Ronald Radosh takes to the pages of The Weekly Standard to give Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States the literary backhand it deserves. A sample from the article’s third page:

Another event whose treatment reveals the shabby methods of Stone and his partner is Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs. Stone claims that Japan had already lost the war, that the Japanese military leaders were ready to accept a peace agreement, that major military figures including Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur opposed the bombs’ use, that Truman reached the decision after ignoring the pleas of Nobel scientists, and that he did so to intimidate Russia and end the war against Japan before Russia could join it, as Stalin had agreed to do.

This is the thesis that Soviet agents and apologists like Carl Marzani, P. M.S. Blackett, and Dana F. Fleming laid out in the first years of the Cold War and which was revived (and lent legitimacy) 40 years ago by left-wing historian Gar Alperovitz. In the interim, however, major books and academic articles based on archival research in Japan and the United States—by Wilson D. Miscamble, Richard B. Frank, Robert James Maddox, Sadao Asada, and many others—have discredited the argument. But for Oliver Stone, there is only one truth, the “truth” that discredits the United States.

According to Stone, the dropping of the atomic bombs was criminal because the war was over, Japan defeated, and its leaders wanted peace. According to Stone, Truman lied when he said that American lives would have been lost in the invasion that would have been necessary if the bombs had not been dropped. His purpose in dropping the bombs was to show Stalin “that the United States would stop at nothing to impose its will.”

But as Richard B. Frank, author of the magisterial Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, wrote in these pages in 2005:

All three of the critics’ central premises are wrong: The Japanese did not see their situation as catastrophically hopeless. They were not seeking to surrender, but pursuing a negotiated end to the war that preserved the old order in Japan, not just a figurehead emperor. Finally, .  .  . American leaders .  .  . understood .  .  . that “until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion cannot be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies.”

In those last lines, Frank quotes from a July 1945 U.S. analysis of military and diplomatic intercepts. He adds, “This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945.” As for Stone, having dispensed with the facts, he is pleased to depict Truman as a moral monster and “war criminal.”