Oliver Stone On Interviewing Putin, Documenting Snowden, And Making Controversial Choices

RS: Well, the other thing they’re able to do is say: We know, we have the facts, we have the information. If you knew what we know about any place in the world, then you would see, we had to do what we did. And the one example that I pull up a lot—because when I worked at the LA Times my publisher, a very good guy, Tom Johnson, he had been in the White House, he was close to Lyndon Johnson; Bill Moyers had been in the White House as press secretary at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin. And this is before you went to Vietnam, and this is before Ron Kovic got three-quarters of his body paralyzed, and has been in a wheelchair forever. And it was all based on something called the Gulf of Tonkin attack, the second attack, right? And you know, I was sitting there at the LA Times 20 years later—and I had been in Vietnam around that time, and I thought OK, there must have been an attack by some ridiculous PT boats from North Vietnam, they didn’t have a navy, they didn’t have an air force, but maybe some PT boats went out there and shot at this huge aircraft carrier and destroyer. And it was absurd, but nonetheless that was the excuse for bombing North Vietnam, which that war, you know, McNamara said three and a half million people died, Indochinese, maybe; now people feel it’s more like six, seven million died; it was one of the great acts of genocide in human history. Twenty years later—and they always said, if you know what we know, we have this other information, we know this thing—20 years later, it turns out they knew in real time, Lyndon Johnson, McNamara, that there was no second Gulf of Tonkin attack. That the [captains] had said: We have no evidence. You know, the pilots flying above, including Admiral Stockdale later, who was a longstanding prisoner of war, he was flying above it and he said there was no attack, and yet he was one of the people sent off to bomb Vietnam, and he gets shot down and he’s held as a prisoner. So it’s really interesting. The argument that’s used up to this day, you know, what happened with Sarin gas in Syria—they always say: We have information.

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