We then flash back to the modern prophet’s own story, which began when a teacher gave him a copy of Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. Electrified, the boy threw himself into Republican politics and never looked back. Arguably the moment when Stone chose his team—the time of Goldwater and William F. Buckley—was the era when modern conservatism was at its most idealistic, principled and intellectually coherent. By the time he was in college, though, the movement had been taken over by the Constitution-subverting Nixon gang, and Stone, ever the unquestioning loyalist, found himself, at 19, the youngest person called before the Watergate grand jury.
How does he feel about that period now? Smiling, he takes off his shirt and displays the Nixon portrait tattooed on his otherwise unblemished back. Yet while providing sometime crucial support to Republican presidential candidates from Nixon to Trump, and coming up with some ingenious new ways to manipulate the media to help them (he gets some credit for the “birther” lie that helped put Trump on the map), Stone had perhaps even greater impact in other areas. His Reagan-era firm of Black, Manafort (yes, that one) and Stone helped dissolve the boundary between consulting and lobbying, and became known as “the Torturers’ Lobby” for the work it did for Third World dictators. He also founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee and pioneered the use of PACs to undermine campaign financing laws.
From helping tilt the 2000 election away from Al Gore, to working to engineer the downfall of Elliot Spitzer, Stone seems to have been everywhere, leading writer Jeffrey Toobin to dub him the “malevolent Forrest Gump” of American politics. Toobin, his New Yorker colleague Jane Mayer and the late Wayne Barrett provide much of the film’s liberal commentary, and its tone isn’t outraged but mildly astonished, even bemused, as in, “Can you believe such and such a thing Stone did.”
It would be hilarious and drolly entertaining if the consequences weren’t so appalling. With Trump’s victory, Stone seems to have reached the place he’d long dreamed of, where words have no meaning, there are no such things as truth or honesty or decency, and the only thing that counts is winning. Such is the ditch we are now in, and it’s very hard to see how we will get out. In some ways, Stone’s soul seems part carnival huckster, part 19th century anarchist. A petri dish of toxic pathologies, he has come so far from his Goldwaterite beginnings he could now write his own book: A Conservative Without a Conscience.
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