By Anthony Marro
It’s tempting to speculate how I.F. (“Izzy”) Stone would have fared in the electronic world, able to reach millions instantly with the push of a button rather than schlepping his bundles of newspapers from the printer to the post office and then sending them off to individual subscribers by second-class mail. Fortunately, Myra MacPherson has resisted the temptation.
Speculation is a parlor game and honest biography is history, and it’s the history she’s produced that has important lessons for the present. It’s not the first word on Stone (she credits earlier works by Andrew Patner and Robert Cottrell) and it won’t be the last (D.D. Guttenplan’s biography is nearing completion). But it’s quite timely because “All Governments Lie” is being published at a time when reporters and editors everywhere are still asking themselves how they could have been so unquestioning about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in a country that, it seems clear, had been so effectively disarmed in the first gulf war that it barely had weapons of self-defense.
Stone likely could have told them just how and why they went wrong. For as MacPherson documents in this valuable book, his life’s work was not only advocating liberal causes but also exposing government lies and deceits, and attacking attempts by the government to intimidate and silence its critics. Her work is not only a biography of Stone but a detailed history of government attempts to manipulate public opinion through much of the twentieth century. It includes reminders that the mainstream press often was unable or unwilling to effectively counter them, at least in the short run, and argues that troublemakers like Stone are vital to a democracy.
The second part of Stone’s “All governments lie” quote is: “but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” Three years later, it’s still not clear whether the Bush administration actually believed what it was telling the rest of us. Stone himself might not have been able to sort it out either, but he would have worked very hard trying. There’s much that journalists of every stripe — from the most committed advocates of objectivity to the anarchists of the Internet — can learn from this book.
I.F. Stone was born Isador Feinstein in Philadelphia in 1907, the son of a father who had deserted from the Russian army at the start of the Japanese war and a mother who had emigrated from Odessa. Just where Stone’s radicalism came from isn’t certain since he seldom talked or wrote about his youth. But MacPherson believes it was rooted in the persecution of Jews in the czarist Russia of his parents, and nurtured by the success of turn-of-the-century reformers and muckrakers. He dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania mainly because he preferred working at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and never left journalism despite two afflictions that would seriously handicap most reporters, terrible eyesight and worse hearing. And after the New Deal ended he had few, if any, high-level Washington sources. He was considered such a radical (and was under such constant FBI surveillance) that many officials feared their careers could be destroyed if they were even caught talking to him. He did, however, have great insight, and sometimes considered the lack of sources more a blessing than a curse. “Establishment reporters undoubtedly know a lot of things I don’t,” he once said. “But a lot of what they know isn’t true.”
While Stone said often that all governments lie, he also knew that governments in democracies reveal a great deal. He read voraciously with the help of thick glasses and often a magnifying glass, transcripts of congressional hearings and agency reports in particular. He knew that there was always someone somewhere deep in the bureaucracy who knew what was really happening — or at least knew pieces of it — and that eventually it would be put into writing and then would be made public. It was a matter of finding the right pieces and connecting the right dots. “He sat at home and read everything in the goddamn world,” David Brinkley said. “He was always quoting some report of some obscure agency you never knew about — and distilled it into something interesting.” He also knew how to spot what others missed in their own reporting. He once told David Halberstam that The Washington Post was a particularly exciting paper to read because “you never know on what page you would find a page-one story.”
More important, he knew that you couldn’t become friendly with people you covered and still do a credible job. Murray Kempton said often that reporters are incapable of reporting honestly on people they call by their first name. Stone put it more colorfully. In the 1974 film documentary, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, there is a scene in which the ABC White House reporter is seen playing tennis with Nixon’s press spokesman, Ron Ziegler. “If you’re one of the crowd,” Stone says as the tennis balls fly back and forth, “you find yourself at dinner parties agreeing with people, a lot of half-baked nonsense, you shake your head very wisely and people see you shaking your head wisely, and pretty soon, you know, you’re caught up in the God-damnedest mess of crap anybody ever got caught up in.”
He stayed at arm’s length even from officials he admired, started out with the assumption that what the government was saying wasn’t entirely true, and found ways of getting the government itself — in its own official documents and in its own words — to confront its own lies.
Stone spent his whole adult life in journalism (he worked for the Camden Courier in New Jersey while still in high school, and then for The Philadelphia Inquirer, PM, The Nation, and the New York Post, among others) but not always in newsrooms. Most of his work during the eighteen-year run of I.F. Stone’s Weekly was done from his home. It was very lonely at times, MacPherson says, because the phone seldom rang and many establishment reporters regarded him as “a scruffy nag to avoid.”
He was an advocacy journalist in every sense of the word, spending most of his days preaching to the already converted. He had built the core readership of the Weekly from what Victor Navasky calls the “ghoul list” of subscribers to earlier leftist publications that had died. Probably the only readers of the Weekly who didn’t share his views on McCarthyism, the cold war, Vietnam, and civil rights were the FBI agents assigned to track him. He did some very good reporting over the years, but his strongest voice was as an editorial writer, columnist, and essayist. The famous David Levine caricature shows Stone in his Coke-bottle glasses and carrying a shovel, lifting the dome off the capitol and exposing the snakes and muck and money underneath. But Stone himself said that the real job of a free journalist in a free society wasn’t digging up dirt. Rather, he said, it was to “provide greater understanding of the complexities in which your country and your people and your time find themselves enmeshed.”
Today, some consider him a forerunner of honest bloggers. In his time, he was seen more as a pamphleteering descendant of Tom Paine. But in either role, he approached it as an iconoclast, a maverick, and at times a contradiction, describing himself as a “pious Jewish atheist” and as a socialist who hated collective action.
At one point in the twenties he in fact was a member of the Socialist Party. He left it, he said, because “I felt very strongly that a newspaperman ought not get too close to a party or he’d lose his independence.” But that wasn’t because he thought he should be detached. He believed journalists should serve the great currents of their time, and for Stone those were opposition to fascism (part of the reason for changing his name was concern that his criticisms would be discounted because of the Feinstein by-line), a commitment to civil rights, support for the creation of Israel (and a later concern about the treatment of Palestinians), and attacks on the whole range of harassments and intimidations inflicted on citizens by Joseph McCarthy, Hoover’s FBI, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which he seemed to consider America’s Cossacks. He was an early critic of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which he called a sham, and the whole Vietnam War. “How do you win a war in a peasant country on the side of the landlords?” But he was very slow to criticize the horrors of Stalin’s gulag (more on this later), and even at the time of Stalin’s death was still calling him a “giant figure” and a “great leader.”
Late in life, particularly after the documentary I.F. Stone’s Weekly was released, he became something of a cult figure, seen as wise, witty, and engaging, and a source of inspiration to a whole generation of younger journalists. Some who had known him in earlier times hadn’t always seen him that way. Penn Kimball, who had worked with him at PM and later taught for many years at Columbia, admired his tenacity but said that “he had no sense of humor that I could discern. He was a very self-centered fellow.” Robert Sherrill said that there were “little shit” aspects to his personality. And Shirley Katzander, another colleague at PM, considered him a humorless sexist. Asked about his personality, she told MacPherson that back when she knew him he didn’t have one.
MacPherson acknowledges that Stone wasn’t a feminist, and that particularly after he started working from home he expected his wife to wait on him and his family to accommodate him. “Father and his work were one, and to that one we were all of secondary importance,” his daughter Celia wrote. “When father napped, we tiptoed; when he was hungry, we ate.” When Celia and Walter Gilbert eloped and secretly borrowed Stone’s car to do it, his response when they called to tell him what they had done was: “This may be a joke or serious, but get the car down here. I need to deliver the papers!”
In MacPherson’s book, however, he has many more admirers than detractors. The Stone she describes was “braver than most” because he took on J. Edgar Hoover (Murray Kempton); “strong-willed, courageous, tough-minded, with hugely high standards for himself” (Peter Osnos); and charming because “he never accepted the idea that in order to be a heretic, a maverick, a solo practitioner, it was necessary to be a martyr or a monk” (Victor Navasky). Despite the Weekly’s small circulation, he had considerable impact because his writings helped organize and shape liberal thinking on national issues through much of six decades.
He also made a decent living at it. In 1927, he already was earning $40 a week at The Philadelphia Inquirer, which was very good money at the time. In the depths of the Depression, Stone, according to a friend, was making $125 a week at the New York Post while many reporters were working for $15 a week. By the time he closed the Weekly (which had become a biweekly) in 1971, it had a circulation of 70,000 and was grossing what in today’s dollars would be about $1.4 million a year.
Stone said he never actually joined the Communist Party, although he said late in life that he had been “a fellow traveler.” And while he was slow to criticize Stalin in the thirties and forties, from 1956 on he became a strong critic of Russian communism. That needs to be noted because a thick section of MacPherson’s book is devoted to refuting charges that surfaced after his death in 1989 that during the World War II years Stone had been a Russian spy. The evidence was skimpy and vague — two 1944 KGB memos discussing meetings with an American journalist identified with the letter “I” — and both D.D. Guttenplan, writing in The Nation, and Cassandra Tate, writing in CJR, seemed to have effectively discredited it more than a decade ago. But MacPherson felt the need to address it at length, she said, because the vilification is being kept alive in the blogosphere and repeated by people like Robert Novak and Ann Coulter, for whom she has even harsher words than they often use about others. Of all of her sources, MacPherson seems to have found the FBI the least useful. Much of the FBI surveillance time seems to have been spent listening to Stone shout “What did you say?” to whoever was on the other end of the phone. The 5,000 pages in his file included little she found worth working into her book, but they did show that even the FBI didn’t believe he was a spy, concluding that he was far too open in his association with Communist front groups to conduct any espionage.
MacPherson’s view is that he was a national treasure, probably more deserving of a statue in Washington than most of the generals there. That’s not likely to happen, but if it did, a good place for it might be in front of the Government Printing Office. It could show him peering through a magnifying glass at one if its reports, because that’s where he got many, if not most, of his scoops. n
Anthony Marro is a former editor of Newsday.
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