I.F. Stone, who never had the greatest eyesight, made it worse by spending much of his working life reading tiny-print federal documents to dig out tidbits and revelations missed, ignored or concealed by the megamedia of his time. I first encountered him in the fall of 1964 at the house of an assistant professor who subscribed to I.F. Stone's Weekly, a newsletter that never exceeded 70,000 circulation but exposed more government chicanery than hoary publications reaching far more readers. That fall, as I was trying to wrap my head around the meaning of the growing war in Vietnam, Stone exposed the lie of the Gulf of Tonkin incident when no other journalist delved or dared. After that, I read every issue of the Weekly I could. Twenty-five years later, I was fortunate to obtain a signed copy of his The Trial of Socrates just months before his death.
Stone's newsletter came about in great part because he was blacklisted from regular journalism at the height of McCarthyist hysteria. And thank goodness for it. When he died two decades ago, he came under attack from right-wingers determined to smear him and his legacy. In All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, published in 2006, Myra MacPherson wrote:
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. ...
At Stone's death in 1989, a laudatory Washington Post editorial 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.
At The Nation, another Stone biographer, D.D. Guttenplan - American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone - writes:
| I.F. Stone
| Although a radical pariah for most of his career, towards the end of his life America's greatest investigative journalist, I.F. Stone, had become a kind of liberal talisman—a cuddly curmudgeon whose coke bottle glasses and wrinkly venerability made him safe for mainstream admiration. Because I.F. Stone's Weekly—the one-man, four-page newsletter he published himself, exposing White House lies and Pentagon prevarications—was run out of his Washington basement, nowadays Stone is often called "the first blogger." As his biographer, it's a label I've always resisted, pointing out that Stone made a good living from his work, supporting a wife and three children thanks to thousands of subscribers who paid to read what he had to say. And though I'm often asked "What would Izzy have thought?" about various contemporary political phenomena, from the Tea Party to the rise of Hugo Chávez, in most cases the only honest answer is "Why don't you break out the Ouija board and ask him yourself?"
But I.F. Stone would have loved WikiLeaks. This is, after all, the man who wrote: "Nothing makes life more interesting than outwitting censorship." Julian Assange was still a teenage hacker when Stone died in June 1989, and the WikiLeaks founder's motives and early influences are as much of a mystery as his personal life. But what WikiLeaks has achieved, in a remarkably short space of time, is nothing less than the Holy Grail of muckrakers from Ida Tarbell to I.F. Stone. Perhaps Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Brass Check was a pioneering exposé of media self-censorship, put it best: if a journalist could only "succeed in his efforts to make the people believe what 'everybody knows' then he will be recognized in future as a benefactor of his race." ...
Hillary Clinton may not like it, but when Stone observed "the State Dept. is constantly leaking material to favored reporters" back in 1945 (!) he wasn't breaking news either. Reminding Nation readers that "letting 'confidential' information leak out" is "the favorite Washington pastime," he cautioned: "If this is a crime, all but a hopelessly inefficient minority of Washington officials and newspapermen ought to be put in jail."
While Stone cherished his iconoclast's independence, joking that "establishment reporters undoubtedly know a lot that I don't know. But a lot of what they know isn't true," he also felt that, in standing up the Nixon administration and printing the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post and the New York Times had vindicated the honor of his profession. I have no doubt he would feel the same debt to the editors of today's Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País. "To suppress the truth in the name of national security is the surest way to undermine what we claim to be preserving," he wrote in 1966. "There is a is a Latin legal maxim—justitia fiat, ruat coelum: Let justice be done though the heavens fall. I would paraphrase it for newspapermen and say: Let the truth be told as we see it though officials claim the disclosure would cause the heavens to collapse upon them. |
• • • • •
At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:
One of the fault lines developing in the DNC chairmanship race is the divide between the national DNC and the state party chairs. I am sympathetic to arguments from the state parties that the DNC doesn't give back to the states, and I am sympathetic to the DNC's argument that the state parties are a bastion of corruption and fail to innovate.
A perfect example -- the state parties are furious that the DNC had paid canvassers in Blue areas (like Berkeley, NYC and Boston) raising money for the DNC. The state parties considered this a raid on their own turf, and demanded a portion of the proceeds.
But really, why didn't the state parties have their own paid canvassers doing the same? Instead of whining about things, why not [mimic] the DNC's success?
In a perfect world, the state parties would be incubators of innovative political tactics. They are smaller and, theoretically, more nimble than the national organization. So why are they expecting handouts from the national party?
If anything, the DNC should dole out grants to fund entrepeneural projects in the states -- incubating new tactics and rewarding innovation. Those projects that show promise could then be adopted by the national party and cloned in other states. |