All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone
By Myra MacPherson
Scribner, 564 pages, $35
The Best of I.F. Stone
Edited by Karl Weber
PublicAffairs, 350 pages, $23.95
At a time when the media is routinely criticized for its failure to ask tough questions of politicians or for serving as a transcription agency for the Bush administration, it should not be surprising that the late idiosyncratic left-of-center journalist I.F. Stone has attained something resembling iconic status, at least among many liberals and those on the left. (Those on the right, of course, disparage him).
If some appreciate him for his political views–always left of center–others memorialize him for his penetrating insight and dogged determination. For decades, Stone was a tireless one-man investigative unit–what journalist Myra MacPherson calls a “human fact-finding machine”–who instinctively distrusted statements by government officials and cut through their obfuscations to lay bare their self-serving mistruths. “All governments are run by liars,” Stone once said during the Vietnam War era. His crusade, spanning the late 1920s through the late 1980s, was to expose those lies, or at least the lies of those whose policies he opposed.
Two new books aim to illuminate Stone’s career, style, passion and legacy for contemporary audiences. “The Best of I.F. Stone,” edited by Karl Weber, allows Stone to speak for himself on a selected array of subjects. In “All Governments Lie,” MacPherson lovingly recounts Stone’s journalistic and political journey. Her hagiographic account defends Stone’s reputation from “posthumous vilification” and establishes his place as one of the 20th Century’s “premier independent journalist[s].” She admittedly goes beyond biography to provide her readers with a “historical treatise on the press”–she has contempt for most journalists today–and “Stone’s running commentary on twentieth-century America.”
Izzy Stone, as he was known (he changed his name professionally from Isador Feinstein to I.F. Stone in 1937), succeeded despite his against-the-grain sensibility. Rejecting the life of a small-town New Jersey shopkeeper that his Russian-Jewish immigrant father had in mind for him, young Stone gravitated toward the life of the mind, political engagement and journalism. Following the publication of his own paper in high school, Stone, a University of Pennsylvania dropout, proceeded to climb the journalistic ladder, working at the Philadelphia Record and the New York Post in the 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1940s he was an associate editor of The Nation and an investigative reporter for PM, a short-lived but feisty progressive daily newspaper. He ultimately solidified his place in journalism history with the almost-two-decade run of his self-published I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which eventually brought him considerable attention and wealth. In his retirement, Stone maintained his prodigious output, writing countless essays for The New York Review of Books and producing his own surprising best-selling historical study, “The Trial of Socrates.”
Stone kept alive the muckraking tradition that first emerged during the Progressive era. What drove him during his half-century-plus career in investigative journalism, however, was his passionately held politics. As a young man in the 1920s, Stone had been strongly attracted to the Socialist Party, then past its heyday. In the 1930s, he offered strong support for President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, although he didn’t hesitate to criticize it for not going far enough. Horrified by the rise of Nazism long before most journalists took sufficient notice, Stone railed against the Nazi regime, American isolationists and later businessmen, who, he believed put profit before the national interest. During the Cold War decades, he denounced the abridgement of civil liberties at home, the pursuit of an aggressive anti-Soviet policy abroad and the escalation of the nuclear arms race. The Vietnam War provided Stone with endless opportunities to critique misguided assumptions, wrongheaded policies and misleading cover stories. In the 1960s, he championed the emerging civil rights movement and criticized the “militant posturing and stale leftist cant” of the New Left.
The Stone that emerges in McPherson’s pages is charismatic and aggravating, endearing and insufferable. Never one for self-doubt or introspection, Stone possessed an ego, a confidence and a passion that equipped him well to stand up to the powers that be. In MacPherson’s hands, Stone is always, it seems, principled and penetrating as a worthy exemplar in a world of journalistic frivolity or subservience. Unable to conceal her deep affection for her subject, she often assumes the role of Stone’s cheerleader and publicist, constantly quoting those who approve of her subject and swatting down those who do not.
If her admiration for Stone is understandable, it also stands in the way of her critically interrogating his political stances. Nowhere is this clearer than in her treatment of Stone’s relationship to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. MacPherson is no friend of either American or Soviet communists, as she makes clear. But Stone at times was. While he never joined the party, he was a self-described fellow traveler, believing through the 1940s, at least, that the Soviet Union, whatever its flaws, offered a positive model deserving of emulation, and that American communists, whatever their flaws, were a force for good.
MacPherson defends Stone as someone who, while “too charitable about the Communist lie at the time,” nevertheless was no mindless party functionary or follower of the Soviet system. Indeed he wasn’t. But MacPherson’s explanations for Stone’s “blind spots” and “myopic optimism”–a desire for a united front against fascism, the impossibility of obtaining unbiased news in the American press about the Soviets, his “emotional desire for peaceful coexistence”–sound more like excuses than a serious engagement with the substance of Stone’s analysis and the problematic moral and political choices he sometimes made. Although Stone did become increasingly anti-communist in the 1950s and 1960s, MacPherson lets him off the political hook far too easily.
(So, too, does Weber, who selects for “The Best of I.F. Stone” pieces that emphasize Stone’s later hostility to communism rather than his earlier attraction to aspects of it. Stone’s “commitment to journalistic honesty–as well as his love of freedom as the single deepest human value–left him no alternative” but to criticize the “essentially repressive and dishonest nature of the Soviet system,” we are told in a disingenuous editorial headnote to Stone’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. Presumably journalistic honesty and love of freedom might have prompted a full-throated denunciation a decade or two earlier, given what Stone knew or suspected about the Soviet regime.)
Nor does MacPherson question Stone’s depictions of life in the U.S. ” `Today in America,’ ” Stone argued in the 1950s, ” `it is a crime even to think.’ ” The FBI, he charged, was “America’s near equivalent of Russia’s secret police.” In 1949 a distraught Stone relocated his family to Paris when the “oppressive Cold War climate had penetrated his natural ebullience.” Stone, MacPherson writes, was “genuinely fearful of returning to a country that seemed dangerously tilting toward fascism.” He eventually changed his mind about living in Europe and moved his family back to the U.S.
But MacPherson takes at face value Stone’s exaggerated depictions of the dire state of American political life. Although the FBI dogged him for decades and McCarthyism indeed took its toll on political dissent, the fascism that Stone mistakenly predicted never materialized. “In the worst days of the witch hunt and cold war,” Stone recalled in 1963, “I felt like a guerilla warrior, swooping down in surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry.” No American version of the Soviet secret police sent Stone the journalistic guerrilla off to a gulag in North Dakota. In fact, he acknowledged that it “speaks well for the tradition of a free press in our country that even in the heyday of McCarthy it was possible for me to obtain my second-class mail permit without trouble . . . without a single political question.”
Although MacPherson’s biography is of the life-and-times variety, her rendering of Stone’s times offers a distorted picture. For all the repression on the home front that accompanied World War I, the Wilson administration did not actually crush “all dissent” nor did “suppression of speech and thought,” which admittedly was widespread, become “orchestrated madness.” None of the Scottsboro Boys convicted in Alabama during the Great Depression was executed, though she claims some were, and it’s more than a stretch to talk of McCarthyism as a “reign of terror.” Nor was Malcolm X murdered for his “emerging sense of unification with whites.” Did President Warren Harding really epitomize “the whipped-cream emptiness of the twenties?” Whatever one might think of Herbert Hoover’s policies, that president had not been “sleepwalking through much of his term.” Her overwrought descriptions of historical periods–the “swirling madness of the thirties,” the post-World War II years as “an edgy, emotional time”–tax the reader’s literary patience. And surely there is a better way to describe the plight of some groups of workers than noting that “[b]eneath the ballyhoo” of the Roaring ’20s, “[f]armers, miners, and textile workers were not making whoopee.”
For all of Stone’s faults, his firm belief that governments–Democratic and Republican–mislead the public by manipulating the press remains pertinent today, as both volumes didactically remind us repeatedly. “Stone’s skepticism regarding the professed nobility of government intentions served him well,” MacPherson rightly concludes. Of government officials, Stone once said, “You can’t just sit on their lap and ask them to feed you secrets–then they’ll just give you a lot of crap.” Yet time and again, that, unfortunately, is a lesson the press corps seems to forget, often with dire consequences. Stone may not deserve the secular sainthood some of his fans have bestowed on him, but the all-too-human investigative journalist does have much to teach the practitioners of modern journalism.
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Eric Arnesen is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the editor of the essay collection “The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation,” due out in January.
