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I.F. Stone

This past June 18th was the 20th anniversary of the death I.F. Stone (1907-1989), muckraker extraordinaire.  In recognition of the date, Amy Goodman interviewed D.D. Guttenplan on Democracy Now radio: he is the author of  “American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone.” If you wanted to nominate any single writer for journalistic integrity, in my book, I.F. Stone would be the gold standard. I first encountered I.F. Stone in the 1960s, when I discovered his little publication gem the “I.F. Stone’s Weekly.” I promptly subscribed and continued my subscription for several years until he folded the publication in 1971. In that year, I remember receiving an envelope in the mail, with a note signed by I.F. Stone thanking me for my subscription and giving me a cash refund, which conformed to the penny, what he had calculated to be the value of the remaining  portion  of my subscription. It must have taken him some effort to personally write notes like that, since his Weekly had grown to a readership of 70,000 and was basically a one man operation. For a relatively small   fee, you could subscribe to Stone’s weekly publication and learn things about our government and international events that you would not hear about from any other source, or if you did, it would often be the case that the source you heard it from would have been jostled into pursuing a story because of hearing about it first from Stone. There was really no one like him. Unfortunately for us, Stone lived before his truly needed time, as we find ourselves desperate for someone of his caliber today in the face of corporate-controlled news centers, all for reasons that he never would have imagined during the prime of his journalism career. Insider journalists considered Stone to be one of their key sources in tracing down stories, but also setting the journalistic agenda and the once high standards of news reporting.  But,  It wasn’t always flashy and never came in the form of a single sound bite.  It was Stone’s  belief that governments lie, but in doing so, they leave behind the damning evidence in their own publications–a clear paper trail–it’s up to you to find it.  In the case of the U.S. Government, government documents from many different sources could be scrutinized for the nuggets of information that would disprove what the government was trying to put out as the reasons for its actions. His advice was to begin reading government documents backwards, going to the index first.

I.F. Stone's Weekly

I have commented on how we created a false enemy to keep our military complex intact at the end of WW II, create U.S. hegemony over the rest of the world and began marching down the road of a series of major Folly Compounding misadventures, with a philosophy of “military empire” that still grips our government and a sizable portion  of our economy.  That misstep took place because Truman was a hardliner on foreign policy and unraveled many of the plans and ideas that FDR had expressed for the post-war recovery period, particularly with respect to Russia. That shift in policy towards a hard line position made it inevitable, that when the French lost the battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and had to abandon their colonial ambitions in Vietnam, we would step in to replace the French, using an anticommunist rhetoric, initially claiming that the Vietcong got their funding and military support  from the Russians and Chinese. Our national propaganda was to adopt the “domino theory” to fend off the advancing wave of communism. If South Vietnam fell to the communists, all of Southeast Asia would be lost. One of the earliest challenges to this idea was brought to national attention by I.F. Stone. He scoured through government documents related to captured weapons and, using the hard data in those documents, showed that the majority of Vietcong weapons that had been captured in South Vietnam, were manufactured in the U.S. and other Western countries, meaning that they were obtained from the South Vietnamese that we were training and equipping at the time. The Vietcong got their weapons from the South Vietnamese, not Russia or China. Because of that kind of evidence, Johnson had to invent the Gulf of Tonkin episode (which never took place) and blame the North Vietnamese for interfering with U.S. policies, using that fictitious event to escalate the war in South Vietnam. I.F. Stone was a major force in getting the anti-Vietnam War protesters focused on some of the important lies that the U.S. government was using to start and keep us in that disastrous war. I always had the feeling that by reading Stone’s weekly publication, I was a member of the “most informed club.” It was that simple. It was like his Weekly came with a prepaid veracity stamp on it. If his weekly was still published, it might amount to the only print publication available in which hard-nosed, independent news reporting was available to us.

Through his weekly publication and other sources, Stone lived through and wrote about the depression, WW II, the birth of Israel, the Cold War, Zionism, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights and multiple presidencies. He was a prescient force on almost everything he wrote about. Stone  was blacklisted from television as a commentator for asking questions that were too tough when he participated in one of the first episodes of “Meet the Press.” A single episode that got him thrown off and removed from television is described by D.D.  Guttenplan on Amy Goodman’s show, from which I quote below:

” And on this particular morning, the person he was battling with was a guy called Dr. Morris Fishbein. Now, in the ’40s, Morris Fishbein was the most famous doctor in America. He was the editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, and he was the person that the medical and pharmaceutical industries put up to oppose socialized medicine, or national health or a national health insurance. He was the person who coined the phrase “socialized medicine” as a means of discrediting national health insurance [Truman supported a National Health Insurance Act].

Fishbein had described the proposals for national health insurance as a step on the road to communism. And so, Stone said to him, “Dr. Fishbein, given that President Truman has already spoken out in favor of national health insurance, do you think that that makes him a dangerous communist or just a deluded fellow traveler?” You know, and it’s familiar, isn’t it? And—” Stone was blacklisted for 18 years from television for his remarks and interview with Fishbein.”

I. F. Stone was a Jeffersonian Marxist. By that one means that he believed in Jefferson’s statement that he would rather live in a society without government but with a free press than live in a society in which there was a government but no free press. Thank about that–a Marxist state with a free press. That’s never been tried before and is probably possible only within a subset of our current population–a rather small subset. Stone believed in common social goals and aspirations. He loved the FDR period and contributed writings to promote the implementation of the New Deal (he wrote a book for FDR explaining how the courts were denying the New Deal legislation to go through and criticizing them for it, though he was not in favor of stacking the court, as FDR tried to do). Izzy Stone applauded the New Deal era in which the pursuit of social justice had become a political objective and he would have spoken out vociferously against the erosion of those ideals through Reaganomics and beyond. He was also a visionary who saw conflicts in terms of their human, social impact and not the geopolitical forces that created them. He visited the Middle East right after WW II and was in favor of a home for the displaced European Jews, but he believed that the best possible solution for the region was a state in which governance was shared between the Palestinians and the Jews. Where would we be today in the Middle East  if that formula had been implemented?

I.F. Stone has a website where you can read and download one of his Weekly publications. His biography, written by D.D. Guttenplan has moved to the top of my long reading list. In a 2000 poll of journalists, when asked what were the top 100 most influential publications of the 20th Century, I.F. Stone’s Weekly was ranked 16th. Not bad for a publication that he basically put out himself. Last year, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University announced plans to award an annual “I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence,” designed to stimulate a resurgence of independent journalism, something desperately lacking in our nation. I don’t think blogging alone can get it done.
RFM