Erasmus by Siegfried Kracauer

 

I sometimes wonder whether advancing age does not increase our susceptibility to the speechless plea of the dead; the older one grows, the more he is bound to realize his future is the future of the past – history


Roughly speaking, my interest lies with the nascent state of great ideological movements, that period when they were not yet institutionalized but still competed with other ideas for supremacy. And it centers not so much on the course followed by the triumphant ideologies in the process as on the issues in dispute at the time of their emergence. I should even say that it revolves primarily around the disputes themselves, with the emphasis on those possibilities which history did not see fit to explore.

 

This interest is intimately connected with an experience which Marx once pithily epitomized when he declared that he himself was no Marxist. Is there any influential thinker who would not have to protect his thoughts from what his followers – or his enemies, for that matter – make of them? Every idea is coarsened, flattened, and distorted on its way through the world. The world which takes possession of it does so according to its own lights and needs. Once a vision becomes an institution, clouds of dust gather around it, blurring its contours and contents. The history of ideas is a history of misunderstandings. Otherwise expressed, an idea preserves its integrity and fullness only as long as it lacks the firmness of a widely sanctioned belief. Perhaps the period of its inception is most transparent to the truths at which it aims in the midst of doubts.

 

One might argue here that history does not know such caesuras; that actually the controversy goes on after an idea, or what remains of it, has gained ascendency. As a matter of fact, the tradition of any ruling doctrine is a story of continual attempts to adjust it, however precariously, to contemporary demands, ever-changing situations. And these attempts at reinterpretation may lead far away from it; no dogma is immune against heresy and corrosion. But even so the initial phase of an accepted idea appears to have a significance of its own which distinguishes it from all subsequent phases. Were it otherwise, the history of many a powerful belief would not comprise efforts which tend to justify the concern with the time of its birth. They invariably spring from the conviction that the dominant creed of the epoch has been corrupted by accretions, misconceptions, and abuses which altogether obscure its precious core. And it is logical that this view should kindle a desire to undo the injurious work of tradition and rehabilitate that creed in its virgin purity. From its corrupted state in which it is all but unrecognizable the eyes turn back towards its yet unspoiled origins. A case in point is Luther. His development also shows that the return to the sources is sometime tantamount to a fresh departure, the restorer revealing himself as an innovator.

 

Be this as it may, I feel immensely attracted by the eras which preceded the final establishment of Christianity in the Graeco-Roman world, the Reformation, the Communist movement. The fascination they exert on me must be laid to my hunch that they carry a message as important and elusive as that of the trees which aroused Proust’s compassion. And what would the message be? One thing is certain: it does not figure among the contending causes of those eras but is hidden away in their interstices; it lurks, for instance, behind the debate between Celsus and Origen, or the religious disputes between Catholics and reformers. Its location is suggestive of its content. The message I have in mind concerns the possibility that none of the contending causes is the last word on the last issues at stake, that there is, on the contrary, a way of thinking and living which, if we could only follow it, would permit us to burn through the causes and thus to dispose of them – a way which, for lack of a better word, or any word at all, may be called humane. Werner Jaeger alludes to it when discussing the desire for mutual penetration between Greek culture and Christian faith in the second century A. D.:  ‘Both sides must finally have come to recognize that .  .  .  .an ultimate unity existed between them, and a common core of ideas, which so sensitive a thinker as Santayana did not hesitate to call ‘humanistic’ .  .  .   Actually both sides failed to achieve that ultimate ‘humanistic’ unity. Need I expressly mention that the possibility of it presents itself at every juncture of the controversy which threads the historical process? There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in. Yet even though the message of the humane is virtually omnipresent, it certainly does not claim attention with with equal urgency al the time. No doubt this message, whether received or not, is particularly pressing and definite in the eras  which reverberate with the birth pangs of a momentous idea.  It is they in which the mingling antagonists are challenged to ask the fundamental questions instead of having to tackle this or that sham problem handed down by tradition.

The figure of Erasmus, who lived among the antagonists  without belonging to them, illustrates most of what has been said just now in so striking a manner that I cannot resist the temptation to insert a few remarks about him. They are based on the assumption that he came as close as was possible in his situation to delineating a way of living free from ideological constraints; that in effect all that he did and was had a bearing on the humane.

Erasmus never tired of spreading the message of it. His editions of the Greek New Testament and the Fathers as well as his Adagia and Colloguia with their constant recourse to Greek and Latin authors clearly testified to his desire to revive the original simplicity of the Christian doctrine and to accept the ancients he admired into the company of the saints. His satires on monasticism and the corruption of the clergy were no less public property than his demands for Church reform in the spirit of Christian humanism. Nor did he easily miss an opportunity to publicize his ideas about the pitiable condition of the poor, the greed of the princes and other secular affairs; his tracts and letters teem with references to topical issues, conveying views whose often far-sighted modernism owed much to his de-dogmatized Christian outlook. He abhorred violence and sympathized with the common man, the simple soul. All this the contemporaries knew. They also knew that he was loath to take sides and shunned clear-cut decisions. And they could not help noticing that he invariably rejected the positions offered him by popes and kings. ( the stock opinion that he did so out of his sense of independence is a model case of sloppy thinking.)

The conclusion that Erasmus stood out like a monument for everybody to see would seem to e unavoidable. However, the strange thing is that in spite of his outspokenness he was the most elusive of men. ‘Nobody has been privileged,’ a friend of his formulated, ’to look in the heart of Erasmus, and yet it is full of eloquent content.’

Secrets mean a challenge to the interpreter. Judging from the evidence, the psychological make-up of Erasmus related to the build of his mind in a significant way. It should therefore be possible to trace the diverse aspects of this figure to a hypothetical common source. Such an attempt may not afford insight into the heart of Erasmus but it will at least reveal something about the forces that shaped its contents. Now both the personal leanings and the intellectual pursuits of Erasmus coincide in suggesting that he was possessed with a fear of all that is definitely fixed. To state the same in terms involving his spiritual self, he was essentially motivated  by the conviction that the truth ceases to be true as soon as it becomes dogma, thus forfeiting the ambiguity which marks it as truth. His fear –or should I say, his nostalgia for perfect immediacy? – reflected this conviction; a spiritual rather than a psychological fear, it was largely identical with the mystical strain in him which has been repeatedly emphasized in the literature.

Everything falls into a pattern once you think of this fear as the prime mover behind the scenes. For one thing, various seemingly unrelated personality traits of Erasmus find their natural explanations in its stirrings It makes one understand his distrust of philosophical speculations and his unwillingness to participate in theological disputations, bound as they were to run into a medley of categorical assertions. It accounts for his ingrained repugnance to any binding commitments and his skeptical attitude towards alleged solutions of certain religious problems which, he observed on some occasion, had better be put off till the time when ‘we shall see God face to face.’ And it naturally was at the bottom of his hatred of the absolute assuredness in which Luther indulged – Luther whose turn to the Bible and fight against the abuses in the Church Erasmus unswervingly approved at the risk of getting increasingly entangled in polemics which incommoded him greatly.

More decisive, his fear of the fixed also explains the position which his Christian humanism was to occupy among the competing ideologies of the period. To be sure, Erasmus championed a cause in the sense that he aimed at religious regeneration and social improvements. But since his aversion to formulas and recipes  with their congealed contents prompted him to keep his ideas, so to speak, in a fluid, they did not, and could  not, jell into an institutionalized program; from the outset, their true place was in the interstices between Catholic doctrine, as established by tradition, and the hardening creeds of the reformers. One might even assume that Erasmus would have disavowed, or indeed no longer recognized, his own message had it confronted him in the guise of one of these beliefs; their hold on the masses was bought at a price he was not willing to pay. His cause was precisely to put an end to the historical causes.

This carries all-important implications for the way in which the world responded to Erasmus. The universal fame he rapidly won indicates that at least some of his ideas and endeavors ingratiated themselves with people at large. Not to mention his influence on the Spiritualists, the Spanish mystics, and, in later days, enlightened 18^th-century minds – influences partly due to misunderstandings - , he led the theologians back to the sources of Christianity, spread the gospel of humanism, and encouraged fuller literary expression. It cannot be doubted either that his concern for a better society, his belief in perfectibility through knowledge and education, and his insistence on what has time and again been confused with tolerance gave a voice to longings whose existence the soft halo surrounding his public image tends to confirm. Many may have welcomed Erasmus as a liberator redeeming them from narrow-mindedness and prejudice. In the ‘Erasmus-atmosphere,’ to use Walther Koehler’s term, they could breathe more freely.

But they were scattered in the crowd; they did not rally round Erasmus. His message proper was of little practical consequence; it created a mood rather than a movement, a mood as intangible as a transient glow in the night, a fairly-tale‘s  promise. There were Lutherans, no Erasmians. How could have it been otherwise?  True, Erasmus wanted to change institutions, yet he did not want the world to corrupt his inner most cravings by institutionalizing them. Out of his all-pervading fear of the fixed he himself prevented  his  ‘cause’  from degenerating  into a cause, even though he was aware that his reluctance to become ‘engaged’ inevitably spelled defeat. ‘I am afraid,’ he wrote seven years before his death, ‘that the world will ultimately carry the day.’

This was exactly what happened: the world, a world split into camps, blurred his intentions and objectives. His wide visibility notwithstanding, Erasmus remained largely invisible. Conservative Catholics and reformers alike lacked the language to comprehend a message which cut across, and transcended, the doctrines to which they adhered. The language they used was geared to their respective causes. So the vision of Erasmus disappeared behind a veil of misinterpretations. Small wonder that he sat between all chairs imaginable. Luther rudely called him an Epicurean, which in measure he was, and zealous schoolmen accused him of having touched off a religious and social revolution, which was not entirely untrue either. And since he heeded his own counsels in sifting the good from the bad in the conflicting doctrines, the warring antagonists, offended by his refusal to let himself be cast in the role of a partisan, presented him as a weakling who wavered irresponsibly between Rome and Wittenberg and took refuge in unavailing compromises.

 

From the angle of the world Erasmus was a fickle customer indeed. He defended the uprising of the German peasants as a revolt of misery and despair, but no sooner did they commit excesses than he (sadly) admitted the necessity of repressive countermeasures. He attacked the rigidity of a tradition which opposed the philological revision of sacred texts and yet exhorted the pious to bear with traditional abuses, arguing that it was impossible to create a new world overnight. His evasive attitude towards the cult of the saints and the confession – institutions which he neither criticized nor wholeheartedly endorsed – could not but strengthen the impression of his intrinsic ambiguity. And this ambiguity went hand in hand with his eternally reiterated pleas for peaceful agreements at all costs. ‘I love concord to such a degree,’ Erasmus declared in 1522, ‘that should a debate develop I would rather forsake part of the truth than trouble the peace.’

These words hint of the motives behind his conduct. With Erasmus, the notion of peace was pregnant with Christian meanings; it foreshadowed a fulfillment beyond the reach of established creeds which, poor substitutes of the unattainable truth, breed only conflict and bloodshed. Hence, what the staunch devotees among Catholics and Protestants stigmatized as undecided wavering on his part was in reality nothing but the deceptive outward appearance of his unwavering determination to move straight ahead towards the peace he envisioned. Fortunately, he was a masterful navigator; for as matters stood, he was obliged to steer his way between rivalling parties with prudence and much finesse. Yet despite the fact that he pursed a middle course and what looked to the world as such, Erasmus was the opposite of a compromiser. His efforts to bring the dissenters back to the fold and impress upon the Church the need for reforms did not result from opportunistic, basically anti-Utopian considerations but, conversely, amounted to an utterly uncompromising attempt to remove the causes that prevented the arrival of peace. Utopian  visionaries condemn those who stick to the middle of the road on the ground that that they callously betray mankind to perpetuate a state of imperfection. In the case of Erasmus  the middle way was the direct road to Utopia – the way of the humane. It is not by accident that he was a friend of Thomas Moore.

That most of his contemporaries should ignore an approach which would have lost all its meaning if it had become a cause lay in the nature of things. The question is whether Erasmus himself realized where the way he followed would lead him. His message pointed into an abyss: did he fathom its depths? In one of his Colloquies he has Eusebius, its protagonist, extol the divine power moving such ancient authors as Cicero or Plutarch and then proposes that ‘perhaps the spirit of Christ or Plutarch is more widespread than we understand.’ It is the very thought of Erasmus which Eusebius epitomizes. Taking his cue from the apologists and the revered Origen, Erasmus held that the pagan sages too were inspired by divine revelation and that, because of  the radiant manifestation of the Logos in Jesus Christ, Christianity was the consummation of the best of antiquity. This extension of Christianity into the virtual goal of all worthy non-Christian strivings permitted him to reconcile his devotion to ‘Saint Socrates’ with his faith in transubstantiation and to protest the Christian quality of his humanistic concerns. He conceived of the humaneness to which he aspired as an outgrowth of Christian liberty.

For all we know this might well be the whole story. But is it? Note that Erasmus was reportedly as inscrutable as he was outspoken. There must have been things he left unsaid -  perhaps things too dangerous to be revealed? To venture a guess at what will forever remain his secret, it is not entirely improbable that, in pondering his road and its destination, Erasmus arrived a conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may ( or may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once and for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas and institutional arrangements for the sake of that ‘ultimate unity’ which the causes mean and thwart.

Memoirs From Beyond The Grave by Chateaubriand

 

Book Six, I. Prologue

London, April to September 1822;

            Revised in December 1846


Thirty-one years after having set sail for America as a simple sub-lieutenant, I set sail for London with a passport conceived in the following terms: Laissez passer sa seigneurie le Vicomte de  Chateaubriand, pair de France, ambassadeur du Roi pres Sa Majeste Britanique, etc., etc. ‘Let pass his lordship the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Peer of France, Ambassador of the King to His Majesty, the King of Britain.’ No description; my greatness was supposed to be enough to make my face familiar everywhere.

A steamboat, chartered for me alone, carried me from Calais to Dover. When I set foot on English soil, on April 5, 1822, I was saluted by the cannon of the fort. An officer came on behalf of the commandant to offer me an honor guard. Down at the Shipwright Inn, the owner and waiters of the place received me with deep bows and bare heads. Madame the Mayoress invited me to a soirée in the name of the loveliest ladies of the town. Monsieur Billing, an attaché of my embassy, was awaiting my arrival. A meal of enormous fish and monstrous quarters of beef restored Monsieur L’Ambassadeur, who had no appetite at all and who was not tired in the least. The townspeople, gathered beneath my windows, filled the air with their loud huzzahs. The officer returned and, despite my protest, posted sentries at my door. The next day, after distributing no small amount of my master the King’s money, I was on my way to London, to the booming of cannon, in a light carriage driven at full trot by a pair of elegantly dressed jockeys. My servants followed in other carriages, and couriers dressed in my livery rode alongside the cavalcade. We passed through Canterbury, drawing te gaze of John Bull and of every horse and rider that crossed or path. At Blackheath, a common once haunted by highwaymen, I found an entirely new village. Soon after, I saw the immense skullcap of smoke that covers the city of London.

Plunging into this gulf of carbon vapor, as though into one of the maws of Tartarus, and crossing the entire town, whose streets I well remembered, I landed at the embassy in Portland Place,. There the  chargé d’affaires, M. le Comte George de Caraman, the secretaries of the embassy, M. le Vicomte de Marcellus, M. le Elise Decazes, M.de Bourqueney, and other attaches welcomed me with dignified deferentiality. Every usher, porter, valet, and footman of the house assembled on the sidewalk. I was presented with the cards of the English ministers ad foreign ambassadors, who had already been informed of my upcoming arrival.

On May 17, in the year of grace 1793, I disembarked at Southampton in my way to this same city of London, an obscure and humble traveler coming from Jersey.  No Mayoress took notice of me,. On May 18, William Smith, the mayor of Southampton, handed me a travel permit for London to which a copy of the Alien Bill had been attached. My description read, in English: ‘Francois de Chateaubriand, French officer in the emigrant army, five feet four inches high, thin shape, brown hair and brown side whiskers.’ I modestly shared the least expensive carriage with a few sailors on leave. I changed horses at the most miserable inns. Poor, sick, and unknown, I entered a rich an opulent city, where Mr. Pitt reigned. I found lodgings, for six shillings a month, under the laths of a garret at the end of a little street off the Tottenham Court Road, which a cousin from Brittany had prepared for me:

Ah! Monseigneur, que votre vie,

D’ honneurs aujourd’ hui si remplie,

Differe de ces heureux temps!

Yet another sort of obscurity has come to darken my days in London. My political positon is overshadowing my literary fame, and there is not a fool in the three kingdoms who doesn’t prefer the ambassador of Louis XVIII to the author of The Genius of Christianity. I shall see how things turnout once I’m dead, or once I’ve ceased to fill M. le Duc Decazes’s post in the Court of  George IV – a succession as bizarre as the rest of my life.

Now that I am in London as the French ambassador, one of my greatest pleasures is to abandon my carriage in the corner of a square and go wandering on foot trough the backstreets I used to frequent; the cheap, working-class suburbs where sufferings refuge with similar sufferings; the unheralded shelters I haunted with my partners in distress, never knowing whether I would have enough bread to survive the morrow – I, whose table is laden with three or four courses today. In all those narrow and destitute doorways that were once open to me, I meet only unfamiliar faces. No longer do I see my compatriots wandering the streets, recognizable by their gestures, their gait, the state and cut of their clothes; no longer do I catch the sight of those martyred priests, wearing their little collars, their big three-cornered hats, and their long black threadbare frocks, to whom the English used to tip their hats a they passed by. Wide streets lined with palaces have been cut, brides built, and promenades laid; Regent’s Park occupies the site, close to Portland Place, where once meadows were covered with herds of cattle. A graveyard, which dominated the view from the window of one of my garrets, has disappeared into the confines of a factory. When I go to see Lord Liverpool, I am hard pressed to pick out the empty spot where Charles I’s scaffold once stood,. New buildings, closing in around the statue of Charles II, have encroached, along with forgetfulness, on memorable events.

How I mourn, amid my insipid pomp, that world of tribulations and tears, that time when my sorrows mingled with the sorrows of a whole colony of exiles! It’s true then that everything changes, that the poor die the same as the prosperous. And what has become of my brothers in emigration? Some are dead, and others have suffered various fates: like me, they have seen their family and their friends disappear, and they find themselves less at home in their own country than they were in a foreign land. Was it not in that land that we had our gatherings, our amusements, our celebrations, and above all our youths? Mothers and young maidens, starting their lives in adversity brought home the weekly fruit of their labors, then went out to revel in some hometown dance. Friendships were struck up in the small talk of the evenings, after the day’s work, on the grass of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. In chapels, decorated with our own hands in dilapidated rooms, we prayed together on January 21 and on the day of the Queen’s death, deeply moved by the funeral oration delivered by the emigrant curé of our village. We strolled along the Thames, gazing at the ships towering over the docks and loaded with the riches of the world, admiring the country houses of Richmond – we who were poor, we who were deprived of our fathers’ roofs. All these things were true happiness!

When I come home in 1822, instead of being greeted by my friend, trembling with cold, who opens the door of our garret calling me by my first name, who goes to bed on a pallet next to mine, covering himself with a thin coat and with nothing but moonlight for a lamp, I walk by torchlight between two lines of footmen ending in five or six respectful secretaries, and arriver, riddled along the way by the words Monseigneur, My Lord, Your Excellency, Monsieur, L’Ambassadeur, at a parlor draped in gold and silk.

- I’m begging you, young men, leave me be! Enough with these My Lords! What do you want me to do with you? Go and laugh in the chancery, as if I weren’t here! Do you think you can make me take his masquerade seriously? Do you think I am stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes? The Marquess of Londonderry s coming to call, you say, the Duke of Wellington has left his card: Mr. Canning came looking for me; Lady Jersey expects me for dinner with Lord Brougham; Lady Gwydir hopes that I will join her in her box at the Opera at ten o’clock; Lady Mansfield, at midnight, a Almack’s .  .  .

Have mercy on me! After all, where can I hide? Who will deliver me? Who will rescue me from these persecutions? Come back, you lovely days of indigence and solitude! Rise up and live again, my companions in exile! Let us go, old comrades of the camp-bed and the pallet, let us go out into the country, into the little garden of some forgotten tavern, and drink a bad cup of tea on a wooden bench, talking of our foolish hopes and or ungrateful homeland, mulling over or troubles, looking for ways to help each other or one of our relations even worse off than ourselves.

This is how I’ve felt and what I’ve thought these first days of my embassy in London. Only by saturating myself in the less ponderous sadness of Kensington Gardens have I been able to escape the sadness that besieges me beneath my own roof. At least these gardens haven’t changed ( I assured myself of this again in 1843); the trees alone have grown taller: here, in perpetual solitude, the birds build their nests in peace. It’s no longer even the fashion to meet in this place, as it was in the days when Madame Recamier, the most beautiful of French women, used to walk here followed by a crowd. Now, from the edge of the deserted lawns of Kensington, I love to gaze at the running of the horses across Hyde Park and the high society carriages among which one might pick out my tilbury, standing empty, while I, become once again a poor little émigré, climb the path where the banished confessor not long ago recited his breviary.

It was in Kensington Gardens that I contemplated the Essai historique. It was there that, reading over the journal of my travels overseas, I drew from it the loves of Atala. I was there, too, after wandering in the country, under a low English sky, glowing, as though shot through with polar light, that I penciled the first sketches of the passions of René. By night, I stored the harvest of my daydreams in the Essai historique and The Natchez. The two manuscripts advanced side by side, though I often lacked the money to buy paper, and, for want of thread, fastened what sheets I had together with tacks pulled from the windowsill of my garret

These places where I had my first inspirations make me feel their power; they refract the sweet light of memories over the present – and I feel myself prodded to take up the pen again. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have as much time here as in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, this edifice that I’m building from dry bones and ruins. My secretaries in London want to go picnicking in the morning and dancing at night, and I am glad to let them go. The men, Peter, Valentin, and Lewis, go to the tavern; the maids, Rose, Peggy, and Maria for a stroll on the sidewalks; and I am delighted. I have been left the key to the street door: Monsieur L’Ambassadeur is in charge of the house. If you knock, he shall open. Everyone is gone, and I am here alone. Let us get down to work.

It was twenty-two years ago, as I have just said, that I sketched The Natchez and Atala here in London; I am now at the precise moment in my Memoirs when I shall set sail for America: this coincidence suits me marvelously. Let us cancel out those twenty-two years, as they have in effect been canceled out of my life, and se off for the forests of the New World. The story of my embassy will be told when the time is right, if it pleases God; but as long as I remain here for a few months, I should have the leisure to proceed from Niagara Falls in New York to the Army of the Princes of Germany, and from the Army of the Princes to my refuge in England,. The Ambassador of the King of France can then recount the story of the French émigré in the same place where the latter was exiled.

 

 

Enemy of the State by George Scialabba

The facts of  Stone’s life have been told well and often, most recently by D. D. Gutttenplan in American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone. He was born on Christmas Eve 1907, in Philadelphia, and christened Isadore  Feinstein. His parents had a dry goods store, which prospered modestly during Izzy’s boyhood and adolescence, and his cheerful, bustling mother adored him. He was inordinately bookish, starting very young. ( and continuing throughout his life – he was, for what it’s worth, far more literate, in his unostentatious way, than William F. Buckley Jr.) But he didn’t care much for school or succeed at it very well. He was also moonlighting from schoolwork as a reporter for local newspapers, and after a year he left college to work full-time as a journalist. He never looked back, at least until retirement, when he learned Greek, investigated Socrates, and discovered that that universally revered martyr for free speech was actually a good deal more hostile to democratic freedoms in Athens than most of Senator McCarthy’s victims were to democratic freedoms in America.

Neither Stone’s inner nor his outer life seems to have been particularly  complex or dramatic. He was a dutiful son: when his father’s business suffered in the Depression and his mother intermittently became mentally ill, Izzy, who was well paid by then, helped. He met a lively, popular girl, not much given to reading but much taken with his ebullience; they stayed happily married for sixty years. He was an enthusiastic and good-humored but often distracted father. He had few but loyal friends, was close to his siblings and on good terms with his relatives and in-laws, and- especially during his years in Washington D. C. – was not much of a party-goer. He led a full life, professionally and domestically, with few storms, and had a sunny and feisty personality, with few shadows or enigmas. The one moment of high drama was his decision in 1953, amid the ostracism which followed his fierce denunciation of the Smith Act and the publication of The Hidden History of the Korean War, to found I. F. Stone’s Weekly. A lesser man would have folded his tent, or at least lowered his voice.

 

Stone was cursed all his life with interesting times, boiling over with warm, depression, revolution, and totalitarianism. He covered these calamities not on the scene but behind the scenes, where policy was made. Some journalists could bring political action to life, Stone was one of the few who could bring political causation to life. He read official reports, studies, speeches, press conferences, congressional testimonies, and budget documents, voraciously, analytically, skeptically. He found the threads, connected the dots, and brought the substructure of real causes and motives to light.

An early example, which made Stone’s reputation in Washington, was his coverage of American unpreparedness for World War II. Long after it became obvious that US involvement in the war was likely, American industry simply could not stoop doing business with fascist Germany and Japan, even in strategic commodities like oil, rubber, metals, minerals, chemicals, and machine parts. The trade was too profitable, and the ties between German cartels (by then the arm of the Nazis regime) and American banks, corporations, and law firms ( including Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles represented a great many German clients) were too close. Stone tracked down the figures of industry after industry and hammered away at the story until even the Senate committee investigating war preparedness commended him. The additional German and Japanese war production enabled by the delivery of these materials may well have cost  the lives of thousands of American and Allied soldiers- more damage, in all likelihood, than was caused by Communist infiltrators in the State Department.

Equally important were Stone’s reports on how greed  and incompetence retarded American industry’s conversion to wartime production. General Motors could not be induced to stoop making cars in record numbers even after its factories and workforce were needed for tank, truck, and aircraft production. Alcoa Aluminum would not increase supply of this vital component for fear than an early end to the war would result in a surplus, hence lower prices. Major oil companies would not open their pipelines to independents; and in general, dominant companies would not cooperate with smaller rivals. All this profitable foot dragging was aided and abetted by the ‘dollar-a-year men,’ the business executives and corporate lawyers ‘loaned’ to the federal government in order to keep an eye out for the interests of their employers and clients. These, of course, were precisely the ‘responsible’ people, the men of substance- bankers, executives, and lawyers, along with professional diplomats and military officers – to whom Walter Lippmann proposed entrusting real power in a democracy, while the fickle public meekly registered its preferences every four years and hoped for the best.

Another high profile demolition was Stone’s reconstruction of the Gulf of Tonkin episode. Which had prompted Congress to authorize the use of force against North Vietnam. Piecing together information from Senate and UN debates and from European and Vietnamese news reports, Stone showed that the official account was false. The US boats deliberately entered what they knew the North Vietnamese claimed a territorial waters; they were supporting, perhaps directing, a South Vietnamese military operation against the North; there was no second attack on the boats, as claimed; and the Pentagon had detailed plans already drawn up for the extensive bombing reprisals that followed the North Vietnamese ‘attack’ (which in any case had caused no injuries or damage), suggesting that the US was hoping for, if not actually attempted to provoke an  incident.

As with the Korean War fourteen years earlier, Stone was virtually alone at the time in challenging a misleading official justification for an undeclared war. And one again, millions of lives were lost because Congress and the press were not as conscientious as he was.

Far more than a few million lives would have been lost in case of a nuclear war, and Stone was rightly obsessed with the arms race. It was plain to him that the US remained far ahead of the USSR through most of the nuclear era and could have had afar-reaching arms-control agreement at virtually any time. It was equally plain that the prospect of ‘limited nuclear war’ adumbrated in Henry Kissinger’s influential Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was ‘poisonously delusive.’ And amid much high-mined hand-wringing about the malignant but mysteriously self-sustaining momentum of the arms race, Stone kept pointing out the extent to which it was not some tragic  historical imperative but rather sheer, unstoppable bureaucratic self-aggrandizement by the armed services that drove the progress of weapons technology.

To expose corporate fraud, diplomatic obfuscation, budgetary sleight-of-hand, and wartime propaganda required investigative enterprise for which Stone is renowned. To write about two of his other preoccupations, the internal security panic of the Truman era and the struggle for racial equality in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, required only common decency – as uncommon n these cases as in most others.. Stone harried – there is no other word for it- Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. “Melodramatic bunk by a self-dramatizing dick’ was his entirely  typical comment on a speech by Hoover to the American Legion, and he was hardly less scathing about McCarthy. Stone had his reward: The FBI read his mail, searched his garbage, tapped his phone, and monitored his public appearances, while the State Department denied him a visa and tried to confiscate his passport- marks of distinction not granted to his more cautious colleagues. About race, Stone simply said the obvious – the now-obvious, that is – repeatedly and eloquently. His columns on the subject are still bracing.

Stone was ardent Zionist in the 1940s and was the first American journalist to report on the Jewish exodus from Europe and the creation of the State of Israel. In 1944 he penned an open letter to American newsmen urging pressure on President Roosevelt to admit more displaced Jews into the United States, which would not only have saved many Jewish lives but might have also greatly reduced tensions in post-war Palestine. In 1945, when it was still feasible, he advocated a bi-national Arab-Jewish state. Beginning immediately after the 1948 war, he pleaded for a swift resettlement of Palestinian refugees. Immediately after the 1967 war, he warned Israel against occupying the West Bank and Gaza. Right from the start –and even before- he was right about Israel / Palestine.

Above all, he was right about the Cold War. He ridiculed the notion that the Soviet Union, bled dry by World War II, was poised to overrun Western Europe, or that it controlled every popular movement from Latin America to the Balkans to the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And he pointed out how much US-Soviet tension was the result of America’s insistence on rearming West Germany and integrating it into a hostile European military alliance. The cornerstone of Cold War ideology- that US actions were primarily reactive and defensive, dictated by unrelenting Soviet aggressiveness – took no account of Stalin’s fundamental conservatism or of American designs on Mideast oil or on Southeast Asians markets for its Japanese ward. Nor did allow Americans to perceive how arrogant and threatening the rest of the world considered America’s claim that Taiwan was our ‘first line of defense,’ a notion Stone set up superbly in a satire, The Chinese 7^th Fleet in Long Island Sound.’ Finally, Stone recognized the role of defense spending in America’s economic management, both as a subsidy for advanced technology and as a fiscal stimulus that entailed no government competition with private producers- what would later be called ‘military Keynesianism.’

All governments lie, Stone reminded his readers, and none act morally except when forced to by an aroused public. This moral universalism is his most valuable legacy. It is true that Stone worked harder than most other journalists and hobnobbed less. But what set him apart was something else: that he applied to his own government the same moral standards we all unhesitatingly apply to others. No reporter would accept at face value a Communist or even a non-Communist government’s account of its own motives and intentions. Japan’s insistence that it sought only to bring prosperity and order to the rest of East Asia in the 1930s, or the USSR’s protestations that it invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan at the request of their legitimate governments to save those countries from subversion by international capitalist conspiracy, were met with ridicule or simply ignored in favor of explanations based on Japanese or Soviet self-interest, an in particular on the interests of their ruling elites. But vey few journalists were equally skeptical ( in public, that is) about the motives of American intervention in Indochina, Central America, or the Middle East. Those actions may have been deemed imprudent for one reason or another; criticism in this vein was ‘responsible.’ But to question Americas good intentions – to assume that the US is as capable of aggression, brutality, and deceit as every other state, and that American policy, like that of every other state, serves the purposes of those with preponderant domestic power rather than a fictive ‘national interest,’ much less a singular idealism – was to place oneself beyond the pale. Then as now, such skepticism was the operative definition of ‘anti-Americanism.’ By that definition Stone was anti-American, and America badly needs more such enemies.