Oliver Stone Once Slipped Acid to His Dad

I came back alienated and numb. I didn't come back as a protester, but confused. How did you feel about the protest? Fighting with my father. Oh, fighting with your father? Sure, of course. I gave him LSD one time. On purpose? Did he know? Yeah. Didn't he know you were giving it to him? No, he didn't know I'd give it to him, but he knew that he was on something. How did you do that? Was he slipping into his coffee? No, he was scotch. Ah, even better. How much? Quite a bit. He was strong, though. He handled it? He drank whiskey every day of his life, so yeah, he was a tough guy. But he was great, he was like swaying to the music and having sex fantasy. Wow. Did you tell him about it afterwards? No, actually, but over the years, he knew I kind of, after a while, he figured it out, I guess. I was a long-haired, wild kid, you know? Right, right. Talking black talk to him. Did you feel like you had to do it because you knew what kind of an impact it would have on him and open some doors? Oh, I was fighting with him. No, we were fighting about the war, fighting about everything. I just didn't like his ideas and wanted to destroy his mindset. Oh, wow. His mindset was, okay, this Vietnam is a mess, but his mindset was, but we can learn from it. We're going to build up our knowledge for the next war. That was his thinking. Right. See, he came out of that generation of World War II. His father was wiped out in 29, and his first job was as a floor walker. He didn't have anything. He worked his way up on Wall Street, very hard worker research in the back offices. So when the war, the war, the Second World War was the highlight of his life. He says, he comes back from the war, and America faced this problem. What are we going to do with all these men? And now we've got the women working. How are we going to employ all these people? Everybody seemed to be scared of another depression. They thought we're going back into that. So there was this militarized economy that we had, and they kept going. It basically kept going and built up by 19... It ended in 1945. By 1950, 1951, we were back in Korea, where we were building up again. The whole concept of an enemy was important to the American economy. The Soviet Union, of course, fit the bill, although they were our ally in World War II and did most of the fighting. They became our biggest enemy right away. There was no hesitation about it. It was often a political decision to have an enemy, to create fear, and to keep the militarized economy that we have. Eisenhower talked about it. He was the one who built it up the most. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. No, no, no, we're not. I mean, it's fine. But my father came from that generation, and he believed firmly that Russia was really invading our country, threatening it. They were in our schools. They were in our State Department. I mean, he wasn't Joe McCarthy, but there was a lot of that mentality. Nixon was like that. Hoover was pushing it. I grew up terrified. I grew up terrified. Dad, why do we let the Russians do that? That kind of mentality of being besieged. And so my father and I fought a lot, as you can imagine, because I got kicked out of it. He'd take me to a restaurant. I'd have an American tie that was made out of American flag, right? And the restaurant owner would kick me out because I thought it was disrespectful. He'd been an ex-marine. That's interesting. You can have an American flag anything now, and you're respectful. That's weird. You can have an American flag hat or a t-shirt and a different world. Oh, come on. This was still the height of the 70s. The older people were offended by that. Yeah, it's interesting how that shifted, right? Now the more American flags, the better on everything. Socks, underwear, whatever you want. Nothing is respectful. Yeah, it's different. It's really weird. It's kind of been bastardized.