9781416556794

FOREWORD:

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IZZY AND THE DEATH OF DISSENT IN JOURNALISM

You've really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you're sunk.

-- I. F. Stone on government manipulation of the media

In writing this book it has not been easy keeping up with the fast-breaking news about a man who has been dead for seventeen years. Lest you think I jest, reflect on this.

In 2004, Philip Roth gave I. F. Stone a walk-on part in his masterful work of fact and fictionThe Plot Against America.In Roth's mesmerizing "it can happen here" tale of fascism triumphant, Charles A. Lindbergh, in real life the international aviation ace and Hitler admirer, has defeated FDR. On page 316 of the novel, I. F. Stone is carted off with FDR New Dealers Bernard Baruch, Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, and other real famous men by President Lindbergh's gestapo-style FBI as pogroms begin in America. Roth's novel vividly relates the fear among American Jews in 1942 when fascism was a real threat. Back then, journalist I. F. Stone was among the alarmed who excoriated isolationist Lindbergh's coziness with the Third Reich.

Uncanny echoes of Stone are heard in concert halls, on radio, or on CDs of the Kronos Quartet as his distinctive voice dips in and out of the music. With a continued war in Iraq, the Kronos Quartet and composer Scott Johnson found new poignancy and symbolism in Stone's antiwar lectures for peace taped decades ago and incorporated into "How It Happens," Johnson's 1993 work for amplified string quartet. Stone's twenty-two-year-old words punctuate a world that remains as frightening as when he spoke them -- a combustible Middle East, North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats, and a messy, unnecessary war in Iraq -- "How much bloodshed, cruelty, suffering? How many survivors to wonder? Was it a Canadian goose, or a real ICBM heading one way or the other, that set off the great conflagration? Think what would have happened if -- " Stone's voice is deliberately and dramatically ended in midsentence.

What appears to be a fleeting apparition of owl-eyed Izzy rushes by in the background of real footage of a McCarthy hearing in George Clooney's award-winning 2005 movie on Edward R. Murrow,Good Night, and Good Luck.

The twentieth century's premier independent journalist, known to everyone from the corner grocer to Einstein as Izzy, is honored on campuses that award I. F. Stone chairs, fellowships, and scholarships. Institutions rank his tiny one-manWeeklyin the Greatest Hits of twentieth-century journalism. In one major study, Stone'sWeeklyplaced number 16 in the top 100, behind coverage of Hiroshima, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, and the work of early-century muckrakers. As an individual voice, he placed ahead of Harrison Salisbury, Dorothy Thompson, Neil Sheehan, William Shirer, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Murray Kempton, and other worthies. Some who once ruled Georgetown and political society, such as columnist Joe Alsop and the acerbic H. L. Mencken, did not make the cut. Walter Lippmann placed 64. Such are the vicissitudes of life for journalists who once stood so high. "This kind of list is needed in journalism,'' said Mitchell Stephens, of NYU. "Nobody thinks of journalism in terms of decades or centuries.'' It is important to examine why some endure.

And Stone endures. He is quoted in theNew Yorkerand theNew York Times,remembered as an inspiration by Bill Moyers and Seymour Hersh -- arguably the best investigative reporter today -- and anyone else who despairs of modern journalism, especially the unquestioning acceptance of governmental spin. He is a lone "courageous" voice remembered by Michael Cross-Barnet in a 2005 recollection of his own father's ruined career during the Red Scare:"The New York TimesShafted My Father." Defending theTimeseditor Melvin Barnet, Stone had asked back then, "How can theTimeseditorially support the Fifth Amendment and discharge those who invoke it?" Bloggers bill themselves as the next Izzy. Then the right-wing chorus falsely called Stone a Red spy. The list goes on.

Stone went from a young iconoclast in the 1930s to an icon during the Vietnam War. In the fifties, he spoke to mere handfuls who dared surface to protest Cold War loyalty oaths and witch hunts. A decade later, he spoke to half a million who massed for anti-Vietnam War rallies. He became world famous.

Today, Izzy's remarkable immediacy leaps off the pages. Not only is he a sheer joy to read, his views take on vital importance, as if he had written them just this morning, illuminating the tumultuous first five years of the twenty-first century.

"There was increased reliance at home and abroad on suppression by force and an increasingly arrogant determination to 'go it alone' in the world."This was not written when George W. Bush ignored the United Nations, colleagues, international treaties, and advice of allies and started a war but by Stone during Cold War escalation.

"All governments are run by liars..."This was not about the weapons of mass destruction or subsequent other Iraq War lies but those told during the Vietnam War.

"It is not a private quarrel between the Israelis and Arabs. It's a world concern -- and of great concern to America, as a great power, to have stability and peace. And there is no way to have peace without some modicum of justice. The Arabs can not be held in second-class citizenship and bondage. If something isn't done pretty soon the lines may harden, each side will destroy its own moderates -- and then they will move on to destroy each other."That was not about today's discord or the wall built by the Israelis to keep out the Palestinians in 2004, but Stone's sorrowful warning years ago.

"Almost every generation in American history has had to face what appeared to be a menace of so frightening an order as to justify the limitation of basic liberties -- the Francophiles in the days of the Alien and Sedition laws, the Abolitionists, the Anarchists, the Socialists in the days of Debs; Fascists, anti-Semites and Communists in our own time."Some saw "compelling arguments for suppression." Stone argued against this, claiming that a country founded on basic freedoms had "managed to get through before." This was not about the excesses of the Patriot Act but about investigative assaults and secret surveillance of citizens in 1949. Then as now, fear galvanized citizens into silent support. The terrorists of 9/11 and continuing worldwide terrorism made it easy to sell the Patriot Act -- and to resell it to a cowardly Congress as 2005 drew to a close. The very name echoes those deployed the Cold War Red Scare, when congressional inquisitors decided who was "un-American" and President Truman instituted the "Loyalty Oath." Stone would have led the pack in uncovering -- once again -- illegal domestic spying in the twenty-first century and ripped into the Patriot Act for its trampling on the Bill of Rights, which included forcing clerks and librarians to turn over lists of what citizens read, and detaining a thousand "suspects" with no evidence. Jailed without charge, forbidden to see lawyers or family, the vast majority were innocent of federal crimes of terrorism. Bush's team had grossly inflated the number of terrorist actions. Justice Department stonewalling thwarted media access, yet available reports were overlooked. Such documents would have had hound dog Stone salivating at the joy of the hunt.

"There still seem to be many worthy gentlemen...who wish to anchor the world in a sea of narrow minds (including their own) and hold it there, lest it move forward...They are utterly out of place in this age of rationalism."This was not about the current forces of Creationism but the first go around, with the famous 1920s Scopes Monkey Trial and written by a fourteen-year-old Izzy.

This book combines biography, a historical treatise on the press, and Stone's running commentary on twentieth-century America. All are necessary to draw some present-day lessons from the life and times of I. F. Stone. At pivotal points in their careers I have twinned outsider I. F. Stone with insider Walter Lippmann because they are dynamic examples of opposing approaches to journalism. Presidents and kings were so much a part of Lippmann's life that when he visited Paris, his forwarding address was in care of Charles de Gaulle. He wrote speeches for presidents and never saw the dichotomy, lecturing younger colleagues like James (Scotty) Reston to remain detached. "Walter was more engaged with more presidents from Wilson to Lyndon Johnson thananybodyin the press! He was always in the White House," Reston once exclaimed to me. Meanwhile, Stone was blackballed by the National Press Club after his premature gesture of civility in a Jim Crow era, inviting a black to lunch there.

A vital companion theme is the repression of dissent that Stone and others faced in the twentieth century and which continues to this day. Stone never confused dissent with disloyalty, as mainstream media and the government so often do. Stone fervently loved this country, viewing dissenting voices as crucial for keeping it true to its ideals.

Since Stone wrote and thought everything out loud in the public arena, there are no private papers or memos and only sparse correspondence -- the stuff of conventional biographies. Because of this, one extraordinary lie has been promulgated by the far right bent on besmirching Stone's legacy. They repeat the falsehood that Stone's family burned his papers, hinting at some dark conspiracy. They deduced this fromNationwriter D. D. Guttenplan's innocent observations that Stone had left no papers. After more than a decade of examining Stone, I can sadly attest to Guttenplan's accuracy and applaud his continual debunking of Izzy-the-spy lies that the neocons spread. However, I hope to provide new insights from numerous unpublished reminiscences of family and friends, unpublished interviews with Stone, his massive and unpublished FBI file, recently declassified Russian, Chinese, and North Korean documents, and his own riveting words that flowed by the millions during nearly seventy years of writing and speaking. Stone's style combined a comic's gift for one-liners, an eye for the "significant trifle," and trenchant analysis of world affairs.

Major reasons underscore the importance of revisiting Izzy. His life was fascinating, his observations of a half century ago ring with amazing significance today, his work and methods should be taught in all journalism classes. As this book will show, he is a sheer delight to read, evocative, provocative, and witty. He needs to be known by journalism students and a young audience. Finally, he needs to be defended from posthumous lies perpetuated by today's right-wing media.

His work helps evaluate the best and the worst in today's journalism. Although Stone inspired many, he was too much of an original to be fully emulated. His vibrancy and zest for life, his enthusiasms for everything from disco dancing to Demosthenes, his curiosity and hound-dog tenacity, would have made I. F. Stone unique in any arena. But he was especially so in Washington. Most of the time, he simply didn't give a damn if he was an outcast. He slaved to make history and current events "fun" -- a favorite word. He struggled always to write his "soufflés," articles and books as airy as confections despite the substance larded into each sentence.

Best of all, commented journalist and novelist Nicholas Von Hoffman, "There are so few troublemakers and he was a wonderful troublemaker. He had such wonderful guts. He defied the social fears which make cowards of most of us. He was his own person in the ice age of big, controlling institutions and organizations. He could stand alone and stand apart and therefore stand for what he believed in." Stone was nothing like today's prepackaged bloviators pickled in self-importance who offend and lampoon easy targets that feed their flocks' prejudices. An equal-opportunity deflator, when Stone perceived injustice, inequity, or lies billed as truth, he sometimes turned intimate fans into intimate foes. Izzy collected countless critics left, right, and center, alienating just about everyone at one time or another. He loathed pontificating, thumb-sucking pundits and carefully crafted a breezy, provocative style. Never far from his autodidactic grounding in the classics and philosophy, Stone possessed a memory of confounding accuracy; a scholar's grasp of the past that he applied to current events with dazzling relevance; a trial lawyer's proclivity for the tough question. Coupled with these attributes, Stone's skepticism regarding the professed nobility of government intentions served him well.

In the same year that Stone died, 1989,Nightline'sanchor, Ted Koppel, said of the establishment media, "We are a discouragingly timid lot...people whose job it is to manipulate the media know that...many of us are truly only comfortable when we travel in a herd." Even Stone's great outspoken colleague Murray Kempton once told me, "I have a tremendous need to pass a test of fraternity when I'm on a story. I'm much more of a herd man than Izzy ever was." Stone was comfortable traveling alone.

Government leaks tossed out at private dinner parties were as suspicious as hand grenades to him. And a reporter had to "bone up" in advance and ask good questions to get both news and respect from officials. "You can't just sit on their lap and ask them to feed you secrets -- then they'll just give you a lot of crap." The First Amendment was Stone's bible and Jefferson his God. Stone never stopped preaching against secrecy in government. "Inevitably such organizations [the FBI, CIA, NSA] become means of inhibiting the exercise of freedom of liberties and intimidate people." Few but Stone had the nerve to ridicule FBI director J. Edgar Hoover at the height of his power, calling him a "glorified Dick Tracy" and "the sacred cow," knowing full well that Hoover would retaliate. From the thirties to his death in 1972, Hoover endlessly hounded Stone, amassing thousands of pages, staking out such subversive activities as buying cigars, picking out groceries, writing letters to his hearing-aid company. The FBI bugged his phone and pawed through his garbage. Comrades in the hunt were the CIA, State Department, Army, Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Post Office, and U.S. Passport Office.

"Secrecy is hardly new," said commentator Bill Moyers, who worked for one of the legendary White House liars, Lyndon Johnson. Speaking of today's President Bush, Moyers added, "But never has there been an administration like the one in power today -- so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and, in defiance of the Constitution, from their representatives in Congress."

For the first five nightmare years of Bush's reign, a compliant White House press corps, known to some in the trade as "access whores"; a conglomerate Murdochian right-wing drift; "liars for hire" paid by the administration to tout its programs; deferential acceptance of administration fibs -- all are disgraceful capitulations to power. It is frustrating to observe such follies where mainstream media shies from accurately informing the public, burying major stories in an avalanche of celebrity trash. During the Iraq invasion, jingoism replaced journalism. With Pan-Cake makeup and microphones at the ready, an enthralled crew of the embedded embraced battle (many of whom had forgotten their own devotion to ducking the Vietnam War). Early reports were tailor-made for Army recruitment posters, with the exception of some hard-hitting reporters such as Mike Cerre for ABC-TV.

Instead of reporting scandals, establishment newspapers created them. Fiction appeared in articles in theNew York Times,the self-proclaimed newspaper of record. Both theTimesand theWashington Postwere forced to issue postmortem mea culpas for their unquestioning hype of Bush's WMD false raison d'être for war. Their admission that they'd buried stories expressing doubts -- written by a finePostreporter, Walter Pincus, who was inspired by Stone -- demonstrated the folly when administrative sources are sacrosanct. Which illustrates Stone's dry comment "Establishment reporters undoubtedly know a lot of things I don't. But a lot of what they know isn't true."

Only after President Bush ignored the tragedy of a Hurricane-wracked New Orleans, only after U.S. troop deaths in Iraq reached 2,000, only after the cost of war reached into the billions did mainstream media begin assertively challenging what had been a highly scripted five-year media propaganda blitz. A miracle would be the day that the media did not show up for hollow photo ops such as the "Mission Accomplished" and "Plan for Victory" obscenities. As 2005 came to an end, indictments fell like snowflakes, and journalists began reporting on a host of Republican scandals, leading with the resignation of Cheney's top aide, Scooter Libby, after his indictment on five counts -- obstruction of justice, perjury, and false statements -- in the probe of White House leaks to journalists regarding the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. (Not until April 2006 revelations of Libby's testimony did the mass media start to question Bush's sound-bite denials of his involvement in the leaks.) TheWashington Post'sDana Priest broke the story of CIA secret prisons in Europe; theLos Angeles Timesbroke the story of a Defense Department contractor that paid Iraqi journalists to run fake upbeat war stories in Baghdad media;Time'sembedded reporter Michael Ware exposed phony administration claims that an assault was primarily led by Iraqi forces. Still, it took theNew York Timesa full year to disclose that it had learned of warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens.

No discussion of a free press is without a heated look at "objectivity" -- a deceptively simple concept. At its very worst, what is collected in an "objective" fashion can be a major trap (witness every single story garnered from a spin-minded administration source; the prime example is theNew York Times'sJudith Miller's -- as well as reporters on other publications -- credulous reporting on WMDs, which obviously seemed "objectively accurate" to their editors at the time). Because it was the vauntedTimes,television followed with inaccuracies based on its coverage. After theTimesfinally chastised Miller for her blind acceptance of false WMD information and her dealings with Libby, her career there was over. It is time to resurrect Stone's warning: "You cannot get intimate with officials and maintain your independence. No matter whether they are good guys or bad guys don't get intimate with them or you'll lose your independence and they'll use you."

The fifteen-second sound bite is carefully crafted by spin doctors to mask or deflect news and is religiously regurgitated on TV.

Stone rejected the idea of the reporter as a robot with no political passion or insight. "Without forgoing accuracy and documentation," Stone argued, reporters did not need to be "neutral." "There's no use interviewing anybody," he said, "if you're only going to ask them baby questions." Said Izzy, "A newspaperman ought to use his power on behalf of those who were getting the dirty end of the deal.... And when he has something to say, he ought not to be afraid to raise his voice above a decorous mumble, and to use forty-eight-point bold." "Izzy's point was that reporters were not stenographers," said investigative reporter and author Scott Armstrong, who organized the campaign that convinced President Clinton to veto the Official Secrets Act -- a provision that would have for the first time in U.S. history criminalized the unauthorized disclosure of government information by federal employees and whistle blowers. "Izzy was eternally disappointed that so many were not willing to find the public records and say, 'These two points have been said and it's wrong. Here's what the recordshows.'"

Or, as Stone put it, what often bothered him more than thepresenceof opinion was thelackof news in articles. As British publisher Lord Northcliff uttered, "News is something someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."

Finding Real News means searching beyond the carefully crafted word of official dissemblers. Faux objectivity is when one gets lies, in the guise of formal statements, from the Robert McNamaras and the Scooter Libbys and Tom DeLays and Kenneth Lays and presidents and prime ministers. Real objectivity is when reporters dig into documents, find a credible whistle-blower source, or learn things on their own and verify them.

As a columnist, when he was not doing straight reporting, Stone committed no crime when he voiced his opinions or marshaled facts to fit his ideology and principles. Nonetheless, his enemies on the right, who consistently do the same, castigate him for the sin of having opinions. Stone advised young writers to keep in the back of their minds, no matter how impassioned their feelings, that "you may be full of BS" and, unlike many pundits, was not overly concerned about being viewed as right or wrong. He knew that such analysis depended on the prevailing political, social, and cultural framework of the moment. "Either you're going to sit on your ass and write your preconceptions or you're going to be a good reporter and that means being inconsistent. You change your mind or admit an error because things are very complicated and people do change and it's fascinating to watch them." Stone also learned to "go into the bowels of government where the really good sources are. They are good public servants, very often breaking their hearts with frustration. They're the best kind of source."

As Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, notes, "Izzy's lasting strength rests on his fierce independenceandon documentation. His independence is what inspired us and in many cases shamed most of us much of the time. But it was the material Izzy produced from his close reading of the official record and careful listening of official words that was valuable to the public and to history. When Izzy allowed his deep beliefs to override his journalism or verification he got himself into trouble. But his objective method -- his objectivity as a journalist -- is what brought him back to earth."

Scotty Reston recalled his tribute when Lippmann turned seventy-five: "I said that the great achievement of Lippmann was that he was a great definer of issues and that he used the news as a peg for his philosophy of government. He defined theissuesbetter than anybody else. Well, he didn't like that. He wanted to be judged on the basis of whether what he had written and what he had proposed was right or wrong. And that record wasnotvery good."

Stone was far from a mere dissenting polemicist. "Izzy realized some things that most journalists forget -- when the decision on the controversy is taken, it is only then that you really begin to have available to you the facts that brought the crisis about," reflected Reston. "Most reporters, I among them, usually when the decision is taken, go on to something else, but not Izzy.... He would go back and read and interview and then bring together a story about what had really happened -- which was usually so much better and accurate than the day-to-day coverage."

At Stone's death in 1989, a laudatoryWashington Posteditorial nonetheless chided Stone for "misappraising" some societies and rulers. Scoffed Von Hoffman, "They should look to themselves and the establishment press who urged going slow on the 'Negro question' when Izzy was taking black judges to lunch, couldn't see -- and even defended -- Vietnam while Izzy was seeing something else, or when they played into Cold War fanaticism and helped the China lobby to exist for years." A longtime anti-Stalinist, Von Hoffman said, "On Russia, certainly Izzy can be criticized, but in so many other arenas his vision stands up far better than most establishment journalism." Stone was far ahead of the pack regarding numerous momentous and pivotal trends in twentieth-century history: the American labor movement, Hitler and the rise of Fascism, disastrous Cold War foreign policies, domestic purges, covert actions of the FBI and the CIA, the greatness of the civil rights movement, the horror of Vietnam, the strengths and weaknesses of the anti-war movement, the disgrace of Iran-contra, and the class greed of Reaganomics.

Initial research on this book began in 1990 when Google and bloggers were unknown terms. The Library of Congress was home while studying Stone's roots and political leanings, early socialist and labor movements, the New Deal, the cold war and the "Red Menace" decade, Stone's controversial book on Korea, and civil rights.

Many of the 1960s civil rights activists and anti-Vietnam War protestors who madeI. F. Stone's Weeklya success never knew his rich past. Child publisher at fourteen, in 1933 the twenty-five-year-old Stone was the youngest editorial writer on a major daily, slashing away at Hitler, whose ascendancy was largely ignored by Walter Lippmann. As a thirties radical, Stone mingled with the famous: Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, Clifford Odets and John Dos Passos, James Thurber and Heywood Broun, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Future talents who were teenagers in the forties -- Joseph Heller and Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth and E. L. Doctorow -- read Stone inPMandThe Nation.

Stone wrote millions upon millions of words on everything from Woodrow Wilson's peace initiatives to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars. He had a roiling history with fellow Jews; beloved when he became the first reporter in the world to travel illegally with holocaust survivors to Palestine, he was soon denounced by some as a Jew hater for championing the rights of displaced Palestinians.

Stone achieved the remarkable: he reached the age of eighty-one without growing old. Buoyed by a childlike ebullience, he often used a line that Moyers now loves to repeat when he praises Stone: "I am having so much fun I ought to be arrested."

During the Vietnam War, Stone's truth became so popular that hisWeeklymade money. A toiler outside the system, Stone was never one to take a vow of poverty and reveled in buying his wife a mink coat, joking that he had become a war profiteer. His irredeemable optimism made it all sound simple, but he worked long and furiously, relying on his own digging so that by the time he approached an official he was ready to confront him with facts. Stone's digging brought no cozy enshrinement in Washington's power circles during the dark days of McCarthyism. A stunning change occurred in the last years of his life. When Stone died, mainstream journalists who had once ignored him were stumbling all over themselves to laud "Izzy."

Then came posthumous vilification. After Stone was safely dead, right-wingers displayed their estimable courage by slandering Stone as a Soviet spy. By misrepresenting information found in decrypted Russian memos unearthed a half century after the fact, they continue their calumny into the present. Worse, mainstream media have repeated these lies, often unquestioningly.

One would like to simply dismiss, for example, the rants of Ann Coulter, the Queen of Sleaze, whose aversion to the truth is matched by an utter lack of decency. Before the Internet, talk radio, and cable TV, such extremists were relegated to fringe publications. Today, the far right, no matter how baseless their arguments, have found prominence and financial heaven. Sadly, every uncorrected falsehood, such as her lies about Stone, remains in the blogosphere, often repeated by a mainstream media scrambling for an audience.

Therefore when it applies to Stone or his work, material that surfaced well after his death has been addressed in the body of the book. Unfortunately, Stone cannot defend himself as he did so aptly in life. He once described to me how he felt about politicians and journalists who had shunned him during the fifties: "I used to walk across the lawn at the Capitol and I would think, 'Screw you, you sons of bitches. I may be just a goddamn Jew Red to you, but I'm keeping Jefferson alive!' "

Stone was lauded for his ability to find exposés in documents that other journalists were too lazy to read or overlooked when they did read them. Again, it is not so easy to take a fresh look, to disabuse oneself of the perceived wisdom that is the stock-in-trade of government documents and press conferences. Friend and fellow journalist Christopher Lydon said, "Izzy was the only journalist, surely, who comes close to the notion of genius."

Stone would not have disputed that opinion. Fresh from his best-selling triumphThe Trial of Socrates,eighty-year-old Stone told an audience that he had written a speech for Socrates. In fact, he said, it was a damn good speech. In fact, "I think that if Socrates had delivered it to the jury, he would have gotten acquitted." Stone enjoyed the ensuing laughter but in no way felt his assessment was a joke.

One criticism of Stone is that he gave Communist dictators more slack than right-wing demagogues during the thirties and forties. Even friendly critics argued that he was late to voice full-fledged criticism of Stalin's horrors. When he did, in the mid-fifties, his passionate admission lost him subscribers who still clung to the Bolshevik dream. However, his critics are incorrect when they paint him as uncritical of the USSR or American Communists; as far back as the thirties, Stone was assailing the system's repression. He belittled the "little Stalins" in the American Communist Party (CPUSA). During McCarthyism, Stone repeatedly advised America to not "go the way of Russia." Stone's inconsistencies as well as his thinking on this subject are addressed.

Stone was attacked for thinking that the road to peace with Communist regimes was through diplomacy rather than tough threats of war. Irony did not escape him in 1988, at the age of eighty. "Who would have thought it?" he remarked. "First, President Richard Nixon -- that old Red-baiter -- met with Mao. Now Reagan, the great opponent of the 'evil empire'! Who would have dreamt that he would head for a summit with Gorbachev and drop back from the nuclear abyss?" (Stone chuckled at how Reagan's actions had alienated all of the "kooks" in his corner.) Stone couldn't have been more pleased that these two heroes of the right had approached the Communists in the manner that Stone had been vilified for advocating all along.

As columnist Robert Scheer wrote in 2005, the terrorizing predictions of a unified international Communism never happened. Long ago, Stone was alone in American journalism when he argued that the domino theory was wrong, that Communist leaders played one against the other and their ideological internationalists were subdued by pragmatists. Vietnam now is a prosperous free-enterprise partner with the United States. Historical rivals China and Vietnam "compete for shelf space in Costco and Wal-Mart," providing cheap labor for capitalism, noted Scheer. As outraged as Stone had been, he asked why the United States had not recognized this pattern, particularly Ho Chi Minh's nationalism. Instead 3 million Vietnamese and fifty-eight thousand Americans died in a war without purpose. Scheer added, "Sound familiar?"

Stone did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he had traveled a long road since his adolescent enthusiasm for the 1917 Russian Revolution. In later life he ardently befriended Communist dissidents. "There are great risks in a free society, but the risks of dictatorship are even greater.... The only thing that made it look good was the absence of a free press and a solid wall around it."

After a long detour, I returned to Stone in 2002, having received the last batch of some five thousand pages of FBI files. I realized rudimentary explanations were in order for a new generation, most of whom no doubt think that a person speaking of HUAC is referring to some man named Hugh Ack, as did a young transcriber of my audiotape interview with the eminent John Kenneth Galbraith. That inquisitional body which terrorized leftists for decades, the House Un-American Activities Committee, was no longer recognized by its famous abbreviation.

By then, my office was a canyon of FBI boxes. Many Stone files are redacted and missing, despite fruitless years of appeals; Stone was dead, informants -- FBI "moochers" Stone termed them -- were dead, the USSR had collapsed, no conceivable threats to national security existed. Still, the remaining files form a fascinating paper trail of invasions and assaults on private citizens. Hoover spent a great deal of taxpayers' money, sometimes illegally and always secretively and unethically, on what any sane person would think was a fairly needless exercise. On pain of death Stone could not have contained himself from writing and saying everything he thought.

Stone took the long view. American history had always "been marked by recurrent periods of paranoia, bigotry and fear of new ideas," he noted, but he remained optimistic and loyal. In the slaughterhouse that is human history, despite its flaws, America's democracy was one of the few "bright spots," he always said. This did not mean that Stone ever stopped trying to goad it toward a more perfect union.

People often mistook Stone's passionate arguments for personal animus. Stone never hated anyone, with the exception of Cold Warrior John Foster Dulles, whom he dismissed as the "Cracked Cato of Capitalism." If Stone had been a sour, curdled gadfly, his legacy would have been spent long ago, like those of Walter Winchell and Westbrook Pegler. Like all interesting people, Stone was as complex as he was controversial. He could be prickly and kind, generous and unconcerned, self-absorbed but consumed with society's underdogs. He could be peevishly impatient on deadline, then all smiles at dinner. He suffered fools not at all, but spent hours encouraging young writers.

"I used to get extremely discouraged, but heneverdid," said his longtime friend and editor of theProgressivemagazine, the late Erwin Knoll. "Whenever I was complaining about some horrible political action, he would say, 'Look, you're so lucky! You've got a ringside seat on this magnificent spectacle, the world!Enjoyit!' " Knoll said Stone's mistakes came from his idealism, "incurable optimism," and the desire to think the best of mankind. "When Lyndon Johnson suspended the bombing of North Vietnam, Izzy said that meant the war was about to end. A few days later I turned on the news and we had resumed the bombing. My phone rings and it was Izzy. And he says, 'I was wrong and you were right. I don't know how to make it up to you -- except to offer you a refund on your subscription.' " (Then, as always, a mere $5 a year.)

The great caricaturist David Levine portrayed Stone with a demonic gleam in his eye, digging out the dirt in Congress. Stone said, however, "I don't think the primary job of a free journalist in a free society is digging out the dirt. That's part of it, I suppose. The real problem is to provide greater understanding of the complexities in which your country and your people and your time find themselves enmeshed. That's our job, to translate these issues, to study them. The primary job is not to disgrace anybody or defame them, but to provide understanding."

As Stone often pointed out, the press, as it used to be called, was never as good as the myth. Historically, the control of news by the powerful was rampant. In Stone's day, family newspaper dynasties, wealthy businessmen, and government allies predominantly shaped the news and were typically antilabor, anti-New Deal, anti-civil-rights. Yet one could still find diversity and dissent printed by courageous publishers more interested in telling the truth than in large profits.

Today's vast media monopoly is no longer a fresh story but remains a disastrous new low, blocking diversity, severely hampering the public's right to know and substituting pap for truth. The far right are richly endowed by those with a vested interest in staying wealthy; their radio and television stations, newspapers, magazines, books, and Web sites disgorge to a global audience misleading information on everything from Bush tax cuts to the war on terrorism. The success of the right's takeover of information is described by scholars Anne and Paul Ehrlich: "Individuals who would simply have been run-of-the-mill fools haranguing a few dozen people on street corners in 1904 can command the attention of tens of millions of radio or television fans in 2004."

Ideology is matched by ignorance, dispensed to an often uncaring or gullible audience. On CNN in 2004, a morning-show host, Jack Cafferty, quipped that the start-up liberal-based network, Air America, was a "Communist radio network." When his cohost suggested liberalism wasn't the same as communism, Cafferty answered, "Aren't they synonymous?" That old canard, the myth of the liberal media, still sells; neocons know that they only have to use the word in a title and mainstream media will anxiously interview them or review their books to prove that the word does not apply to them. Cowardice should not be confused with credibility, but it is.

Telecommunication has transformed news gathering like no other revolution since the Gutenberg press. Those who started in journalism pounding typewriters and prowling libraries find Web sites an unfathomable miracle. In five minutes on the Internet, for instance, I was able to pull up the translated telegrams of Stalin to Mao during the Korean War. Ancient articles are produced in a click, and newspapers polish their Web sites as much as their subscription lists. Something unique has occurred in gathering "news" in the Iraq war that could make war correspondents obsolete and cause havoc with military censors. Soldiers are returning from a day's battle and instantly disgorging what happened in e-mails home. Yet this lightning ability to disseminate information has produced a troublesome database of lies as well as fact, trash and flash as well as insight. Rummaging through the blogosphere attic necessitates inexhaustible, exhausting attempts to separate truth from fiction.

Finding dissenting voices requires reading, a Paleolithic practice of dim recollection for the MTV crowd. Countless media watchdog groups, authors, and columnists such as theNation'sEric Alterman and theNew York Times'sFrank Rich, have brilliantly addressed the good, the bad, and the ugly in today's megamonopoly media. And Jon Stewart's Comedy CentralDaily Showspoof of media and politics is often hilariously accurate. Luckily, a host of the best journalists, many of whom were influenced by Stone, are still found in such publications as theNew York Review of Books,theNew Yorker,theNation,and in smaller magazines like theWashington Monthly.In sad capitulation to the right,Los Angeles Timescolumnist Bob Scheer was fired in 2005 and replaced with neo-con columnists. Luckily, voices of truth survive in media watchdog organizations such as FAIR, on the Web, and in independents like Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, and Bill Moyers. Many continue to see Stone as a beacon. Said Ivins, the leader in an unpopular posse pursuing and exposing George W. Bush, "I get courage just knowing Izzy is out there." Note that she did not use the past tense. Let us hope there will be a regenerative process with future generations, although the comments of one journalism professor at a major university are despairing; he told me that only 14 percent of his pupils were interested in print journalism. Stone would have regarded that as terrific odds. "All you can do, if you're lucky," he used to say to young journalists, "is change the odds a little.... You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it."

Stone once protested, "I don't have a pessimistic view -- I have alongview. If you want to change the human race overnight in a couple of meager centuries, of course it looks pessimistic. I have a basic democratic faith that there is a modicum of reason in all of us. And that's all we have to build on. And that's very precious." At the age of eighty, Stone sounded a warning much needed today: "Without that faith there is no reason for being a journalist. It's all we have to work with. That's supposed to be what motivates us."

He paused. "That is the heritage we have from Jefferson."

Excerpted from All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone by Myra MacPherson
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Foreword: The Importance of Being Izzy and the Death of Dissent in Journalism	p. xi
The Making of a Maverick
Coming to America	p. 3
Beginnings	p. 12
Boy Publisher	p. 29
Raking the Muck and Red, White, and Blue Patriotism	p. 41
Newspaperman in Knee Pants	p. 60
The Decisive Decade
Crashing into the Thirties	p. 81
New Deal, New Life, New York Post	p. 95
American Dictators and (Not Always) Popular Fronts	p. 118
Hitler, Lippmann, Izzy, and the Jews	p. 135
"My Heart Is with the Spanish Loyalists"	p. 152
When Tyrants Ruled	p. 163
Washington Wars, Hot and Cold
Nation on the Brink	p. 181
Great Expectations	p. 196
Living with Izzy	p. 211
Blood and Billions and Going Underground	p. 228
Guilty Until Proven Innocent	p. 246
A Hot War and a Cold Murder	p. 264
Going It Alone
Chasing Izzy	p. 285
Lies and Spies	p. 307
A Guerrilla Warrior during the Fifties Fetish	p. 329
Confessions	p. 348
A Bloody Revolution at Home	p. 359
Affairs of the Heart, Plus Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro	p. 378
The Haunting War	p. 391
From "We Shall Overcome" to "Off the Pigs"	p. 412
Icon
From Iconoclast to Icon	p. 435
Stone vs. Socrates	p. 457
The Last of the Great Fog Cutters	p. 475
Acknowledgments	p. 483
Notes	p. 489
Bibliography	p. 535
Index	p. 547
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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"All Governments Lie" The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone

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