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 7th 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.
