The penultimate episode of Untold History of the United States begins at a point of historical indecision. Ronald Reagan, having bypassed the signing of a peace treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was to cede the presidential office in 1989, and a critical move for his successor would be the resolution of the Cold War. It is with conspicuous disappointment, then, that Stone narrates the induction of Republican George H. W. Bush, whose reserves of oil money and family ties to the Nazi party are bluntly clarified. The Bush administration’s eventual invasion of Panama in hopes of shutting down the drug war is thus treated as a foregone conclusion that spoiled any chance of sustained peace at the tail end of the Cold War. Bill Clinton’s ensuing presidency, a long-delayed Democratic return to the White House, is also evaluated, with the rise of special interests in Clinton’s campaign foretelling an era of disastrous compromises on economic and trade policies. In evoking this world of diminished potential and squashed hope, Stone wrangles together Nazi propaganda films, archival newspaper clippings, United Nations broadcasts, footage of the two presidents both in public and in private, and clips from films like Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor, which depicted for audiences of the time an increasingly incongruous ideal of American heroism.

Stone’s finale to Untold History of the United States traces a decade in the wake of 9/11, meticulously detailing the many military interventions in the Middle East that were routinely softened or outright disguised by administrative doublespeak. The Bush administration is presented as careless to a degree without precedent in remodeling the country as a fear-mongering empire, with George W’s blind faith in divine righteousness over empiricism likened to Islamic extremism. But the episode’s fury does not flag with the conclusion of Bush’s service: Obama, though introduced as a much-needed humanist savior, is taken to task for his eventual Wall Street bailouts on the domestic front and for a less zealous but scarcely less deadly continuation of Bush’s belligerence overseas. Even as Stone’s narration maintains a coldly declarative force, his montage generates contradictions and associations at a furious rate: in a densely packed hour, 21st century economics are paralleled with those of the Roaring Twenties, popular Hollywood war films are shown to disproportionately underscore military successes in lieu of overwhelming failures, and viewers are urged to ponder myths of American greatness as drone bombings light up the screen.