Izzy Stone

Grassroots Editor, Winter 1992

“Our tradition is one of protest and revolt,” the historian Henry Steele Commager once wrote, “and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past . . . while we silence the rebels of the present.” As further evidence of the American habit of domesticating the country’s radical heritage, witness the case of I.F. (Izzy) Stone. When Stone retired in the early 1970s, after a long and illustrious career of outspokenly independent journalism, there was a discernible sigh of relief from both the political and journalistic establishments. For politicians, Stone had been an annoying gadfly because he insisted on actually listening to what they said and reading the reports they issued and pointing out to the public the discrepancies between official pronouncements and reality. For journalists, Stone served as a constant reminder of how the tradition of a free press survived and how far short they fell of the mark he set.

When Stone announced, after folding up his one-man newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly—which he had published from 1953 through 1971—that he was undertaking a study of ancient Greece, a lot of people breathed more freely. After all, who but a few classical scholars could be upset by Stone’s raking muck on Socrates and Plato? (The result of Stone’s work, The Trial of Socrates, finally appeared in 1988 and did upset many classical scholars with its characterization of Socrates as a proto-fascist.) Once he was safely relegated to the status of semi-retired, the cycle of homages and testimonials could begin and, with Stone’s death in June 1989, these encomiums reached a crescendo. Stone understood the irony of the development of his reputation, once telling his wife, “Honey, I’m going to graduate from a pariah to a character and then, if I last long enough, I’ll be regarded as a national institution.”

The problem with making Stone a national monument is that many of the unique characteristics, eccentricities and flaws that guided and marked his career likely will be chipped off to fit the mold. Stone’s admirers are primarily found in one of two groups—political left-liberals and working journalists—each with its own agenda. And with the growing abundance of hagiographies of Stone, we are in danger of losing sight of Izzy Stone, the man. (For a recent example of this tendency toward hero-worshipping of Stone, absent any subtlety or nuance, see Robert Cottrell’s Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone.)

By the end of World War II, Stone already had been working for more than twenty years as a reporter and editorial writer for a variety of liberal newspapers and journals. His politics placed him on the left edge of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. But with the advent of the Cold War, American politics shifted to the right, and Stone found himself increasingly politically isolated. The publication of The Hidden History of the Korean War in 1952 completed Stone’s ostracism from the political mainstream. With this caustic attack on Truman’s foreign policy, Stone was characterized by Richard Rovere as “a writer who thinks up good arguments for poor Communist positions.”

In many specifics, Stone’s argument in The Hidden History is tendentious and based on circumstantial evidence. Even historian Stephen Ambrose, an admirer of the book, describes as “weak” Stone’s thesis that South Korea, with American and Taiwanese encouragement, deliberately provoked the North Korean invasion. But the book remains significant, not only because Stone stood practically alone as a radical critic of the war, but because he recognized in the actions of the American government and military many of the same problems that would become increasingly apparent during the next decade in the Vietnam war: a systematic policy of official deceit, suspicious enemy body counts, indiscriminate killing of civilians (especially through air power), and deliberate attempts to foil the peace process.

Unwilling to curb his independence to fit within the parameters of the Cold War consensus, Stone began publishing the Weekly on January 17, 1953, with himself as sole reporter and editor. At a time when the Korean war continued while the truce talks dragged on, the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg wound its way through the appeals process, Senator Joseph McCarthy was at the peak of his power, and the American left, in Abe Peck’s words, “had been reduced to a few caring people with Jobian patience and some Kremlin groupies,” it was hardly an opportune moment to begin publishing a small, radical newsletter, especially when, as Stone said, “There was nothing to the left of me but the Daily Worker.”

But Stone slowly built up a devoted following throughout the Weekly’s first decade—circulation increased from the original 5,300 to 18,000 by 1962—based on a combination of eclectic radicalism and solid investigative journalism. Stone hewed an independent political path. In June 1953, for instance, he urged the left to support Eisenhower’s peace initiatives in Korea. Pragmatism necessitated this tactic, he argued, because in the hysteria of the Cold War, “peace” had largely become synonymous with appeasement. But Eisenhower’s plan gave the left a chance to put the peace issue back in the realm of respectable debate.

Similarly, Stone self-consciously recognized that his maverick radicalism would alienate the support of many of the “Kremlin groupies” in his audience. After a 1956 visit to the Soviet Union, for instance, he wrote, “I feel like a swimmer under water who must rise to the surface or his lungs will burst. Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men.” The next year he wrote of Soviet-style communism, “this is not socialism as it was envisaged by Marx and Engels. They saw in it a more perfect democracy, not rule from the top by a self-chosen few. . . . This rigid, naive, dogmatic view is the very opposite of that rich, complex and dynamic concept of social change which Marx and Engels developed.”

In a 1956 article assessing the significance of the Rosenberg case, Stone excoriated both the American government’s and the Communists’ handling of the trial, claiming that the use of the case for Communist propaganda was shameful and that Communists raised no protest against the “disappearances” and executions of political opponents in Eastern bloc countries. But Stone refused to join the self-satisfied chorus of Cold Warriors condemning political purges in the East while failing to acknowledge the American purge of political dissidents. In praising the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Boris Pasternak for his novel Doctor Zhivago, Stone criticized the double standard of American celebrators of Pasternak. “I do not remember that Life magazine, which glorifies Pasternak, ever showed itself any different from the Pravda-Kommunist crowd in dealing with our own Pasternaks. I do not recall that Life defended Howard Fast for receiving the Stalin award or deplored the venomous political hostility which drove Charlie Chaplin and more recently Paul Robeson into exile.”

As a muckraker, adversity forced Stone to develop his own approach to investigating stories. Poor hearing precluded reliance on interviews or public hearings, while political isolation prevented access to the inside sources most journalists believe necessary to getting fresh scoops. Thus Stone developed the habit of poring over official government documents and teasing out the significant facts overlooked by mainstream journalists facing the dual pressures of deadlines and political conformity. “As a reporter who began by covering small towns, where one really has to dig for the news,” Stone wrote in 1955, “I can testify that Washington is in many ways one of the easiest cities in the world to cover. The problem is the abundance of riches. It is true that the Government, like every other government in the world, does its best to distort the news in its favor—but that only makes the job more interesting.”

After slowly building up a respectable following in the Weekly’s first decade, Stone’s reputation soared—along with his circulation, which reached 71,000 by 1971—in the 1960s, based primarily on his coverage of the Vietnam war. An early and consistent critic of the war, Stone was a major source of information and inspiration for the burgeoning antiwar movement. At a December 1964 meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society, Stone encouraged the organization to adopt Vietnam as its major issue, which inspired SDS to organize the first major antiwar rally, held at the White House in April 1965.

Long before the term “credibility gap” entered common parlance, Stone specialized in pointing out examples of government mendacity. He was an immediate critic of the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, whereby Congress, virtually without dissent, handed over to President Johnson its Constitutionally-prescribed power to declare war. Stone questioned whether the attack on two U.S. destroyers by North Vietnamese patrol boats was really unprovoked. Four years later, looking back at the Tonkin Gulf resolution, Stone viewed the administration’s attempt to subvert the Constitution as running much deeper than even he had originally suspected. The Johnson administration had been looking for an excuse to widen the war and the Tonkin Gulf incident merely provided it. “For all this goes back to the question,” he wrote, “not just of decision making in a crisis but of crisis-making to support a secretly pre-arranged decision.”

Despite his outsider’s status—or perhaps because of it—Stone consistently broke stories the mainstream media missed. His most famous scoop came with his dissection of the 1965 government White Paper, “Invasion from the North,” which sought to prove the war was not an indigenous rebellion, but an invasion orchestrated by Communist forces outside South Vietnam. Using the government’s own evidence, Stone undermined the credibility of the White Paper. Of all the weapons and supplies captured, he said, “The material of North Vietnamese origin included only . . . 24 French sub-machine guns ‘modified’ in North Vietnam, 3 machine guns made in North Vietnam, 16 helmets, a uniform and an undisclosed number of mess kits, belts, sweaters and socks. Judging by this tally, the main retaliatory blow should be at North Vietnam’s clothing factories.” As Thomas Powers said, “The effect of the white paper, and of Stone’s reply, was to destroy the government’s claim that it understood the war because it alone had the facts.”

Stone saw the war as having a variety of pernicious effects on the American government and people. It caused the United States to sacrifice its own political principles both abroad, as it imposed a series of antidemocratic regimes on South Vietnam, and at home, as it took extralegal steps to squelch the growing antiwar movement. It dehumanized the sensibilities of the American people—“If our spirits were not so dulled by our own propaganda,” he wrote in 1965, “we would realize how shamefully our country is acting.” And it diverted attention away from needed civil rights and anti-poverty programs at home into a war that Stone labeled doubly racist. “So long as the war goes on it must deepen racial bitterness at home and abroad because colored people are the victims and because colored men make up so disproportionately large a share of our own combat troops while the cry rises to save the white boys from the draft for the graduate schools.”

Throughout his career, the issue about which Stone wrote and felt most passionately was the fate of Israel. An ardent Zionist, Stone had traveled with Jewish refugees from the Polish-Czech border to the Middle East at the end of World War II, a story chronicled in his 1946 book Underground to Palestine. But his long-standing support of Israel was matched by sympathy for the Palestinians displaced by the development of a Jewish homeland. After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Stone wrote, “For me the Arab problem is also the No. 1 Jewish problem. How we act toward the Arabs will determine what kind of people we become: either oppressors and racists in our turn like those from whom we have suffered, or a noble race able to transcend the tribal xenophobias that afflict mankind.” This series of article on the 1967 war caused a rift between Stone and many other Jewish intellectuals. Writing in Commentary, Martin Peretz decried Stone’s “apostasy” and stated that he “purges the anti-Zionist case of its usual vitriol, obfuscates it a bit, and makes it his own.” But Stone remained an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights, urging Jews to rediscover what he termed “the other Zionism”—a view historically maintained by a minority of prominent Zionist intellectuals calling for reconciliation with the Arabs based on “a recognition that two peoples—not one—occupy the same land and have the same rights.”

Despite the elevation of his reputation to “national institution,” Stone remains difficult to pigeonhole. Those on the left, for instance, often tend to gloss over his Zionism. Similarly, while the left increasingly views the Western intellectual tradition as a bastion for the hegemony of dead white European males, Stone was an unrepentant defender of Western culture who, in retirement, undertook a monumental study of the development of freedom of thought throughout Western history (of which his book on Socrates was the first volume). And in an age when the left is more familiar with Oliver Stone than Izzy, it is important to remember that Stone dismissed criticism of the Warren Commission report as “paranoid nonsense.”

That Stone is celebrated by working journalists shows an uneasy accommodation to their present status. In holding Stone up as an exemplar of the American tradition of a free press, they can praise him while simultaneously confessing that the brand of journalism he practiced is no longer practical. For Stone represented the antithesis of the major trends of post-World War II American journalism. In an age of growing corporate control of the media, Stone operated as an individual entrepreneur. At a time when insider journalists defended their increasingly close relationship with policy-makers as necessary for getting scoops, Stone jealously guarded his independence. And as journalists justify the increasing sensationalism of the news as necessary to hold the public’s interest, it is convenient to forget that Stone built his reputation on the basis of his painstaking research and his patient explanation of the importance of official government documents.