PBD Podcast - Legendary Film Maker: Oliver Stone | PBD Podcast | EP 133

Starting point is 00:00:27 Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw I think we may be. First thing. Okay. Sounds good. Adam, Tom, Patrick, and a special guest today. You know the word when people drop the word legendary. And I'll be, oh, he's such a legend Yeah, then we drop 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 guest today Oliver's doing Ods odds are you have seen you've seen

Starting point is 00:00:58 Probably a handful of his work. Let me kind of walk through a couple of them and 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 You're the dragon Pertune 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 writer, director, producer. Let me continue. Natural born killers, writer and director Nixon, writer, director, producer, Aveda. Any given Sunday, Alexander, do you want me to keep going?

Starting point is 00:01:34 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 the interview was 57, 58 minutes each with Putin that came out with Showtime viewers. 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's got the right credibility to say this. She says this maybe one of the best books she's ever read. If we can put this up up there as well,

Starting point is 00:02:06 so everybody can see it. It's called Chasing the Light, Writing, Directing, Surviving, Patoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and a movie game. Oliver Stone, Chase and the Light. Let's put the link below for people to order. As well, having said that,

Starting point is 00:02:21 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 documentary, big one with Hugo Chavez. Oh, I forgot that one.

Starting point is 00:02:34 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 of Vietnam, you didn't. I think you were a schoolteacher in Saigon. I want to say if I'm saying it correctly, you know, you're 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, you're later, you dropped that. I mean, you know, you have a very rich life.

Starting point is 00:03:08 You know, we sometimes see the final product, but the coming up to it is what's really interesting. Do you mind taking a moment in sharing with the audience before Oliver Stone became Oliver Stone that we know about? Who was Oliver Stone? that we know about. Who was Oliver Stump? A conforming scared young student in school, didn't want to get into trouble, went to boarding school, tried to behave. The wild streak was for 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 was an only child. So you have to figure it out step by step, as you know.

Starting point is 00:03:48 It's not, 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. So beautiful together, my father was, I thought he was rich, he was on Wall Street,

Starting point is 00:04:14 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 a hucker, she was on a bicycle, and he stopped her. Thank you for clarifying that, Mr. Stone.

Starting point is 00:04:33 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. 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 socio-economic drift of the of the college was towards Wall Street, towards capitalism, towards competitiveness. It was not an added, you know, put it this way, in my class at Yale was George Bush, okay?

Starting point is 00:05:14 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 and many people and also in at Yale so there were no women at that point either it was I dropped out I dropped out and what to teach as you say in Saigon in Chowlawn actually to Chinese Vietnamese Chinese students huge classes I taught for two semesters and Chinese students, huge classes I taught for two semesters, and it was fascinating experience to be there and living in the back alleys and getting used to a

Starting point is 00:05:50 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 went on I joined I always wanted to go to see so I joined the as a w a wiper, they allowed me to go, not as a union, because you can get a card when they, when the ships were going over to Saigon, they were losing the cruise, because the guys were jumping cruise to make money in Saigon. There was a lot of money to be made in combat zones. So people were jumping ship, and I, I sailed back on the an empty ship to Kuzme Argon. And then I re-enrolled out to Yale for my sophomore year, dropped out a second time. So one time was in a

Starting point is 00:06:36 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. Martin's. And it's a 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, you know, the divorce is before the war.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Right. The divorce was six years ago. So let's say it was a divorce alienation. Yeah, it was a 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,

Starting point is 00:07:42 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 die. I thought, when I got there, of course, after infantry training, I got pretty, I got put into the 25th infantry in September 67, so it was right as the war was getting

Starting point is 00:08:12 into its hottest point. And I served in three different units. I ended up at the first cavalry because I got wounded twice in the 25th. I went through all this stuff in Sassai-Gon, then I went up to Anke, and then I moved on to Camp Evans in Quang Treet Province. So I had quite a bit of experience there. And so I saw a fair share of combat and came back to the states

Starting point is 00:08:39 as disillusioned, I suppose, very disillusioned. I realized I wanted to live because I didn't want to, I didn't, I saw a lot of death and I didn't want to die. You said something earlier to me before we talked about the, when I said something about Vietnam, I came back dead and 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 know, our society was not geared to war. Our society, people were not enlisting

Starting point is 00:09:15 or volunteering by any means. Most people were avoiding it. In my class at Yale and at Yale 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.

Starting point is 00:09:40 And I had, there were many good people there. And at the same time, I got to know our black population pretty, 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

Starting point is 00:10:00 and keeps you, it keeps you human. And I've discovered soul music. And it was just a good relationship. Whereas some other people have problems over there. They, they, you can let ward, you can let ward finish you off. It makes you very callous, very callous. There was a racist war in the sense that yeah, many of us mistreated the Vietnamese didn't

Starting point is 00:10:26 look, didn't respect him at all. The soldiers, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. So, 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.

Starting point is 00:10:43 No, this is, I wrote a book about it. It's called Chasing the Light. And I, about my first 40 years, and I, I told that story because Vietnam plays a huge role in America's destiny, which is where I'm going to go to in the, in my lifetime. My father being a Republican, being pro Vietnam at one point. Very much, even intelligent man. He wasn't, he was an economist,

Starting point is 00:11:06 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,

Starting point is 00:11:31 because he didn't really respect to Vietnam. He, 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 screwed smoking long haired hippie type coming back from this war. But I wasn't a hippie. I was just screwed up veteran, you know.

Starting point is 00:11:50 So after a long period of drugs and just said, now I ended up back at NYU on the GI Bill, which is where I went to film school. And because what else, you know, 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. That was one, that was where my skills. So I went to school for two years. Marty Scorsese was the youngest teacher there. I had him in a class and he was very, very, he moved me.

Starting point is 00:12:24 All the teachers were very good school was very sharp Learned a lot Wait how much how much for you want me to go? No, keep I'm actually very interested. Please continue I'm actually very interested Mark's car says it was your teacher at NYU. You were saying Marty was it yeah, he was young I want to know to the point of first movie like 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, yeah, well that's a few years ahead. I had to go through a lot of, a lot of rejection from film school.

Starting point is 00:13:00 I mean, you come out of film school, I was driving, I drove a taxi in New York. Because that was, there was, 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.

Starting point is 00:13:21 And I was writing. I kept writing. Remember I written the novel, so I kept writing screenplays. My first screenplay is 69. And it's crazy. It reads crazy. But it's part of the development of a writer. You have to go through all these. I wrote 8, 9, 10, maybe 11 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.

Starting point is 00:13:54 I had married a Lebanese woman who was very beautiful and had a job at the UN. So I was, she was helping me. I was living in her apartment. We were married. Well, 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.

Starting point is 00:14:25 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, a higher job to work on Midnight Express, which was a book, a big, a hustling young producer, Peter Goober at Columbia, wanted to make this movie and of course the story was fascinating about a boy, American boy from Long Island, he was busted in Turkey and for hash, went to jail for, it 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 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 sentenced for 30 years.

Starting point is 00:15:08 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 rift raft, you lived pretty badly. So you can imagine the contrast. Anyway, the movie came out, and it was a gigantic hit. It was 1978, 1979.

Starting point is 00:15:35 And I got into Academy Award. That was the most shocking thing. Crazy. Yeah. With the weight to get. You know what makes you interesting? You know, sometimes we're uncomfortable to tell our story. It's like, look, it's not that big of a deal.

Starting point is 00:15:47 It's my life where 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

Starting point is 00:16:16 and explain the scene better because they can go there, right? So background, that Republican economist conservative, then he loses that divorce you can draw from what it is to be a father Republican conservative, then you experience a kid divorce 16 years old heartbroken, what it is to have that take place mom French, so you learn the history of French because mom's gonna 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 so you have a little bit of that experience from the military, you go to see exactly what's going on

Starting point is 00:16:48 and 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 watch Platoon when I was in the army, then your time at 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

Starting point is 00:17:03 and you can't, and how that privilege life is like then being a teacher, your compassion for the African American black community and then coming, I mean the amount of things you can draw from and you tell the story, we feel it. Meaning we be in 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

Starting point is 00:17:29 is the fact that, look, today we had a doctor here on and we're having a conversation with him. And I remember years ago when I got enamored by J.F. Kim, what happened with them? All of a sudden, I'm like, I got an interview. I watch your documentary, J.F.K. and obviously I've seen a movie. I've seen a lot of deaths.

Starting point is 00:17:42 But last time I watched your documentary, and Abraham Bolden, I remember when we interviewed him five years ago, or Clint Hill, or RFK, or, you know, Cyril Wekt, 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 is

Starting point is 00:18:10 It seems like you're the kind of guy that if you are looking at castor and nobody's saying stuff about castor Like like I don't know what you think you hate them. You love them. You can't stand them. You could care less about them I want to learn. That's what I wanted. I don't want to judge. I want to learn. Okay, you this Putin guy is a horrible person. Great. Okay. Let's say you're right. People from Russia, some of them love them, some of them hate them. I don't know. You know what? Okay, 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 and all this other stuff, I don't know, I wanna learn. I think the courage you have to go touch some of the subjects that the rest of the world is like,

Starting point is 00:18:48 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 anyone. I kind of wanna find out for myself. That takes a lot of courage to do what you've done.

Starting point is 00:19:04 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 them, but my dad was a Syrian. My mother was Armenian. So you've been, you're the ultimate, too. You're in a refugee from those situations. And you're in this country, which is a big open freeway in many ways and

Starting point is 00:19:27 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 the many people I'd like to meet, but the rigidity in the orthodoxy is what always closed you down. They always limit you constantly. All my life, my father at first, he certainly didn't approve of my thoughts about the war and this, and certainly I started the question economics. He was a big Franklin Roosevelt.

Starting point is 00:20:06 He was not, he was, he was there in the 1930s. He was there in the Depression. He despised Roosevelt. And I had that Muslim child, but 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.

Starting point is 00:20:25 I think it's very proud of it. It took five years to put that together with Peter Kosnick, a historian, who taught me, had me read the right books and think about American history. And 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, more apparent

Starting point is 00:20:46 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. Oh, had a much more deeper relationship with Africa, with Indonesia, with South America, and with Nasir in Egypt, then

Starting point is 00:21:05 we know. Oh, NASA was heartbroken when we were young. Yeah, but you know, there was a, he was working very effectively to reestablish American relations with these countries in Sukarno and Indonesia. So, you, and he was changing the policy in Vietnam. Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to, to get it done because Lyndon Johnson, who was supposed to be his transition, was when in a complete U-turn in a different direction.

Starting point is 00:21:29 Immediately. Which American historians do not admit. So here again, this is an interesting, we would 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 criticizedis on us 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 as your father that if you Eventually were like I don't know if my dad's right and I want to go figure out for myself like that is still with you at 75

Starting point is 00:22:00 Where today father may be the president or the government or the media or whatever you like Yeah, I 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 on what I'm here in Well, my mother has come plays a huge role here because my mother was a rebel And we haven't talked much about her. She was a She was a rebel part of that 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 has a commits adultery all the time, and the woman doesn't.

Starting point is 00:22:32 So she broke her, she made her own rules up, and she had fun. She was quite a liver. And he 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

Starting point is 00:22:44 to have opposites as parents. Wow. That 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 was, 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,

Starting point is 00:23:24 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?

Starting point is 00:23:40 Sure. Oh yeah. Was there anything specific that you say? Yeah, people, that's what life is. Like my mother, because of my father, became a Republican, she supported Reagan and all that. But she didn't, it was all, no, it's inside that she was a free spirit.

Starting point is 00:23:56 Got it. And totally. And frankly, John Kennedy, my father was skeptical about him, didn't prefer Nixon. And me too, at that point. It took me a long, you have to learn for yourself. That's what all point of life is. It's your path to learn.

Starting point is 00:24:13 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, pretty well. Idolize, demonize, humanize. You know, there's three topics I'd want to touch up on with you. One of them is obviously JFK, because again, I couldn't

Starting point is 00:24:46 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 of the topics before we wrap. But first one being JFK. This is just again selfishly for me. I can't stop reading enough content or studying this guy enough. You look at RFK said something very unique in the interview where he says in the documentary where he said, there is no man with there is more statues building streets named after him than Kenneth JFK.

Starting point is 00:25:18 Now I've seen Churchill maybe there are a couple other names maybe there, but Kenneth he being what he did. But why the level of interest in his story? What caused you to say, I really want to investigate the 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,

Starting point is 00:25:49 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.

Starting point is 00:26:04 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 or ideology in the world, that there's a Hitler out there and that we're all, and we're the defenders of freedom and democracy is a large, and we're the defenders of freedom and democracy,

Starting point is 00:26:25 is a large, is also a myth in the sense that we did not win World War II. We had the Russians, with 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.

Starting point is 00:26:44 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, by the time D-Day happened in 1944, and we landed in, it was a great big myth, but that was late in the war by 43, the war was turning, and early 44, because after Salangrad, the Russians had turned, and it was starting to chase the Germans out of Russia.

Starting point is 00:27:19 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'm 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

Starting point is 00:27:45 that Kennedy was doing. He cut off the 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 Dallas Brothers. That is without doubt. And we go into some length to make this point

Starting point is 00:28:02 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 the, on the, uh, uh, shout factory.

Starting point is 00:28:20 And it's also available on, you can rent it on, I think Amazon. Or, and no, you have to buy it actually It's a digital purchase because it just came out yesterday It's gonna be on Apple can I get it? I think I think I'll get that I'll pull in iTunes and there's two of them that one and the other one they did with the nation the 12 episodes I'll get I'll watch both of them. The 12 episodes is untold history. That was 2012 But that has some great stuff on World War II and the Cold War,

Starting point is 00:28:46 the Cold War. As well as up to the Iraq War, go to what you said. So he 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, Samuitable, Michael Franci's, Frank Kolata, then I went to Clint Hill who was the Secret Service agent to Jackie to see what he had to say.

Starting point is 00:29:10 And then I went to Abraham Bowden, who was a first black African-American Secret Service agent, and then I went to Cyril Weck, who was one of the, what do you call him, a person who, what do you call Cyril Weck? What's up, John? You're the first. Yeah, and then Jim, and all these things

Starting point is 00:29:23 I'm doing so colors. I went down the rabbit hole to find kind of a figure out. But for you, when you're by yourself and the whole thing is done here, you watch it, what are you thinking? Who do you think was afraid of revealing the truth about what happened with Kennedy? Is it C.I.? When you're attributing the truth? Yeah, when you see that these are huge changes.

Starting point is 00:29:41 These are huge changes in foreign and domestic policy. Except for civil rights. As you know Kennedy submitted the bill, civil rights act. And it was based on his momentum, beautiful speech. And based on the momentum of his death, Johnson finally got it passed. That was the beginning. 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

Starting point is 00:30:16 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 conflict, potentially conflict. To save this country from two wars is, to me, is as important as what the Russians did in World War II, because if they hadn't done what they had done, we would have American casualties, which were 450,000, might have well have been 2,3 million, more, just to get through the Hitler fortress that Hitler had built in Europe. So big deal,

Starting point is 00:31:02 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, to McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, 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. Mac than Merer was very clear about that in his book in retrospect.

Starting point is 00:31:49 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?

Starting point is 00:32:20 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. There's one, one fifth West, four fifth East, the role Russia play 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. You know, the baby boomer. They rated the parents of the baby boomers. They rated the parents of the baby boomers. They rated the streets of Norm, the shores of Normandy. And this is the epitome of American culture and exceptionalism.

Starting point is 00:32:52 And your father fought in this war. What kind of backlash do you get from your father or your father's, you know, constituency, his age from what you're saying about world war? You've got to do a very key question. Yeah. I think. Would you mind just pulling this closer to you? Because you can even move that.

Starting point is 00:33:07 I'm saying you can grab that. Like this? You're saying to move the micolid about your own. Yeah, just so you can hear. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 00:33:20 Thank you, Adam. But the concept of the greatest generation is mythology again. He 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, made also, I remember him using that that expression and wrote a book about it. Tom Brokow. Now Tom Brokow is a very nice light, very much

Starting point is 00:33:54 light 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.

Starting point is 00:34:24 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.

Starting point is 00:34:44 He was a heroic man, yes. But 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 then we can go into that, but not here. And he was made a giant, a lion of that generation. But he's not. He is a man who did his job in World War II. And it was a tough war, a no question about it. But a lot of those people, but he's not. He's not. He was a man who did his job in World War II,

Starting point is 00:35:05 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, we'll tell you another story completely, how filthy and dirty it was and how shhh. It was an obscenity. It's a podcast. It was not a pretty war. No one's proud of their service. No one they, 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?

Starting point is 00:35:44 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 sanitized, 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.

Starting point is 00:36:07 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 a quieter and let other countries have their power balance as 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,

Starting point is 00:36:43 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 were, 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 valet guy, X-Marine, Oswald X-Marine, was at the Japan base, he's at the Japan base, he trained in Japan. Another base there.

Starting point is 00:37:23 But in Japan, CIA Cuba training, same here, but in but in Japan. You see I a Cuba training same here He was at a six or seven story building almost identical to the building and then the entire time Well, this is going on and I'm talking to Jim Jenkins. I said Jim Let me ask you question who like 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 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.

Starting point is 00:37:51 So the story behind Lyndon Johnson being way more ambitious than John F. Kennedy. And it was so upset with the fact that these guys took office and behind closed door. So from your end, when you were doing the investigation, you 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 I feel like that documentary could have gone a little bit deeper on LBJ's motivation?

Starting point is 00:38:14 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, remember the documentary,

Starting point is 00:38:36 there's even a scene when he's talking to MacMario, 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's 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.

Starting point is 00:38:58 With Eisenhower, he started the process of supporting the French, paying for the French war. So Kennedy fell into the trapeze, 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

Starting point is 00:39:21 by the Cuban community after two, three years of this. He refused to fight send American troops into Cuba. Kennedy, unknow 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 presenting with is Eisenhower's SIOP-62, SIOP-62, to blow up the world. There is a plan that they were going to attack

Starting point is 00:39:54 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 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.

Starting point is 00:40:37 Can I read the study audience? We're going to single-interrogate our website. This is a United States General Plan for Nuclear War from 961223, gave the President of the United States a range of targeting options and described launch procedures and targets set against the nuclear weapons would be launched to plan and integrate the capabilities of nuclear tired. 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

Starting point is 00:41:06 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 on the world theory. 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, it's the hardest thing to do in the world.

Starting point is 00:41:38 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, 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, I'm going to destroy, I'd like to, I'd like to, I'd like to, I'd like to shatter the CIA and scatter it to the winds.

Starting point is 00:42:10 I forgot the exact quote, but he certainly made the effort. He fired Alan Dolas, who was ahead of the CIA, was a respected, revered figure from the 1950s under Eisenhower. His brother, John Foster, Dolas 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 Dolor's want. He want bringsmanship.

Starting point is 00:42:36 He believed in bringsmanship. And that's what we're 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.

Starting point is 00:43:04 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. I what is your opinion? I'm curious well on who my opinion is is based on what? What is your opinion? I'm curious. Well, my opinion is based on what's years of thinking about it. But frankly, Johnson was a weakling

Starting point is 00:43:30 compared to what we're dealing with here. Johnson was a 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 a more suspect. But he would have been very suspect if he had something that happened to Kennedy.

Starting point is 00:43:50 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 could really think work are the dullest 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,

Starting point is 00:44:15 you have to clean out the whole agency, as Haramman said that. You cannot leave those people in place. Richard Helms became the new traffic cop. 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 Agleton, who ran that program, putting American defectors into Russia for information.

Starting point is 00:44:47 We wanted land-based information. We had spy, we had YouTube flights and all that, but they wanted people on the ground. They sent over quite a few defectors. How 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.

Starting point is 00:45:10 The fingerprints of intelligence are all over Oswald. It's very clear from, if you watch these, even the two-hour will make that very clear. Yes. So if you have that intelligence, but even at that level, 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 this establishment. And that goes

Starting point is 00:45:37 to a high level. And that doesn't mean everybody, they're not sitting around at a conference room. It just means he has to have a conversation. Is it OK? 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 he's 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,

Starting point is 00:46:13 he fought the mob, he's going to come in 60 and 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. Copy 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 shaking like my father. They didn't want to see another renaissance of democratic rule, people's rule.

Starting point is 00:46:43 They don't believe in people's democracy. They don't believe the people should run the country. No, they want control. So that's the whole thing. The Eisenhower and Reagan are so anti-Rosevelt. 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,

Starting point is 00:47:04 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? Because I, so for me, I watched two documents. I watched Ukraine on fire. I watched Winter on fire. So Winter on fire was the one, Champin talks about it.

Starting point is 00:47:22 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 feeling we should. 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.

Starting point is 00:47:38 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 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 Step on the data did you know you know you know he was and how 80,000 Ukrainians Ukrainian soldiers represented and fought for Hitler and then they put him in jail and then you know

Starting point is 00:48:01 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 thing. There's anti-Setans here, yet, among other things, you should go back to World War II, and you should understand that there's a split in here, and 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.

Starting point is 00:48:31 The other half is anti-Russian, strongly so. Stephen Banderra and people like that were working with the Nazis. Many groups, 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 at it. 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 Az-Off battalion, the IDAR battalion, the right sector party,

Starting point is 00:49:17 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, yeah, there was a lot of students and a lot of honest people in my dad. 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.

Starting point is 00:49:50 He wanted to postpone it until he got a better deal, and that makes sense, too. When all this was happening in my dad, he even offered to have an earlier election. He offered it. He said, if you want to get rid of me, it's not democratic, but we'll go with an earlier election.

Starting point is 00:50:06 And they actually accepted it, but then these thugs who are operating behind the scenes at Medan, very organized, by the way, very organized. I think the CIA plays another role there because the 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 48. There was an operation by the CIA to drop these people into Ukraine to make trouble to start troubles for Russia.

Starting point is 00:50:39 It's an old story. There'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.

Starting point is 00:51:04 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 the, Russian Ukraine picked up these people. But we tried to destroy Russia.

Starting point is 00:51:23 As you're phone on by any chance? Do you know what? If your phone is on because someone's ring is going on. Oh, I'm doing this, you mean? And is your phone on? Do you have your phone with you? Maybe it's your phone going on because someone's phone is going off. I have it with me but I check to see if maybe it's going on. Okay. Just the ring tone.

Starting point is 00:51:38 No, it's nothing. It sounds good. So it's off. So, so so now if we watch TV today and we turn it on, you're seeing a Zelelenki that is standing and is looking pretty strong and tough and he's not reacting and the news is telling us that Russia's lost 5 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, nothing, no advancements really

Starting point is 00:52:09 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? We did, no, it's not me. The director was Igor Laptonic, who was 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 Zalensky there.

Starting point is 00:52:45 It's a very interesting documentary about the opposition candidate, Victor Medvedek, Medvichuk, Victor Medvedchuk, revealing Ukraine. That's it. Robert Perry was one of the great journalists in our country. It 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.

Starting point is 00:53:10 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 side. You don't get anything from the other side. And they banned RT and they banned, right? 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.

Starting point is 00:53:40 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 in from 2014 to now,

Starting point is 00:54:00 Donbass has been evictimized by the Ukrainian army. And especially by the Nazi, the neo-Nazi gangs. There are the ones who have been dropping the artillery, killing people. It's been a bloody, and 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 done. You don't hear about it

Starting point is 00:54:26 in the US media. Can you pull up Donbass on the map? And 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. They don't – 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.

Starting point is 00:55:06 There's 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, 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

Starting point is 00:55:35 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 in the US 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 Chomene was the greatest thing since light spread. We thought Chomene, Imam, Kamehne, these guys were all right. And the Shah was horrible.

Starting point is 00:55:59 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 satisns in Germany. Because satisns is like their NBC, let's just say, right? You're watching satisns. 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, and then eventually you got to get to point that i do you

Starting point is 00:56:27 gonna follow the masses and if they're believing what they believe we got a question some of it right so it you ask Carter what they did which was uh... seems like very interesting strategy that the currently using here as well this is a very easy playbook to use is they used chomeene who was in France a way to get the shot to be out.

Starting point is 00:56:48 So Carter goes to Iran has a nice little dinner with the shot December 31st, 77, they do a toast, gives a toast, leaves, revolution happens right off to about, I'm born in 70th October, 18th. Kissinger keeps saying we're gonna help you, we're gonna help you, we're gonna help you, we're gonna help you, then the last thing they tell him is well, how to take you out and he leaves You know in January February something second homani takes over and then Iran right away

Starting point is 00:57:13 There's a war between Iraq now us doesn't get and there's I so We do get you what we do get involved with the point and then who makes money the military industrial complex You know all these Raytheon North of Grumman. But the point is that there is, there is rarely a way to know the whole story. You just said something right now that the audience is going to sit down and say, wait, US is using Ukraine as a proxy to get to Putin to remove him because now the whole world hates that guy then want to move him. Okay. What was your experience like when you did your interview with Putin?

Starting point is 00:57:46 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 Mosodec. 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,

Starting point is 00:58:11 he nationalized the oil interests, the British oil interests, particularly in Iran. That was the signal to get rid of them. So they used a CIA very heavily involved. They paid money to mobs, to storm the streets, to create all these distractions, like they didn't make down, 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.

Starting point is 00:58:42 He was more like a Bernie Sanders. He was a socialist. He was a great man. He was a great man. He was just too trusting. He trusted too much. They got rid of him. They didn't kill him, but they lived in a little room. 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, that's you get another extreme reaction to that.

Starting point is 00:59:25 That always happens in history. It is rarely a kind of moderate emerge in this world. Khmene was extreme and whatever, you know, you know, the rest of the story. However, Khmene did have a lot of provocation. We went on the Iran-Iraq side of the war. We supported Iraq at first. We gave them weapons.

Starting point is 00:59:46 And then when Reagan wanted help with the contrast in Latin America to defeat the Nicaragua and communists, he gave weapons to Iran, which is to a commandeer's regime. It was just amazing. This is 1983, 82, right? Right at the card of the story. I mean, Reagan was basically had done something that the worst American, I mean, it's an actor, a traitor.

Starting point is 01:00:15 You're supporting the supposed enemy. Nixon and Watergate never did anything close to what Reagan did. Reagan got away with it because he was popular in a sense yet that smile, he's a good performer. Contrigate is one of the most undiscovered scandals in American history. Contrigate, if you should really read up on it, because it's a very important scandal. And it comes unglued and Reagan at the last two years of his life, his presidency was unable to keep his agenda going.

Starting point is 01:00:47 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.

Starting point is 01:01:05 And thank God Iran contra-gate was blown. Among them was Robert Perry, who blew the story. Change the direction of the country briefly. All of the North, we heard about this from all of our North. He was from all the hearings looking as a very statesman like 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.

Starting point is 01:01:32 North took a fall as, you know, how many people resigned in Iran, country, like six people, McFarlane. 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, you know, and so did George H.W. Bush. Bush was definitely involved in negotiations with the Iranians. He got

Starting point is 01:02:00 out too. I mean, this whole thing was buried and you have to point to them at Washington media here I'm sorry, but I'm just gonna finish the story but Washington Post plays a huge role here Catherine Graham who was the famous star Merrill Street plater in the post Miss hero of America all that kind of stuff. She she buried the story She did not believe after Watergate the post had been involved in Watergate She said I don't think American take a second shock like this. So she killed it. Killed the story.

Starting point is 01:02:29 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's visualization that I'm having is the whole scene from Trump's interview in 2016, where he famously says, oh, you think where that innocent to? What was the one thing that he said? seen 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 think that we don't have blood?

Starting point is 01:02:50 It's the one honest thing that Trump says, you said? Possibly. But it's true. I mean, essentially, you're taking, you're going inside the underbelly of America, the CIA and, you know, what's happening in the Oval Office and the secret conversations and you're bringing and you're shining a light on them. And it's not so pretty, even if you love America, it's hard to digest. But I love America.

Starting point is 01:03:12 But I love America. And I can take this. 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. It's, why do we have to be top dog is a big question. Well, that's American exceptionalism, right?

Starting point is 01:03:32 I mean, that's the concept of capitalism, there's competition. That's in the court 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 come to 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? It's like, if you play for the Yankees, the Yankees don't start the season.

Starting point is 01:03:56 Say, guys, listen, let's just play the game. Forget about going to play. Who cares about the playoffs? Let's just win the 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 only other strategy that I just try to do that the Yankees a lot of these guys

Starting point is 01:04:13 But go into Putin going to Putin so you know my mother side they're from Russia Okay, so their their Bible was Karl Marx communist manifesto So they're from the Stalin Lenin era they escaped Erbaku Azerbaijan or media and they came to Bandar Palavi 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 Etc etc and then here in America if if you dropped the name Putin to the average person Let's just say David goes on the streets as a man on the street in New York or he doesn't mind me If you ask a hundred people who's Putin they're gonna say what?

Starting point is 01:04:52 Dictator is this he's that he's a murder. He's gonna say all this stuff about him, right? Now you have actually Interviewed with them. I don't know how many hours you guys were together. It was a project that took quite a while to do and For these interviews were launched so who is Putin to you having spent one on one time with them? How different is it than what we see on TV, how he's portrayed? He probably don't want to hear it, but he's the son of Russia in the sense that he has Russian interests or foremost in his mind, as would any leader in any country, whether it's the Philippines or Taiwan or this or that.

Starting point is 01:05:26 I mean, he is cares about his country and he serves it. That's the way he, and that's why he's, he's there because people feel that he's there and it's, they talk about he's, 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, that 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.

Starting point is 01:06:01 So on that point, 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 became very friendly with Cohn, was I think the leading Soviet ologist in our country. He was studied Russia. He gave me point by point all the descriptions of these murders and who possibly did them, but it certainly would be ridiculous for Putin who have done them

Starting point is 01:06:31 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 where the good guys is like a good versus bad scenario? It feels like a, you know, a John Wayne movie.

Starting point is 01:07:04 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. Woodrow, this great Democrat, Woodrow Wilson sent the army. Then again, we didn't recognize Russia until Roosevelt recognized Russia in 33. Roosevelt is the one who tried and he reached out to Stalin and he met with him.

Starting point is 01:07:36 He met with him and he liked him and he said, Uncle Joe, they had fun together, they laughed. They met on the right. They got along in Roosevelt. They had a plan, if he had lived after April 45 to bring Russia into the into this grand alliance that he wanted. He saw UN grand alliance. It was a very strong good picture of the world.

Starting point is 01:07:57 England would be US, China, Russia. It was a tragedy. died in April because Truman came in and he reversed the lines like Johnson after Kennedy. He reversed the policy with the Russia right away. Right away they had a horrible meeting. Stalin felt that the opening was over. And of course Stalin is not saying he was a tyrant. That was a tyrant.

Starting point is 01:08:25 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.

Starting point is 01:08:43 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.

Starting point is 01:09:09 So anyway, Putin is, listen, I spent, I'm limited. I spent four trips, maybe 30 hours with a man. So, 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 you see it. It's called The Putin Interviews. It's four hours long. It was on showtime. It still is.

Starting point is 01:09:30 And it's available through other channels too. You can get it probably on Amazon. You can rent it, nor you can buy it. It's, 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's tells me the whole story from his point of view,

Starting point is 01:09:49 even down to who's firing, who are the people who are firing shots at Medea? 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:10:27 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 were 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 all that violence is what creates that mood for change. So they throw the president out illegally.

Starting point is 01:10:58 They don't have an election. We install this guy, the one that— The other victim. whoever he was. Victoria Nuland is there from the State Department. She's the leader of the Neoconfaction and the American ambassador. It's all written. We got the recordings.

Starting point is 01:11:16 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. In Germany, we're playing a very important role in trying to make this a transition that was democratic. Because they were going to have an earlier election. Didn't happen because of the violence.

Starting point is 01:11:35 The Nazis have much more power in Ukraine than you think. The United States denies it because they say Zalensky's a Jew. And that's their motivation for saying, well, how can they be neo-Nazis? That's nonsense. Neo-Nazis were there way before Zelensky and Zelensky had no power. In fact, when he became president,

Starting point is 01:11:51 he had to make a deal with them. He had to make a deal with them because they're tough people. They're not like 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 what it's discussing that the United States is condones,

Starting point is 01:12:10 it doesn't mention them, it doesn't talk about them, but basically condones what 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 is back then. He saw it for him, it's, you're putting my back against the wall. I'm going, you're pushing

Starting point is 01:12:29 me. You're strangling me. They were surrounding them. We made the Baltics very aggressive towards them. Sweet 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 that 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.

Starting point is 01:13:16 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 them into 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,

Starting point is 01:13:41 and allow their resources to be exploited. That's interesting, what you're saying, Albert, 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.

Starting point is 01:14:03 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 that you think, what I'm hearing is you see a playbook here. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:14:18 Never changed. The Neil Conservatives have kept his 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 Nuland, Kagan, Robert Kagan, who was one of the project founders. You can go up to Robert Kagan,

Starting point is 01:14:38 and you can go to Victoria Nuland on your board there. These are the villains. These are the foster dollars and Alan Lons of you of the modern era. They're her and her husband. Yeah, she's a beauty. She's a beauty. No, when I see her, it makes me really... And I voted for Biden and because I thought, you know, the Uncle Joe, he mellowed. You know, he can't be as bad as he used to be when she was where every war America was in. Remember, he was like, he was a Cold War.

Starting point is 01:15:13 He's never changed. He should be curbing these people instead of appointing them to that. She comes from the Hillary Clinton period. He's inherited that, and he led 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,

Starting point is 01:15:36 and what their dinners are like. But you're describing some very strange bedfellows. And what's interesting, you were talking about, it's an easy connection, one that I've heard that 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,

Starting point is 01:16:06 the intelligence community, and the ability to get the go ahead. Isn't it interesting that Alan Delas ends up on the Warren Commission? I think you could answer that for yourself. It's like the Fox is investigating a chicken coop. Yeah, it's not really a question. It was kind of a reflective thing.

Starting point is 01:16:25 So Alan Dulles did everything in his power. He, first of all, he didn't have a job. So he was, 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.

Starting point is 01:16:46 The biggest crime of all was that he didn't even bother to tell his fellow commissioners that we had tried to assassinate Castro. He 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 didn't have it. They had an agenda anyway. It was going to be straight jacket was J. Edgar Hoover said three bullets, six seconds, a crazy assassin,

Starting point is 01:17:13 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, I'm listening to you, I'm being educated beyond, but you said that you voted for Biden. Yeah, I assume you didn't do that lightly.

Starting point is 01:17:35 Well, you mean in a choice. 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 put in terms? Well, it is, frankly, you can't. And then what did you expect from him and what do you, you know, what grade would you I guess give him now?

Starting point is 01:17:48 I, you know, I'm a sucker for believe, I'm an optimist and I believe that he reached a certain age, a 78, and he's a little more mature and that he sees the bigger picture. And in this case, Ukraine, he is making a big mistake. A big mistake. He's all 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.

Starting point is 01:18:22 The war could expand. That's 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, he doesn't care about, he sees his whole thing as a crusade, as a jihad. Biden has given him the go ahead to do this. Biden is the one who should be calm in this situation. Down he should be speaking to Putin, speaking to Zolansky, calm in a down bean, a statesman

Starting point is 01:18:50 instead of an ideologue. This is a time for a Kennedy. This is a time, that's what Kennedy did with Krochov. This is a time for statesmen, a statesman, like Charles de Gaulle. Somebody who really has a picture of the world, I was hoping Macron or France could have some effect, but you can't get through the Ukrainian US connection. That's the problem.

Starting point is 01:19:14 But beyond Ukraine, I mean, what's happening with that? 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, and 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

Starting point is 01:19:42 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 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 would be different under Trump. Nothing happened with Ukraine and Russia under Trump. That's not true at all. Trump, on the contrary, is a very strange guy.

Starting point is 01:20:13 He was making sounds about Putin when he came in, and I was hoping that there'd be some Daytona. But as he got more and more pressure for his Russia gate, which was a joke, it was a serious, serious accusation. That was, 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.

Starting point is 01:20:40 And I asked Putin about that, too. And he, Putin, practically laughed. It was, he knows that it's not possible. But they, they pictured Trump as a tool, as a mentoring in 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 on to him by Congress. If, 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 would, he would, he's not a coward like,

Starting point is 01:21:16 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, what, 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.

Starting point is 01:21:40 Well, he also has to take the, he has to deal with Ukrainian and he has to deal with the neo-Nazi issue. He's got to deal with the Ukrainian administration the way that country is run. There, I think if you can, obviously if we could have reached a deal where we could, they could split east and west, it would, 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 gonna go. You saw they made him an offer

Starting point is 01:22:07 and Zelensky turned it down. But he promised him that he's gonna cool off the negotiation with NATO and he's kind of backing out from getting closer to NATO. It seems like, you know, who's Putin most annoyed and upset with for him to get to this point? Is he seen it from your opinion as being opportunistic saying,

Starting point is 01:22:25 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, US? Somebody pissed him off to say, this is the time to go tell him.

Starting point is 01:22:42 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. 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

Starting point is 01:23:08 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. So and he was worried about losing their control of the EU sector because they're economically

Starting point is 01:23:41 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's not what 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.

Starting point is 01:24:05 And will he blow off the world? Oh, my God. What does he, I mean, is he supposed to sacrifice Russia to the world, perhaps? That's the ultimate question, right? Are you willing to become leave office, be, whatever, and be shamed? Would you be willing to let Russia become open to NATO or whatever you want to, you know, something like that, but that would be a complete capitulation, wouldn't it? And that would be the end of the Russians are very proud people, the ones that I saw, they're very proud. 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.

Starting point is 01:24:47 He's very lower class, came from poor families, parents were in the war. I mean, the whole story, it's just, and that 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, then 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.

Starting point is 01:25:18 But there's so Russia-Fobia in this country, as I say, going back to 1918. I wish you need a statesman. You need American statesman, who's the last one? Kennedy. Do we have a current one right now? Gorbachev is still alive. I wish the heat come out of. He's old.

Starting point is 01:25:37 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 and time.

Starting point is 01:25:58 Have you thought about reaching out to him and having an interview with him or no? Well, 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, Michael Gorge? If you had George Schultz in Gorge Schultz and if George was still alive,

Starting point is 01:26:15 they would be the perfect older men. Is there anyone in America right now that has the perfect statesmen that could maybe step up? Well? It's not gonna be Biden, according to you. Yeah, maybe Obama. You may be.

Starting point is 01:26:28 Maybe. Although he's, you know, he's so aware of the popular will that he 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 a no the Reagan's battle

Starting point is 01:27:00 But Hillary Clinton he threw her under but he says Obama's good, but maybe Obama's not, but then maybe, you know, but it's biting, 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

Starting point is 01:27:31 he has to say with the amount of experience? Yes. 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 22 days ago was taken off of YouTube. But 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 chasing the light. Yeah, chasing 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 thank you so much for revisiting for sure those are I'm posting all of that go watch all of that Oliver Stone thank you for coming out G.L. it's been fun

Starting point is 01:28:12 talking to you and thank you for your open mind appreciate you thank you this has been great thank you everybody and Tom bye bye bye bye bye Thank you.

PBD Podcast - Legendary Film Maker: Oliver Stone | PBD Podcast | EP 133

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