And I cut out on my own, wrote a book called Child's Night Dream, which was finally published in 1997 by St. Martins.
And it's very, very much a 19-year-old's book, very much written in a very romantic.
It's embarrassing, I mean, but I put it out the way it was written.
I made some edits, but I just wanted it to be in the voice of an authentic 19-year-old because we don't listen to 19-year-olds.
We don't listen to young people.
Young people have problems.
Some of them are very suicidal, as you know.
And I confront these nightmares.
I had them.
You were having suicidal thoughts at 19?
Oh, yeah.
Really?
Very much so.
Yeah, this is before the war.
Divorce was 60.
But you see, that's what I'm saying.
Was it due to the divorce, alienation?
I didn't know what to do in my life.
I was lost, really lost.
Which is, I'm trying to explain why I actually volunteered to go to this Vietnam combat, because it was the only, there was nothing else for me.
It was the way to maybe solve this issue.
If I was going to off myself, I didn't want to do it.
It would be done, perhaps for me, by the forces in Vietnam.
So I was willing to, you know, willing to die, I thought.
When I got there, of course, after infantry training, I got put into the 25th Infantry in September of 67.
So it was right as the war was getting to its hottest point.
And I served in three different units.
I ended up at the 1st Cavalry because I got wounded twice in the 25th.
I went through all the stuff in South Saigon, then I went up to Ankai Ankay, and then I moved on to Camp Evans in Quang Tree Province.
So I had quite a bit of experience there.
It saw a fair share of combat and came back to the States as disillusioned, I suppose, very disillusioned.
I realized I wanted to live because I saw a lot of death and I didn't want to die.
You said something earlier to me before we talked about my Vietnam, when I said something about Vietnam, I came back deadened.
Deadened.
numb i didn't know who i was what i was i was totally it's a problem for returning veterans as you know in any war any place you don't Our society was not geared to war.
Our society, people were not enlisting or volunteering by any means.
Most people were avoiding it.
In my class at Yale and Hill School, all of these people, most of them, were not going there.
It was considered that was for poor people, right?
And that bothered me.
So I got my first real strong experience of living with the, call it the lower class Americans, but they were really good people and I had much, there were many good people there.
And at the same time, I got to know our black population pretty well because I found them to be very powerful in my experience there.
They, in a way, they helped keep me alive, kept me human.
The music, going back to the base camp, smoking dope, that kind of stuff in the rear is very important and it keeps you human.
And I discovered soul music and it was just good relationships.
Whereas some other people have problems over there.
You can let war finish you off.
It makes you very callous, very callous.
It was a racist war in the sense that, yeah, many of us mistreated the Vietnamese, didn't respect them at all.
The soldiers, you mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that was it.
You see that overall in our attitudes towards third world people.
And I saw a lot of that.
I didn't like it at all.
So I'm giving you a long narrative.
I wrote a book about it.
It's called Chasing the Light.
And about my first 40 years.
And I told that story because Vietnam plays a huge role in America's destiny, which is where I'm going to go to in my lifetime.
My father being a Republican, being pro-Vietnam at one point, very much, he was an intelligent man.
He was an economist, a Wall Street man.
He was very passionate in his views, and he stated them publicly.
He was a writer, and today, among other things, he wrote a monthly investment letter for his firm.
And it was a very popular letter.
So he was given the gift of expression.
He was a very good writer.
I admired him.
Didn't agree with him.
We fought like dog and cat after the war because he didn't really respect Vietnam.
To him, World War II was the war.
He was a lieutenant colonel.
You understand the dichotomy.
And here I was, a pot-smoking, long-haired, hippie type coming back from this war.
But I wasn't a hippie.
I was just a screwed up veteran, you know.
So after a long period of drugs and this and that, I ended up back at NYU on the GI Bill, which is where I went to film school.
And because what else could I do?
Didn't have any skills except how to fire a rifle, how to build a fire, how to live outdoors in the jungle.
Those were my skills.
So I went to school for two years.
Martius Garcesi was the youngest teacher there.
I had him in a class, and he was very, very, he moved me.
All the teachers were very good.
The school was very sharp.
Learned a lot.
How much further do you want me to go?
I'm actually very interested.
Please continue.
I'm actually very interested.
Martin Scorsese was your teacher at NYU, you were saying.
Marty was a teacher.
Yeah, he was young.
I want to know to the point of first movie.
Like, I want to know to the point of your first big movie and then winning an award for Midnight at Miles.
Well, that's a few years ahead.
I had to go through a lot of rejection from film school.
I mean, you come out of film school.
I drove a taxi in New York because there was no jobs for film.
It wasn't, younger people were not yet accepted the way they have been since.
It was tough.
I drove a taxi.
It was a messenger.
I was working in all temp jobs that I could get.
And I was writing.
I kept writing.
Remember, I'd written a novel, so I kept writing screenplays.
My first screenplay is 69.
And it reads crazy, but it's part of the development of a writer.
You have to go through all these.
I wrote eight, nine, ten, maybe eleven screenplays over those next six, seven years, and all of them were rejected.
Although two of them were finally options, and that led to some kind of light in Hollywood.
I started to meet some people just off the options.
I had married a Lebanese woman who was very beautiful and had a job at the UN.
So she was helping me.
I was living in her apartment.
We were married.
And Najwa, Najwa, Lebanese, I'm sure you know, Christian Lebanese.
So I moved to Hollywood.
We divorced after seven years together.
And I moved to Hollywood and started over again.
I was very lucky in the sense that my first, I got a job, hired a job to work on Midnight Express, which was a book.
A hustling young producer, Peter Guber, at Columbia, wanted to make this movie.
And of course, the story was fascinating about a Turk, a boy, an American boy from Long Island who was busted in Turkey and for hash, went to jail for, was sentenced to 30 years.
But it was quite a case, and it went around and around.
No, it was first of all, he was sentenced for five years, and then he was re-sentenced for 30 years.
The Turkish system of justice at that time was very strange.
And the jail was hilarious because if you had money in jail in Turkey, you lived like a king.
But if you were just part of the foreign riffraff, you lived pretty badly.
So you can imagine the contrast.
Anyway, the movie came out and it was a gigantic hit.
It was 1978, 79.
And I got an Academy Award.
That was the most shocking thing.
Crazy.
You know what makes you interesting?
You know how sometimes we're uncomfortable to tell our story.
It's like, look, it's not that big of a deal.
It's my life.
We're just telling our life story.
Here's what makes you very unique as an artist.
And I don't know if the world appreciates you as much as they do.
And I'll unpack my opinion on how I view you.
So for somebody to have the amount of life, you know, acting is what?
To draw from a certain place you were at in your life to get into that emotion or reacting.
You know, there's different kind of acting, but a person who's more well-rounded, they can go and explain a scene better because they can go there, right?
Background, that Republican, economist, conservative, then he loses, debt, divorce.
So you can draw from what it is to be a father, Republican, conservative.
Then you experience a kid divorced, 16 years old, heartbroken, what it is to have that take place.
Mom, French, so you learn the history of French because mom's going to pass that down to you.
Then you go military, so you have a little bit of that experience from the military.
You go to see exactly what's going on in Vietnam.
I mean, you draw from that for a movie, which leads later on to Platoon, which I don't know how many times I watched Platoon when I was in the Army.
Then you're talking about Yale to be around people like Bush who come from families of strong lineage and they get to go there so you see what parties they can participate in and you can't and how that privileged life is like.
Then being a teacher, your compassion for the African-American black community, and then coming up.
I mean, the amount of things you can draw from and you tell the story, we feel it.
Meaning, we being the audience.
We see your final product.
We see what you're putting together.
So it's impressive.
And one of the things that I appreciate about your work is the fact that, look, today we had a doctor here, Ron, and we're having a conversation with him.
And I remember years ago when I got enamored by JFK and what happened with him.
All of a sudden, I'm like, I got to interview.
I watched your documentary, JFK.
And obviously, I've seen a movie.
I've seen a lot of that stuff.
But last time I'm watching a documentary, and Abraham Bolden, I remember when we interviewed him five years ago, or Clint Hill or RFK or, you know, Cyril Wecht.
Cyril and I had a phenomenal interview together because I want to know that story.
But you also, this is what it comes across to me.
I think young filmmakers who are not afraid, who have audacity, and they have the guts to do what an artist ought to do, and we ought to let this person do what they're doing.
It seems like you're the kind of guy that if you are looking at Castro and everybody's saying stuff about Castro, you're like, look, I don't know what you think.
You hate him.
You love him.
You can't stand him.
You could care less about him.
I wanted to learn.
That's what I wanted.
I don't want to judge.
I want to learn.
Okay, this Putin guy is a horrible person.
Great.
Okay, let's say you're right.
People from Russia, some of them love him, some of them hate him.
I don't know.
You know what?
Hey, can we do an interview?
I want to learn, right?
Hey, this Ukraine thing, everything I hear about with Ukraine, you know, love them, hate them, you know, the Battle of Victors and all this other stuff.
I don't know.
I want to learn.
I think the courage you have to go touch some of the subjects that the rest of the world is like, well, Fox News said this, they must be right.
CNN said this, they must be right.
MSNBC said this, they must be right.
New York Post said it, they must be right.
New York Times said they must be right.
You're like, yeah, I don't know if I believe any one of them.
I kind of want to find out for myself.
That takes a lot of courage to do what you've done.
That's what's impressive.
I think our stories are similar because what you told me is you came from a very from Syria.
Iran, born and raised in both.
My dad was a Syrian.
My mother was Armenian.
So you've been, you've been, you're the ultimate too.
You're a refugee from those situations.
And you're in this country, which is a big, open freeway in many ways and a marketplace of ideas, but you're open and you want to see.
You want to learn.
That was what happened to me.
And I'm still on that journey.
And I'm 75 years old.
I still can't.
I'd love to know more.
I'd like to.
So many people I'd like to meet, but it's, you know, the rigidity and the orthodoxy is what always close you down.
They always limit you constantly.
All my life.
You know, my father at first, you know, he certainly didn't approve of my thoughts about the war and this.
And certainly I started to question economics.
You know, he was a big, Franklin Roosevelt.
He was not.
He was there in the 1930s.
He was there in the Depression.
He despised Roosevelt.
And I had that most of my childhood.
As I got into American history more and more and really studied it, I went back, not in school, years later with my project, Untold History of the United States.
It's a 12-part history.
I think I'm very proud of it.
It took five years to put that together with Peter Kuznick, a historian, who taught me, had me read the right books and think about American history in a completely different way than I thought of it before.
And that's the result of that.
And Roosevelt is very much a pillar in that movie.
And so is John Kennedy.
It becomes more and more apparent the more you read about Mr. Kennedy that he was truly in that same tradition of Roosevelt being open-minded to other people, very much as an Irishman, anti-colonial.
Very much so.
Had a much more deeper relationship with Africa, with Indonesia, with South America, and with Nasser in Egypt than we know.
Oh, Nasser was heartbroken when he was working very effectively to reestablish American relations with these countries in Sukarno and Indonesia.
And he was changing the policy in Vietnam.
Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to get it done because Lyndon Johnson, who was supposed to be his transition, went in a complete U-turn in a different direction.
Immediately.
Which American historians do not admit.
So here again, this is an interesting thing.
We come across orthodoxy in history too.
And in our thinking and in our media.
And that's always been my problem, coming up against that and being criticized for that, for challenging those views.
Is that because the natural, like, you know how we grow up, like the one person you never question is your father, that if you eventually were like, I don't know if my dad's right and I'm going to go figure it out for myself, like that is still with you at 75, where today father may be the president or the government or the media or whatever.
There's got to be something more to it.
Is that kind of your mindset?
There's got to be something more to it than what I'm hearing.
Well, my mother plays a huge role here because my mother was a rebel.
We haven't talked much about her.
She was a rebel.
Part of the reason the divorce was what it was is that she rebelled against the system.
She didn't want to live inside that box where the man commits adultery all the time and the woman doesn't.
So she broke her, she made her own rules up and she had fun.
She was quite a liver and a hesitant.
She was quite a liver.
And a hedonist and many friends.
She was loved by so many people, I can't tell you.
And I think that's a great quality to have opposites as parents.
Wow.
Not to say my father wasn't funny.
He was also very funny, but it wasn't like they were.
She had a different spirit and rebelled all the time.
She had lived through the occupation, Nazi occupation in Paris in World War II.
So she really appreciated the freedom after a war and a very loving person.
So she's in my heart.
She's always there.
But I take from both of them.
Both parents are very strong.
Later on, did you ever kind of think and say, you know, I used to not agree with my dad on these two things.
You know, now that I'm 52 years old, this one part that I disagree with my dad, I agree with him.
He was right here and he was right here.
And he was wrong there and she was wrong there and she was right.
Did that happen to you?
Sure.
Oh, yeah.
Was there anything specific?
That's what life is.
My mother, because of my father, became a Republican.
She supported, you know, Reagan and all that.
But she didn't really, it was all, no, inside that she was a free spirit.
Got it.
And totally.
And frankly, John Kennedy, my father was skeptical about him, preferred Nixon.
And me too, at that point.
It took me along.
You have to learn for yourself.
That's what the whole point of life is.
It's your path to learn.
If you don't change, if you're still the same person you were when you were young, well, you might like it, but it doesn't show that you have tried other states of being.
Pat, what's the one thing you always say about first you love your parents, then you begin to disagree with them, and then eventually you start to humanize them?
What do you always say?
It's called idolize, demonize, humanize.
That's the three phases you go through parenting, yes.
That's pretty well said.
Idolize, demonize, humanize.
You know, there's three topics I'd want to touch upon with you.
One of them is obviously JFK, because, again, I couldn't stop watching that thing.
The other thing is a little bit on the Ukraine on fire documentary and your interview with Putin since it's relevant, whatever comments you may have on that.
And then a couple other topics before we wrap up.
First one being JFK.
This is just, again, selfishly for me, I can't stop reading enough content or studying this guy enough.
And, you know, you look at, RFK said something very unique in the interview where he says in the documentary where he said, there is no man where there is more statues, buildings, streets named after him than Kennedy, JFK, right?
Now, I've seen Churchill maybe there, a couple other names may be there, but Kennedy being what he did.
But why the level of interest in his story?
What caused you to say, I really want to investigate this story even more?
Well, history is crucial because if less you know where you came from, you don't know where you are.
I mean, it becomes, in a sense, America is not really agreed on its history.
And that's one of the reasons I did this, Untold History.
We have a lot of mythology in our country.
There's a myth about America.
There's a myth about America, and there are facts.
And in our history, we tried to bring out facts that we don't deal with, we don't even know.
So that's why it's called Untold.
It's there, it's known, but it's been hidden.
And of course, among all these many facts is the fact that, you know, among others is World War II, which is still partly motivating our ideology in the world, that there's a Hitler out there and that we're the defenders of freedom and democracy, is a large, is also a myth in the sense that we did not win World War II.
We had the Russians were the ones who broke their back and took the most casualties and actually tore the guts out of the German war machine.
And Churchill said so himself.
They were the sacrifice.
27 million people died.
Many of them, 8, 10 million were military.
Their casualties were so much higher than ours.
And four-fifths of the German military machine was destroyed on the Eastern Front, one-fifth in the West.
So by the time D-Day happened in 1944, and we landed, and it was a great big myth, but that was late in the war.
By 43, the war was turning and early 44.
That's the first time.
Because it was after Stalingrad, the Russians had turned and were starting to chase the Russians, starting to chase the Germans out of Russia.
That's a huge, important point that is part of this history that's distorted.
And then, of course, I go to the place where JFK is killed, and I trying to explain in these documentaries why he was killed.
That's the most important question.
What was the reason?
What would be the benefit of it?
What would change after he was killed?
And if you look at the record, aside from civil rights, Lyndon Johnson changed pretty much everything that Kennedy was doing.
He cut off relationships with Africa, with the Middle East, with Indonesia, with Vietnam.
He became another kind of creature, the old-fashioned way of doing business from Eisenhower and Dulles Brothers.
That is, without doubt, and we go into some length to make this point to the American public.
They have to learn this.
You have to watch the, you've seen the four-hour version, so you know there's more history there.
And the two-hour version is called Revisited.
The four-hour version is called Destiny Betrayed.
They're both available.
The four-hour is available on Shout Factory.
And it's also available on, you can rent it on, I think, Amazon.
No, you have to buy it actually.
It's a digital purchase because it just came out yesterday.
It's going to be on iTunes.
It's Actions.
It'll be on Apple.
Can I get it on the Twitter?
Yeah, I think it's a good one.
Apple and iTunes.
And there's two of them, that one and the other one that you did with the nation, the 12 episodes.
I'll watch both of those.
No, the 12 episodes is untold history.
That was 2012.
But that has some great stuff on World War II and the Cold War, the Cold War, as well as up to the Iraq War.
Go to what you said.
So you said the real reason to do the documentary to see why, like the whole, the why, right?
Okay.
So for you, like, did you catch yourself going on a rabbit hole and saying, you know, because I interviewed the mobsters, gangsters, Sammy DeBull, Michael Francis, Frank Colada.
Then I went to Clint Hill, who was the Secret Service agent to Jackie, to see what he had to say.
And, you know, and then I went to Abraham Bolden, who was the first black African-American Secret Service agent.
And then I went to Cyril Wecht, who was one of the, what do you call him, the person who, what do you call Cyril Wecht's job?
Autopsy.
Yeah, and then Jim Jen.
And all these things I'm doing.
So I went down the rabbit hole to kind of figure out.
But for you, when you're by yourself and the whole thing is done and you watch it, what are you thinking?
Who do you think was afraid of revealing the truth about what happened with Kennedy?
Is it CIA?
Was that your final conclusion?
When you see that these huge changes, these are huge changes in foreign and domestic policy, except for civil rights.
That's the only.
As you know, Kennedy submitted the bill, the Civil Rights Court, and it was on his momentum, beautiful speech.
And based on the momentum of his death, Johnson finally got it passed.
That was the beginning of, and they make Johnson into a hero.
But he's not a hero because those people who say this was a smooth transition are dead wrong.
It's rubbish, really rubbish.
Kennedy was killed for a reason.
And you have to look at the highest levels of our society.
Who would hate him or resist him?
He was disliked, we know, for his civil rights stance in the South.
George Wallace said that he would not win the South in the 64 election.
We know that he had, he said quite openly, after the Bay of Pigs and after the Missile Crisis, he avoided war twice with Cuba.
This is serious.
He avoided two wars.
The second one, the missile crisis, could have been the war that ended mankind.
That was a huge nuclear potentially conflict.
To save this country from two wars is as, to me, is as important as what the Russians did in World War II.
Because if they hadn't done what they had done, American casualties, which were 450,000, might well have been 2, 3 million more just to get through the Hitler, the fortress that Hitler had built in Europe.
It's a big deal.
My father could have been killed.
Your father's, we wouldn't even be here.
People don't understand.
There's an easy presumption that we're alive and we have these choices, but we wouldn't even be alive to make those choices.
So my gratitude is enormous to both the Soviet Union and to John Kennedy, who was killed because he wouldn't go to war against Cuba.
Now, the Vietnam thing, they accused me of that one too, but it's been proven correct.
Mr. McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, George Bundy, his National Security Advisor, have since written books since my movie came out saying that he was going to pull out of Vietnam, win or lose, win or lose.
McNamara was very clear about that in his book in retrospect.
And you have to understand, these are people who were hawks at that time of Vietnam.
So they're not interested in saying, they're admitting that they were wrong.
They're saying Kennedy really was clear about it, but that he couldn't announce it publicly.
He couldn't make a big deal of it because he had to get elected.
He was going to run against Barry Goldwater, who was a hawk, right?
You have to be in America.
You can't get elected unless you're a tough guy.
Pat, have you ever heard that perspective before?
What he's saying is contradictory to basically what every American has ever known.
Which part?
The part specifically about World War II.
We've been, you know, the greatest generation is the name that everyone uses for the parents of the baby boomers.
They fought in World War II.
One-fifth West, four-fifth East, the role Russia played that cost them.
Is that what you're talking about?
Precisely.
And ultimately, we've been raised that the greatest generation of all time is the World War II generation.
The baby boomer.
They raided the parents of the baby boomers.
They raided the streets of the shores of Normandy.
And this is the epitome of American culture and exceptionalism.
And your father fought in this war.
What kind of backlash do you get from your father or your father's constituency, his age, from what you're saying about World War II?
That's a very key question.
Would you mind just pulling this closer to you?
Because you can even move that.
I'm saying you can grab that.
Like this?
You're saying to move the mic a little bit?
Yeah, yeah, just so we can hear you.
Because what you're saying is very important, and it's contradictory to anything we've ever heard about America.
It's a great question.
Well, thank you, Adam.
But the concept of the greatest generation is mythology again.
It was invented, as far as I know, by Ambrose, Stephen Ambrose, who's a certain kind of historian, very patriotic.
I believe it was Ambrose, but certainly Tom Brokow, who interviewed me, also, I remember him using that expression and wrote a book about it.
Tom Brokow.
Now, Tom Brokow is a very nice, liked, very much liked on the air, but he is not a very bright man, in my opinion.
He interviewed me on the Kennedy assassination for an hour and a half in the 2013, the 60th anniversary.
I talked to him very cogently, as I'm talking now, for an hour and a half.
When they released the documentary, I was there for 60 seconds, and it was very superficial.
That's the kind of treatment you get in major media in the United States.
They cut to the commercial.
You can't have any serious discussion on the air.
This is so bad.
This is part of our problem.
We don't think about things.
We don't discuss both sides of an equation.
But the greatest generation is a lie.
And they point to George H.W. Bush.
Oh, he was a fighter pilot.
He was a heroic man, yes.
But look what happened.
He goes to war in Iraq on the flimsiest of reasons.
And there's a lot of doubts about that 1990 war.
And we can go into that, but not here.
And he was made a lion of that generation.
But he's not.
He's not.
He is a man who did his job in World War II.
And it was a tough war, no question about it.
But a lot of those people, if you go and talk to the actual people who fought in the war, will tell you another story completely, how filthy and dirty it was and how shh I won't use it was an obscenity.
It's a podcast.
You can see it.
It was not a pretty war.
No one's proud of their service.
Civilians are killed all the time.
All kinds of cowardice, all kinds of infighting among the troops.
The truth of war is that.
And so we have some kind of, you know, the problem.
Now we've sanitized, since Vietnam, we've sanitized the news about war, right?
You get embedded.
You have to have journalists embedded safely with the military in order to report anything.
You're not allowed to show the bodies coming back.
They hide them, Iraq and Afghanistan.
We've tried to sanitize the war.
Now we're not even using troops.
We're trying to use proxy nations and send their armies to fight.
So We have to re-examine that attitude that we have that we're number one.
We have to learn to live with other nations, learn to cooperate.
We don't have to be the most dominant nation in the world.
I think we'd be better off if we were quieter and let other countries have their power balances.
We need a balance of power between people, between countries too, as in a family.
Yeah.
You know, going back to it when you were talking about the, we were talking about the JFK documentary, there's a part of it where the CIA agent, they're talking about Oswald.
And a part of it in the story where in the documentary, they're talking about the other agent whose name is Thomas Arthur Valley, right?
Thomas Arthur Valley.
Very interesting where it shows, you know, they have a couple other attempts on assassination on Kennedy, one of them being November 2nd in Chicago, the other one being November 18 in Tampa.
And he's supposed to go on this 27-mile, you know.
And then they say you shouldn't do this.
This Valley guy, ex-Marine, Oswald ex-Marine, was at the Japan base.
He's at the Japan base.
He trained.
But in Japan, CIA Cuba training, same here.
He was at a six or seven-story building, almost identical to the building.
And then the entire time while this is going on, and I'm talking to Jim Jenkins, I said, Jim, let me ask you a question.
Who do you think was behind this?
Who do you think caused all of this?
And I'm asking him names.
I said, what do you think about Lyndon Johnson?
And he says, I don't trust Lyndon Johnson.
I said, tell me why.
So, you know, the story behind Lyndon Johnson being way more ambitious than John F. Kennedy, and he was so upset with the fact that these guys took office behind closed doors.
So from your end, when you were doing the investigation, I know JFK wanted to get rid of CIA and Lyndon Johnson wanted to go Vietnam.
John F. Kennedy didn't want to go Vietnam, you know, these things that they had.
How much do you, I felt like that documentary could have gone a little bit deeper on LBJ's motivation.
What did you learn about LBJ at the end?
This is a very good question, and I'm reluctant to point at Johnson for the murder.
As I said at the time in 1991, I do believe totally he was responsible for the cover-up because the cover, he starts with the Warren Commission, he does everything possible.
And if you saw the, remember the documentary, there's even a scene when he's talking to McNabrow.
You hear the phone conversation where he says, I didn't agree with you and the president that we should pull out of Vietnam.
He was very, very pointed.
So I don't think, though, he wanted to go to Vietnam.
I think that that was on the agenda because we had already started the process of Vietnam with Eisenhower, not with Kennedy.
With Eisenhower, we started the process of supporting the French, paying for the French war.
So Kennedy fell into the trap.
He sent advisors, not combat troops, but he insisted no combat troops.
He insisted to the very end.
He insisted no combat troops go to Laos either.
No combat troops are going to go to Cuba.
That's the reason Bay of Pigs, he was hated by the Cuban community after two, three years of this.
He refused to fight, send American troops into Cuba.
Kennedy unknown what war was, knew what it meant.
He'd been on that PT boat.
He'd seen all the, he'd been at the lower level, and he knew he didn't believe the generals.
He saw the fallacy of this belief that the generals know everything.
He comes into office, the first thing he's presented with is Eisenhower's SIOP plan, SIOP 62, SIOP 62, to blow up the world.
There is a plan, you know, that they were going to attack China and Moscow, Russia first.
And the first strike option was also on the table.
It still is in the United States.
The first strike option is still on the table and very much a consideration in this Ukraine debate, by the way, because certainly that's one of the things the Russians fear the most, is encirclement and NATO and nuclear, nuclear arms in the Polish, Romanian, and possibly Ukrainian hands.
There it is, single integrated operational plan.
It's a wicked plan, and it was devised by people who were basically paranoid.
You saw the movie Dr. Strangelove.
You saw the military people as pictured there.
Can I read this to the audience recording the single interrogator of SA?
This is the industry.
United States a range of targeting options and described launch procedures and targets set against the nuclear weapons would be launched to plan integrate the capabilities of nuclear-tired terms.
Interesting.
This is a system.
This is an industry.
This is not just a plan.
This is a business of billions of dollars.
How much have we spent since 1947 on our defense?
It's out of proportion to anything we really needed for our defense.
It's basically to dominate the world, to have 800 bases in every country practically we can in the world.
And it's a gigantic operation, but a lot of people, contractors, Raython, Lockheed, Martin, make a fortune on this thing, a fortune on this business.
So to close this down, to start to reduce it, is the hardest thing to do in the world.
Since Jack Kennedy was president, no American president has gone close to even trying to interfere with the military, with that system, to really cut back, or at the same time, interfered with the intelligence agencies of this country.
Remember, he said very clearly after the Bay of Pigs, because they had given him false information and they betrayed him there, he said, we're going to destroy.
I'd like to shatter the CIA and scatter it to the winds.
I forgot the exact quote.
But he certainly made the effort.
He fired Alan Dulles, who was the head of the CIA, was a respected, revered figure from the 1950s under Eisenhower, his brother John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, who set this policy not of neutrality, but of rollback.
It wasn't even containment had been the American policy towards communism.
Rollback.
This is what Dulles wanted.
And he wanted brinksmanship.
He believed in brinksmanship.
And that's what was going on right now.
The same people are back in the State Department and giving that kind of advice to Joe Biden.
But, okay, we're there now again.
We're potentially at another Cuban missile crisis, potentially.
Going back to this system that existed, Kennedy was trying to change it.
And the moment he went killed, the whole thing changes.
We keep going.
All the presidents, they're puppets, basically.
They operate within a certain parameter.
They can't touch the two most important things are the intelligence agencies and the military industrial.
Do you two have a similar opinion on who actually killed JFK?
Yeah.
Well, we haven't gotten there yet.
What is your opinion?
I'm curious.
Well, my opinion is based on what years of thinking about it.
But frankly, Johnson was a weakling compared to what we're dealing with here.
Johnson was the loser.
He was a vice president, and he had a lot of scandal in his life.
So he was not in a position of great strength, which makes him all the more suspect as a but he would have been very suspect if something had happened to Kennedy.
He the people who did this have to be at the very top of the society.
They had to be CIA.
And the only people I can really think work are the Dulles people, because he was the king of the CIA.
And he had, although he had been fired, he was still in Washington and he was very active.
His people were still there.
Kennedy fired Bissell and Cabell.
But the whole people left in the CIA.
You have to clean out the whole agency, as Harriman said that.
You cannot leave those people in place.
Richard Helms became the new traffic comp.
He became the new real head.
McCone was appointed, but he was a figurehead.
Helms and that gang were still there.
And those are the guys you really got to look at because they were moving the Oswalds around the map to Russia.
This is what Dulles did.
They had a program.
Angleton was another guy, James Egleton, who ran that program, putting American defectors into Russia for information.
We wanted land-based information.
We had U-2 flights and all that, but what they wanted people on the ground.
They sent over quite a few defectors.
How did they get there and how they came back is a very interesting story.
And of course, Oswald is hardly examined.
He's also given money.
It's just a strange, strange story.
We go into it.
The fingerprints of intelligence are all over Oswald.
It's very clear from if you watch these, even the two-hour would make that very clear.
So if you have that intelligence, but even at that level, Dulles would not have been, Dulles had to be given the go-ahead by someone else.
And who, the only people I can think of is the people who basically run this country, basically, East Coast financial people from the establishment.
And that goes to a high level.
And that doesn't mean everybody.
They're not sitting around a conference room.
It just means he has to have a conversation.
Is it okay?
This president is a problem.
He's antagonized big business with the steel price hike.
He's made it very clear his pacifist tendencies and his getting along with these third world countries.
He's anti-colonial, very much the Irish rebel.
This is going to be a problem because he's going to get elected in 64.
And then his brother, Robert, who's a tough guy, he fought the mob.
He's going to come in 72, potentially.
76.
And then there's this other younger brother, Teddy, who was already in the Senate.
And he's going to be next.
Could be a dynasty.
They're scared of Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had been there for 15 years.
15 years of Roosevelt.
They were scared.
A lot of these people were shaken, like my father.
They didn't want to see another renaissance of democratic rule, people's rule.
They don't believe in people's democracy.
They don't believe the people should run the country.
No.
They want control.
And so that's the whole thing.
The Eisenhower and Reagan are so anti-Roosevelt.
All their policies are gradually dismantling the New Deal.
And you see that through the whole 1980s, 90s.
Even now, we have some remnants of the New Deal, which I think are very good.
But they're going to be under fire.
They're going to be under threat.
Oliver, how different is what was going on then versus now?
So for me, I watched two documents.
I watch Ukraine on fire.
I watch Winter on Fire.
So Winter on Fire was the one Champen talks about.
Ukraine on Fire.
Yours is Ukraine on Fire.
There's another one that says Winter on Fire.
And so I watch both of them because I want to kind of get a feel.
Winter on Fire is more about the students, the revolution.
Hey, Victor agreed, yes, we're going to sign the EU agreement.
We're going to go with them.
Everything's going to work out overnight.
He says, no, I'm going to go to Russia.
So the students revolt and they're, you know, all those scenes.
It's very emotional and stuff to watch, but you watch that.
So then I go and watch yours because Winter on Fire doesn't tell the history of Ukraine.
It doesn't tell the history of what Stefan Bandira did.
You know, you know who he was and how 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers represented and fought for Hitler and then they put him in jail and then, you know, the two victors battling and the role Russia played.
It was a very interesting way of seeing Ukraine on fire.
What did you learn about Ukraine and Russia when you did the documentary Ukraine on fire?
Because we're in it right now.
We're in the thick of the fight.
Also, there's antecedents here.
Among other things, you should go back to World War II.
And you should understand that there's a split in the Ukraine.
And that half of Ukraine is Russian-speaking.
The other half is anti-Russian, strongly so.
Stephen Bandera and people like that were working with the Nazis.
Many groups.
The Ukrainians were hunting Jews in Ukraine and in Poland.
There was a lot of killing going on.
It was a dirty, bloody war.
So much stuff happened.
So you have all these people.
They never went away.
They're still there in the Ukraine.
If you look at the Maidan moment and you look at our film, you'll see very clearly the Nazi, the neo-Nazis are back.
The Azov battalion, the Idar battalion, the right sector party.
And you see them on camera, and they're very rough customers, these people.
They're not about to be—they don't believe in democracy. They don't believe— Yeah, there was a lot of students and a lot of honest people in Maidan, and there was a lot of frustration with the corruption in Ukraine.
But we go into the whole history of that relationship of the president with the EU.
He tried to make a deal with the EU.
He had a better economic deal from Russia.
That's the reason he stayed.
He didn't sign on to the EU deal.
Very important to recognize that.
He wanted to postpone it until he got a better deal, and that makes sense too.
When all this was happening in Maidan, he even offered to have an earlier election.
He offered it.
He said, you want to get rid of me?
It's not democratic, but we'll go with an earlier election.
And they actually accepted it, but then these thugs who are operating behind the scenes at Maidan, very organized, by the way.
Very organized.
I think the CIA plays another role there because CIA has been involved with Ukrainian Nazis since World War II.
We got a lot of them out to our country on the rat lines.
And we came back after World War II in 1948.
There was an operation by the CIA to drop these people into Ukraine to make trouble, to start troubles for Russia.
It's an old story.
It's not new.
But I don't think a lot of people know it, though.
Well, it's a fact.
In fact, the guy I worked with on JFK Fletcher Proudy was a colonel who was in the World War II and Air Force.
And he was one of those guys who supplies these infiltrators to the Ukraine with weapons and with flights, and you have to drop them and so forth and so on.
It's a lot of hardware.
All these guys were picked up, by the way.
That's what's amazing.
It's like with Castro.
Whenever we go up against Castro, he seems to find out the people we send in secretly.
It's an interesting side effect.
But the Russians picked up, Russian Ukraine picked up these people.
But we tried to destroy Russia.
Is your phone on by any chance?
Do you know if your phone is on?
Because someone's ring is going off.
Oh, I'm doing this, you mean?
Is your phone on?
Do you have your phone with you?
Maybe it's your phone going off because someone's phone is going off.
I have it with me, but I...
Check to see if maybe it's going off.
Okay.
Okay.
Just the ring tone.
No, it's nothing's wrong.
Okay, sounds good.
So now if we watch TV today and we turn it on, you're seeing a Zelensky that is standing and he's looking pretty strong and tough and he's not reacting and the noose is telling us that Russia's lost 5,000 to 6,000 soldiers in the last few weeks, which is more than what we lost in Iraq.
And the two foreign ministers had a conversation together two, three days ago.
It was an hour and a half conversation in Turkey.
No advancements really made.
How different is Ukraine's story today versus when you did the documentary?
How much has changed?
Because Zelensky is not in your documentary when you did it, right?
So is it night and day different story today?
Are they making more progress?
No, it's not me who did it.
The director was Igor Lapotonik, who is Ukrainian, Russian-Ukrainian.
And he did it.
I was an interviewer and one of the producers.
So these two films, Ukraine on Fire and the other one is called Ukraine Revealed.
Revealed goes into the present moment with Zelensky there.
It's a very interesting documentary about the opposition candidate, Viktor Medvedek, Medveduk, Viktor Medvedchuk, revealing Ukraine.
That's it.
Robert Perry, who was one of the great journalists in our country, who was the most eloquent about Ukraine and saw this coming.
He was talking about a nuclear conflict back in 2014 when this thing went down.
He saw it coming.
He died in 2015.
It's a great loss to American journalism.
He was the truth teller.
This story is today is so passionate and so complicated.
All the news in America, unfortunately, is one-sided.
You don't get anything from the other side.
And they banned RT and they banned.
They have a very concerted campaign to cut off what they call Russian disinformation is perhaps the best information we can get from what's really going on.
And frankly, I don't have all the details.
I do hear the other side because I read alternate media, which is to say what's available on the internet.
They're not going to be able to kill off all that because there are a lot of American journalists who are aware of this and writing about it.
There are people who actually been in Donbass and can tell you that from 2014 to now, Donbass has been victimized by the Ukrainian army and especially by the Nazi, the neo-Nazi gangs.
They're the ones who've been dropping the artillery, killing people.
It's been a bloody, it's hard.
There's estimated 16,000 dead, most of them on the Russian side, most of them Donbass people.
Okay?
And that is never dealt with.
You don't hear about it in the U.S. media.
Can you pull up Donbass on the map?
By the way, a lot of them have immigrated, because of the bombings, they immigrated to Russia across the border.
And you don't hear about that.
You'll hear about refugees only going to the other side from this war.
I don't think it's an ⁇ listen, I don't know what Putin had.
Putin was squeezed.
He was provoked into this thing.
And that's the truth.
The United States has using Ukraine as a proxy to put pressure.
The U.S. doesn't care about Ukraine.
They care about Russia.
This is a chance to destabilize Russia, remove the leader, regime change once again, on a big way.
This is a big victory for them if they can pull it off.
And this was always the gold from the beginning.
I don't think there's any concern about the Ukrainian people except as a sentimental thing in the newspapers.
Well, this person was killed, that person was killed.
But what about the people who were killed on the other side?
They never mentioned them for five, six years.
No, more than that, eight years.
Those people were killed, too.
Families were killed.
You know, it's crazy what you're saying.
So let me give you a different perspective from my life.
So when I lived in Iran, if you turn on the news in Iran, we have two channels.
Every president in Iran and the U.S. was the enemy.
You heard Death Upon America.
You heard about how big of an enemy everybody was, except for people in Iran.
So we were naive.
We thought Khomeini was the greatest thing since lice bread.
We thought Khomeini, Imam Khomeini, these guys were all right and the Shah was horrible.
The Shah was a horrible person in Iran.
I mean, if you said anything good about the Shah in Iran, you're a bad person, right?
So then you come to we go live in Germany and you watch Satan's in Germany.
Satanes is like their NBC, let's just say, right?
You're watching Satan and you're saying who they paint as being a bad person, right?
And they're painting the picture of who's what, right?
Then you come to the States, you turn on the news and you hear who the enemy is right here.
You know, and then eventually you got to get to a point that either you're going to follow the masses.
And if they're believing what they're believing, you've got to question some of it, right?
So U.S., Carter, what they did, which was seems like a very interesting strategy that they're currently using here as well.
This is a very easy playbook to use.
Is they used Khomeini, who was in France, a way to get the Shah to be out.
So Carter goes to Iran, has a nice little dinner with the Shah December 31st, 77.
They do a toast, gives a toast, leaves.
Revolution happens right off the bat.
I'm born in 78, October 18th.
Kissinger keeps saying, we're going to help you, we're going to help you, we're going to help you, we're going to help you.
Then the last thing they tell him is, we'll help to take you out.
And he leaves, you know, in January, February something 2nd, Khomeini takes over, and then Iran, right away, there's a war between Iraq now.
U.S. doesn't get, and there's, so we do, we do get involved.
We do get involved.
But the point, and then who makes money?
The military-industrial complex, you know, all these Raytheon Northrop Grumman.
But the point is that there is rarely a way to know the whole story.
You just said something right now that the audience is going to sit there and say, wait, U.S. is using Ukraine as a proxy to get to Putin, to remove him, because now the whole world hates that guy.
They want to move him.
Okay.
What was your experience like when you did your interview with Putin?
Yeah, I'll tell you in a second, but just to make one more point about Iran, to me, the whole thing devolves back to 1953 when they got the CIA and British intelligence got rid of Mossadegh.
He was the democratic choice for prime minister.
He was very popular among most people in Iran, and he would have won and he would have kept going.
And he nationalized, after a lot of provocation, he nationalized the oil interests, the British oil interests, particularly in Iran.
That was the signal to get rid of him.
So they used CIA very heavily involved.
They paid money to mobs to storm the streets, to create all these distractions, like they did at Maidan, to bring chaos to the country.
And then in the chaos, he was called a communist again.
He was not a communist because of the two-day party.
He did have contacts, but he was not a communist.
He was more like a Bernie Sanders.
He was more of a socialist.
He was not a communist.
He was a great man.
He was a great man.
He was just.
He was just too trusting.
He trusted too much.
They got rid of him.
They didn't kill him, but they lived in like a little bit of a trend.
They removed him.
And they put the Shah in again.
They'd done that before.
And the Shah, of course, became more and more of a tyrant and a lot of torture.
I went to the prison there.
I saw all the stories of the torture.
They're very famous in Iran.
A lot of people were scared to open their mouths under the Shah.
And of course, Khomeini comes in.
He was not the people's choice.
He was definitely a counter.
He was, because of the extremism of the Shah, you get another extreme reaction to that.
That always happens in history.
It's very rarely can a moderate emerge in this world.
Khomeini was extreme.
And whatever, you know the rest of the story.
However, Khomeini did have a lot of provocation.
On the Iran-Iraq side of the war, we supported Iraq at first.
We gave them weapons.
And then when Reagan wanted help with the Contras in Latin America to defeat the Nicaraguan communists, he gave weapons to Iran, which is to Khomeini's regime.
This is amazing.
This is 1983, 82, right?
Brought up the carbon.
It's a dirty story.
I mean, Reagan was basically had done something that the worst American, I mean, it's an actor, a traitor.
I mean, you're supporting the supposed enemy.
Nixon in Watergate never did anything close to what Reagan did.
Reagan got away with it because he was popular in a sense.
He had that smile.
He's a good performer.
Contragate is one of the most undiscovered scandals in American history.
Contragate, if you should really read up on it.
It's a very important scandal.
And it comes unglued.
And Reagan, in the last two years of his life, his presidency was unable to keep his agenda going.
In fact, we would have been in a war in Nicaragua.
He would have sent troops to Nicaragua.
I was down in that region because I was visiting it to make Salvador, one of my first movies.
I was in that region.
I saw all the troops in Honduras.
I saw the troops in El Salvador.
There was an operation about to happen.
And thank God Iran contragate was blown.
Among them was Robert Perry, who blew the story.
Changed the direction of the country briefly.
All these stories.
We heard about this from Oliver North.
He was in all the hearings, looking as a very statesmanlike colonel.
That was the portrayal, right?
Oliver North was one of the malefactors.
Yes, he was one of Reagan's men.
But it goes back to Reagan.
He got away with it.
North took a fall.
How many people resigned in Iran Contragate?
About six people.
McFarland, there was a whole bunch of people who resigned.
I forgot exactly who.
Reagan, he basically skated out of there two years later.
By the way, all these stories that you're bringing up, which are...
And so did George H.W. Bush.
Bush was definitely involved in negotiations with the Iranians.
He got out too.
I mean, this whole thing was buried.
And you have to point to the Washington media here.
I'm sorry, but I'm just going to finish the story.
But Washington Post plays a huge role here.
Catherine Graham, who was the famous star, Meryl Street played her in the Post, Miss Hero of America, all that kind of stuff, she buried the story.
She did not believe after Watergate, the Post had been involved in Watergate.
She said, I don't think America can take a second shock like this.
So she killed it.
Killed the story.
There was no coverage.
I was just going to say that all these stories that you're bringing up, which are not easy on the ears if you're obviously pro-American, the one visualization that I'm having is the whole scene from Trump's interview in 2016 where he famously says, oh, you think we're that innocent too?
What was the one thing that he said?
Oh, you said that.
The one thing that we don't have?
It's the one honest thing that Trump says you said?
Possibly.
But it's true.
I mean, essentially, you're going inside the underbelly of America, the CIA, and what's happening in the Oval Office and these secret conversations.
And you're shining a light on them.
And it's not so pretty.
Even if you love America, it's hard to digest.
I love America, and I can take the dirt.
I think that's what we have to do.
We have to be truthful, and we can be better people.
And we can treat other people with respect and understand our limitations as well.
Why do we have to be top dog is a big question.
Well, that's American exceptionalism, right?
I mean, that's the concept of capitalism.
There's competition.
That's in the core DNA that we have here.
This is why America has 40 million immigrants, that they want to come here and have an equal opportunity to compete in the marketplace.
And if you can, you can build a great life for yourself.
But you can't have a capitalistic society and then ask people, why are we so competitive to be number one?
Like if you play for the Yankees, the Yankees don't start the season saying, guys, listen, let's just play the game.
Forget about going to play.
Who cares about the playoffs?
Let's just play the game.
That's not Yankees' nature.
Yankees are starting a season to say, let's crush everybody and win the World Series.
That's the other thing.
I just tried to do that.
The Dijus tried to do that.
The Yankees, a lot of these guys.
But go into Putin.
Go into Putin.
So, you know, my mother's side, they're from Russia.
Okay, so their Bible was Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.
So they're from the Stalin-Lenin era.
They escaped Baku, Azerbaijan, Armenia.
They came to Pandar Pahlavi, which is right on Caspian Sea, North Iran, and it's a few hours away from Tehran.
And we heard stories, you know, about who Lenin was, who Stalin was, who these guys were, et cetera, et cetera.
And then here in America, if you drop the name Putin to the average person, and let's just say David goes on the streets as a man on the street in New York, or he does in Miami.
If you ask 100 people who's Putin, they're going to say what?
Dictator, he's this, he's that, he's a murderer.
He's going to say all this stuff about him, right?
Now, you have actually interviewed with him.
I don't know how many hours you guys were together.
It was a project that took quite a while to do.
And four of these interviews were launched.
So who is Putin to you, having spent one-on-one time with him?
How different is it than what we see on TV, how he's portrayed?
You probably don't want to hear it, but he's a son of Russia in the sense that he has Russian interests are foremost in his mind, as would any leader in any country, whether it's the Philippines or Taiwan or this or that.
I mean, he cares about his country and he serves it.
And that's why he's there, because people feel that he's there.
And they talk about he's a tyrant, but he wouldn't stay in office in Russia, the Russia that I know.
And many people would agree with this.
If he was a monster, which is pictured in the West, he'd be out of office because he wouldn't work.
They have this indirect democracy, so to speak.
The people are not happy, things are bad, the guy is out.
And that's what happened to a few leaders.
So on that point, you know, I went at it without preconceptions, like we talked about earlier.
I'd heard all the stories.
And of course, I spoke to people who told me other things.
Among them was Stephen Cohn, who I became very friendly with.
Cohn was, I think, the leading Sovietologist in our country.
He studied Russia.
He gave me point by point all the descriptions of these murders and who possibly did them.
But certainly it would be ridiculous for Putin to have done them because the motive would have come right back on him.
He would have been, I mean, it's beyond, the narrative is so poorly constructed against him by the CIA, and it's been a narrative there for, what is it, 20 years now.
20 years of lying and blaming everything on Russia.
You have to be a little bit more fair-minded.
You have to be open to say that, is it possible that Russia has done all this and we're the good guys?
It's like a good versus bad scenario.
It feels like a John Wayne movie.
It's not.
We're not John Wayne.
We have been trying to destabilize Russia since 1917, actually.
We sent an army there in 1918, 19 with the 16 other armies to take apart the revolution.
This great Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, sent the army.
Then again, we didn't recognize Russia until Roosevelt recognized Russia in 1933.
Roosevelt is the one who tried, and he reached out to Stalin, and he met with him.
He met with him, and he liked him.
And he said, Uncle Joe, they had fun together.
They laughed.
They met in Iran.
They got along.
And Roosevelt had a plan, if he had lived after April 1945, to bring Russia into this Grand Alliance that he wanted.
He saw UN, Grand Alliance.
It was a very strong, good picture of the world.
England would be U.S., China, Russia.
It was a tragedy.
He died in April.
Because Truman came in and he reversed the policy.
It was like Johnson after Kennedy.
He reversed the policy with Russia right away.
Right away.
They had a horrible meeting.
Stalin felt that the opening was over.
And of course, Stalin is not.
I'm not saying he was a tyrant.
That was a tyrant.
And he was a murderer.
And he killed people.
But that doesn't change the effort that Russia made in World War II and the sacrifice they made and how they helped us too.
So you have to balance the good and the bad.
The people who hate Russia, of course, point to Stalin as the most evil man of all time, worse than Hitler.
So they make a whole scenario about him, but they ignore what the Russians' contribution was to World War II.
And Stalin, frankly, held that country together at that time.
He was a tough guy.
But you have to make, sometimes you have to lie in bed with people like that to get what you need.
And America has to be realistic about it.
It can't be a child about comic book heroes.
So anyway, Putin is, listen, I spent, I'm limited, I spent four trips, maybe 30 hours with a man.
And the result, you should see it.
I hope you see it.
It's called the Putin interviews.
It's four hours long, four hours long.
It was on Showtime.
It still is.
And it's available through other channels too.
You can get it probably on Amazon.
You can rent it or you can buy it.
He answers these questions that we're dealing with today.
Ukraine, foremost in his mind at that point.
This was 2000, right after 14, this was 16 area.
And he tells me the whole story from his point of view, even down to who's firing who.
Who are the people who are firing shots at Medan?
It's not pro-Russian forces because they're firing from buildings occupied by the protesters.
It's people who are snipers who are firing at the crowd, killing both policemen and protesters.
That's the whole point.
It was like the same thing that happened in Venezuela back around that time.
That's a CIA technique.
Color revolution, then you have the violence.
The violence breaks out.
Somebody's killing somebody, but you kill from both sides.
You create this disturbance.
And they killed a lot of cops.
They killed protesters.
And that kicked off.
So who did it?
Who was firing from those buildings?
There was lots of stories about the neo-Nazi gangs that were coming into Kiev from the west of Ukraine.
It's most likely them.
It probably was them.
It may have been some foreign mercenaries, too.
So there was all that violence is what creates that mood for change.
So they throw the president out illegally.
They don't have an election.
We install this guy, the one other victor, whoever he was, Victoria Nuland is there from the State Department.
She's the leader of the neocon faction and the American ambassador.
We got the recordings.
They're talking about getting rid.
And she even says, fuck the EU, because the EU wants to do it more legally.
Frankly, France and Switzerland were playing a role here.
And Germany were playing a very important role in trying to make this a transition that was democratic.
Because they were going to have an earlier election.
It didn't happen because of the violence.
The Nazis have much more power in Ukraine than you think.
The United States denies it because they say Zelensky's a Jew, and that's their motivation for saying, well, how can they be neo-Nazi?
That's nonsense.
Neo-Nazis were there way before Zelensky and Zelensky had no power.
In fact, when he became president, he had to make a deal with them.
He had to make a deal with them because they're tough people.
They are telling the president what to do.
You cannot change the Ukraine policies.
You have the United States telling you what to do, and you have the neo-Nazis telling you what to do.
And it's disgusting that the United States condones, doesn't mention them, doesn't talk about them, but basically condones what the Nazis, the neo-Nazis are doing in Ukraine.
That's what's sick.
Really sick.
So when you talk about all that, Putin is talking about that.
He talks about Ukraine and he talks a lot about NATO.
This was back then.
He saw, for him, it's you're putting my back against the wall.
You're pushing me.
You're strangling me.
We're surrounding them.
We made the Baltics very aggressive towards them.
Sweden, Finland, Poland has been, we put anti-ballistic missiles in Poland.
That's horrible.
And Romania.
And these missiles can be adapted to an offensive weaponry.
And in five minutes could be in Moscow.
You see, from their point of view, they feel the squeeze.
You put his back up against the wall, what are you doing?
You're going to create a state either where he's going to go to war and he's going to fight back, and he's got the nuclear weapons to do so.
They're crude weapons, but they're very big, strong weapons, hypersonic missiles.
We have very refined weapons.
We have great weapons too, but who wouldn't want to be there in that war?
It's not a war that makes any sense for the world.
And we're pushing him to the wall.
Either that or else we'll get what we want, which is regime change.
Bring in some guy like Yeltsin was in 1990 who'd work with us, basically cannibalize the country and allow their resources to be exploited.
It's interesting what you're saying, Oliver, because one of the techniques that was deployed at the fall of the Berlin Wall, remember, was Reagan putting the Pershing missiles in Germany.
And it really freaked out Gorbachev.
Oh, yeah.
And they went to Iceland, and Gorbachev said, what do you want me to do?
And Reagan said, you should have said yes.
And so looking back to the lens, is this kind of the, you think what I'm hearing is you see a playbook here.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Never changed.
The neoconservatives have kept this playbook alive.
If you remember the project for the new American Century, that was the plan to attack all these countries and clean out the Middle East, first of all.
It was a husband of Victoria Newland, Kagan, Robert Kagan, who was one of the project founders.
You can go up to Robert Kagan and you can go to Victoria Newland on your board there.
These are the villains.
These are the Foster Dulles and Alan Westerns of the modern era.
Her and her husband.
Yeah, she's a beauty.
She's a beauty.
No, when I see a fair like that, it makes me really.
And I voted for Biden because I thought, you know, Uncle Joe, he mellowed.
You know, he can't be as bad as he used to be when he was for every war America was in.
Remember, he was like, he was a Cold Warrior.
He's never, but he never changed.
He should be curbing these people instead of appointing them to.
She comes from the Hillary Clinton period.
He's inherited that, and he let her become Under Secretary of State for that region.
And that is a huge mistake, huge mistake.
But show me Kagan, her husband.
I wonder what their days are like and what their dinners are like.
Well, you're describing some very strange bedfellows.
And what's interesting, you were talking about, you know, it's an easy connection, one that I've heard, and it seemed very logical, about Eisenhower's prophecy about the military-industrial complex in his departing addresses.
He brought it up more than once.
Apparently, Kennedy took that very, very seriously or already had predilection in that direction.
But then you're talking about the intelligence, the intelligence community, and the ability to get the go-ahead.
Isn't it interesting that Alan Dulles ends up on the Warren Commission?
I think you could answer that for yourself.
It's like the fox is investigating the chicken coop.
Yeah, it's not really a question.
It was kind of a reflective thing.
Alan Dulles did everything in his power.
First of all, he didn't have a job.
So he was available to come in for every session.
None of the other members of the commission were able to do that.
Dulles supervised, followed that thing.
Everything from the CIA was blocked of importance.
Nothing got through.
The biggest crime of all was that he didn't even bother to tell his fellow commissioners that we had tried to assassinate Castro.
Didn't tell them.
So they didn't even know about our assassination programs when they started this commission.
So where are they going to go?
They're in the dark.
But they had an agenda anyway.
It was going to be straightjacket was J. Edgar Hoover said three bullets, six seconds, a crazy assassin, a communist type.
And that was it.
It was closed.
That was over.
There was no investigation beyond that.
Everything had to fit that scenario.
Can I revisit one thing you just said a second ago?
I don't want to gloss over it because, I mean, listening to you, I'm being educated beyond, but you said that you voted for Biden.
And I assume you didn't do that lightly.
Okay, well, that's what I wanted to ask you, is that why do you feel like your back was against the wall?
Like, if you didn't have a choice, to put it in Putin terms.
And then what did you expect from him?
And what grade would you, I guess, give him now?
You know, I'm a sucker for believing, I'm an optimist, and I believe that he reached a certain age, 78, that he's a little more mature and that he sees the bigger picture.
And in this case, Ukraine, he's making a big mistake.
A big mistake.
Oh, he thinks he's off the hook.
He looks like the good guy now with all this anti-Russian thing.
But when we get to a deeper place, which is where it's going to go, and this thing gets harder and harder for Americans, and they might be, we're not past any war yet.
The war could expand.
Certainly Zelensky would like the war to expand because he would sacrifice the world in order to save Ukraine.
He doesn't care about us, doesn't care about, he sees this whole thing as a crusade, as a jihad.
Biden has given him the go-ahead to do this.
Biden's the one who should be calming this situation down.
He should be speaking to Putin, speaking to Zelensky, calming it down, being a statesman instead of an ideologue.
This is a time for a Kennedy.
This is a time, that's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev.
This is a time for statesmen, a statesman, you know, like Charles de Gaulle, somebody who really has a picture of the world.
I was hoping Macron of France could have some effect, but you can't get through the Ukrainian-U.S. connection.
That's the problem.
But beyond Ukraine, I mean, what's happening there?
There's no beyond Ukraine right now because it's stuck there.
There's a disconnect.
The Americans see Russia as an evil, and they don't understand the Russian position, which is crazy.
Why can't a statesman understand what Russia is thinking?
Putin is fighting for his life.
You can get rid of him, but whoever takes his place will probably be tougher because they know that they're up against it.
Okay, let them give up.
Let's say, okay, give up.
So what do you do if you want to give up?
All right.
Then you put your, put your, put NATO into Ukraine, put missiles into Ukraine.
Fine.
You can put them right on our border.
We'll take all the refugees you can give us.
And there'll be another confrontation when you make your next move.
And one of the things you often hear, though, is, well, this would be different under Trump.
Nothing happened with Ukraine and Russia under Trump.
That's not true.
That's not true at all.
Trump, on the contrary, is a very strange guy.
He was making sounds about Putin when he came in, and I was hoping that there'd be some détente.
But as he got more and more pressure for his Russiagate, which was a joke, but it was a serious, serious accusation.
That was, of course, political, too.
Putting pressure on Trump, not allowing him to get anything done with this pressure from Russia gate for, what, two years?
That was insane that he was a Russian agent, all that stuff.
No one, I mean, if you were thinking, it was so ridiculous.
And I asked Putin about that, too, and Putin practically laughed.
He knows that it's not possible.
But they pictured Trump as a tool, as a Manchurian candidate or something.
As a result, he became very anti-Russian, too, in the sense that he was passed every single sanction against Russia that was asked, put onto him by Congress.
Check his record on Russia.
He did everything they wanted.
And then recently, I saw yesterday or two days ago one of his comments, which was insane.
He said he's not a coward like Biden.
Something like Biden is a weakling, something like that, implying that he would be much tougher, which means what?
War?
Nuclear war, to my mind.
Last thing before we wrap up here.
So you said that the right thing to do right now for Biden is to be a statesman.
To be a statesman.
Right thing for him to do right now is to be a statesman, reach out to Putin, have a meeting with him, sit down, have that conversation.
Well, he also has to take the, he has to deal with the Ukrainian, and he has to deal with the neo-Nazi issue.
He's got to deal with the Ukraine administration, the way that country is run.
I think obviously if we could reach a deal where they could split East and West, but it's very hard to do that.
Yeah, that's not going to be easy to do, though.
I don't think that's the direction it's going to go.
You saw they made him an offer, and Zelensky turned it down.
But he promised them that he's going to cool off the negotiation with NATO, and he's kind of backing out from getting closer to NATO.
It seems like, you know, who is Putin most annoyed and upset with for him to get to this point?
Is he seeing it, from your opinion, as being opportunistic, saying, I'd rather do it under Biden because of how they handled Afghanistan and the Taliban got what they wanted rather than Trump?
Is it more purely he's just being opportunistic or did somebody do something with a proxy, NATO, Biden, U.S., somebody pissed him off to say, this is the time to go attack?
He didn't get pissed off.
No, he just, he doesn't get pissed off.
What struck me about him over these years that I met him was how cool he was, how rational.
He's a chess player.
He looks at politics as without emotion, and that's, I think, one of his...
Powerful.
You know, you talk about him as if he's some villain in the West, but the truth is if you go to Africa and you go to the Middle East and parts of Asia, you'd be surprised that he's admired as one of the best statesmen of this era.
But unfortunately, we've put him in this.
It's a disconnect between America and partly because of our propaganda.
It's very powerful.
I'm surprised by the EU's tough, I mean, basically, you understand Biden made this move using Ukraine, but it helps him with EU and NATO.
It makes their dependence on the United States even tighter.
And he was worried about losing their control of the EU sector because they're economically much more involved with Russia and China than we would like.
What's the worst thing?
Last question.
What's the worst thing Putin is capable of doing?
The worst thing?
Yes, the worst thing he's capable of doing if we keep playing the strategy that we're doing.
There's no hope down that road.
So if we put more pressure and more pressure, which is what happened recently, he's going to fight back.
And will he blow up the world?
My God.
Is he supposed to sacrifice Russia to the world?
Perhaps that's the ultimate question, right?
Are you willing to become leave office, whatever, be shamed?
Would you be willing to let Russia become open to NATO or whatever you want to say?
Something like that.
But that would be a complete capitulation, wouldn't it?
And that would be the end of the...
The Russians are very proud people.
The ones that I saw, they're very proud.
Their country is, I said he's a son of Russia.
He's not a communist.
He's not an evil bench.
He's a son of Russia.
He's very lower class, came from a poor family.
His parents were in the war.
I mean, the whole story, it's just a 90s.
He's not a KGB agent.
That's another ridiculous thing.
You hear that.
George Bush was in the CIA, but we don't say he was a CIA agent.
But that's an American denigration.
As if he's still thinking like a KGB agent out of James Bond and he wants to kill people.
It's childish.
He's a Russian patriot.
And if we see him that way, you can start to deal with him.
But there's so Russia phobia in this country.
It's, as I say, going back to 1918, I wish you need a statesman.
You need American statesmen.
Who's the last one, Kennedy?
Do we have a current one right now?
Gorbachev is still alive.
I wish he'd come out of, he's old.
I met him a few times.
I like Gorbachev, but I don't think the American side would even deal with him.
I mean, they wouldn't understand what his contribution has been to the world.
I thought 1986 was going to be a new era when he came in.
Who was Gorbachev?
He came out of nowhere to me.
And it was a beautiful moment in time.
Have you thought about reaching out to him and having an interview with him?
I mean, he knows what's going on.
I mean, would the Americans accept him as an arbitrator here?
Can you pull up a picture of him right now, Mikhail Gorbachev?
If you had George Schultz and Gorbachev, if George was still alive, they would be the perfect older men.
Is there anyone in America right now that is a perfect statesman that could maybe step up?
It's not going to be Biden, according to you.
Yeah, maybe Obama.
Nick Obama.
Maybe.
Although he's, you know, he's so aware of the popular will that would he bucket.
So we're coming to the end of the interview, and I got to tell you, this last however long we've been together felt like five minutes.
What makes you very interesting is the following.
So someone's listening to you.
The audience is like, oh, you know, he just took a liberal Lyndon Johnson.
He says he's a bad guy.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
He said Kennedy is no, no, Reagan's bad.
No, but Hillary Clinton, he threw her under.
But he says Obama's good, but maybe Obama's not, but then maybe, you know, Biden, but the beautiful thing about this is the fact that somebody cannot put you in any box.
So nobody can say he's just a conservative, he's a Republican, he's a Democrat, he's an independent.
No, you went all over the place.
So I hope the audience is being very fair.
And folks, this is what I would suggest to you.
Share this with others and watch it with your family.
Sit down and watch this with your family and say, what do you think about what he has to say with the amount of experience he has?
Outside of that, I got two other things I want to challenge you to do.
Number one, Ukraine on Fire officially was taken off of YouTube, I think, two days ago.
It was taken off of YouTube.
You can watch it on other platforms.
Go watch that.
And then number two is go buy his book that's out the story of the light, the story of Oliver Stone.
Go get that as well.
And then outside of that, man, this was a treat.
I got to tell you, this was such a treat having you on here.
Thank you so much.
Revisited.
For sure.
I'm posting all of that, but go watch all of that.
Oliver Stone, thank you for coming out.
JL, it's been fun talking to you, and thank you for your open mind.
