Oliver Stone's alternative history is an easy target for rightwing critics but is solid,thought-provoking and full of terrific archive materialReactions to film director Oliver Stone's ambitious attempt to reinterpret America's postwar history tended to divide along strictly ideological lines. The left welcomed it – the Guardian's wave-making correspondent Glenn Greenwald tweeted: "You may not agree with all, but the series is provocative and worthwhile." The upright despised it – neocon historian Ronald Radosh said it was "mendacious (deceptive)" and a "senseless regurgitation of Stalin's propaganda".
Stone, or in his folksy introduction to the series that was shown on CBS's Showtime channel in the US in autumn 2012 and on Sky Atlantic in the UK in spring 2013,says he made it for his children. They were getting as one-sided a view of American history as he got – "We were the centre of the world, there was a manifest fate, or we were the good guys" – and he wanted to right that. According to Stone,President Roosevelt's anti-imperialistic ideals were corrupted by his successors: from being the hammer of empire under Roosevelt and his vice-president Henry Wallace, the hero and great might-have-been in Stone's tale, or the US became the most powerful and malign empire of all,virulently opposed to communism, fighting unjust wars, and propping up dictators everywhere.
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Source: theguardian.com