http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-if-stone5-2009jul05,0,4366962.story
From the '30s through Vietnam, I.F. Stone doggedly reported the
truth as he saw it. J. Edgar Hoover saw it a bit differently.
By Clancy Sigal
July 5, 2009
American Radical
The Life and Times of I.F. Stone
D.D. Guttenplan
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 570 pp., $35
He loved burlesque, ballroom dancing and "a good brawl." So confessed
modern America's loneliest and best maverick investigative reporter,
I.F. ("Izzy") Stone. For several decades, especially during the
McCarthy nightmare, Stone was almost alone in taking on the
Washington establishment. From the loyalty purges to Vietnam and
beyond, he revered "the power of a fact," even when it sometimes
contradicted his own long-cherished beliefs. (On Castro's Cuba and
Stalin's Russia, he reserved the right to modify his early enthusiasm.)
According to his latest biographer, D.D. Guttenplan, Stone -- who
would rather be accused of inconsistency than pussyfooting as a
reporter -- was an egoistic prima donna, hell to work for (one
assistant had to seek therapy), sometime party liner, hard-bitten
newsman, fellow traveler, libertarian socialist, passionate New
Dealer, traumatized anti-fascist and ambivalent Zionist. He was a
mass of contradictions and all the better for it.
Indeed, he was a most unlikely hero to young journalists like myself
during the "Haunted Fifties" (the title of one of his books) when
most journalists -- and most mainstream liberals -- chickened out. He
was short, chubby, stared out from Coke-bottle glasses and was so
deaf he had to use a primitive two-piece microphone-and-battery
hearing aid, which sometimes he furtively clamped against the door of
a congressional hearing from which he'd been (typically) excluded for
asking snooping questions. He had the soul of a dogged police reporter.
Stone's glory days coincided with, and were triggered by, the 1945
death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Suddenly liberal New
Dealers like Stone found themselves out of favor and under suspicion.
In swift succession, left-wing unions, the more outspoken liberal
organizations, Communists and their allies and the "caring"
professionals like teachers and social workers came under the hammer.
None of the Red-hunting governmental committees could have functioned
without the able assistance and scurrilous files of FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover. While Stone called the Truman years "the era of the
moocher," he hated only the top G-man for whom he had a fear that
"ran through him like an electric current. Because Izzy knew what
Hoover could do." After Stone publicly expressed his contempt, an
enraged Hoover repaid the compliment with a "massive undercover
operation," tapping his phone, sifting his garbage, opening his mail,
shadowing his every footstep -- targeting Stone not only as a noisy
and nosy troublemaker but also as a Russian spy code-named "BLIN."
Even today Stone remains "a hate figure for the American right,"
which periodically resurrects the fairy tale that he was a Soviet
agent. Usually this smear is based on a purported KGB agent's report
to Moscow of his wartime lunch, or lunches, with Stone, sometimes at
Harvey's restaurant in Washington, D.C. -- a curious choice since it
was also frequented by Hoover.
From the late '30s, Stone, the son of a Richmond, Ind., shopkeeper,
though a lazy student and college dropout, had risen on talent and
chutzpah to become one of America's most successful journalists, as
reporter and chief editorial writer for the influential New York Post
and tabloid daily PM. With easy access to the White House under FDR,
he made regular appearances on "Meet the Press" in the mid-1940s.
Then overnight he became a Cold War "unperson," the vanished man of
American journalism.
Stone was an Untouchable, not least among nervous mainstream
colleagues. Once he came out with the 1953 book "The Hidden History
of the Korean War" challenging the official Washington line,
"bridle-broken" liberals joined conservatives in trashing -- and
ostracizing -- him. (For three years he had not a single visitor to
his Washington office.) This was especially painful to Stone, who,
ever since Hitler's rise to power, had been "virtually obsessed by
what he saw as the German and Austrian left's failure to unite
against the Nazi threat." And now, he feared, it was happening here
in America, effective resistance crippled by "the liberal impulse to
genuflect before the heresy hunters." This "criminal disunity" on the
American left was paving the road for a native fascism, Stone believed.
What a strange time! The ACLU's general counsel, Morris Ernst, was
also J. Edgar Hoover's personal informant. Senate liberals, led by
Hubert Humphrey, inserted a clause in the McCarran Act calling for
"subversives" to be rounded up and put in detention camps in a
"national emergency." In this bizarre period, many liberals were so
eager to prove their anti-Communist credentials "that the effect was
to lend aid, comfort and moral authority to the inquisitors." Stone
himself became so anxious he even considered emigrating with his
family to the new nation of Israel, where previously he'd been one of
the first journalists to cover the illegal Jewish underground to Palestine.
Then he got the inspired idea that if no newspaper would hire him
he'd hire himself and began to self-publish, with his devoted wife
Esther's help, a one-man newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly, which,
"from the very first issue . . . functioned as a kind of underground
telegraph of the American opposition." For its first decade, it had
fewer than 20,000 subscribers but was passed from hand to hand,
family to family, like samizdat. My own mailed copy came to me in Los
Angeles wrapped in brown paper like porn but even so had been ripped
open by postal inspectors or my FBI shadows or maybe even my nervous landlord.
Guttenplan's big, boisterous bio- graphy of Stone is a "two-fer." (I
should note that I was interviewed by the author for this book, and
my work is referenced briefly in it.) You get a straightforward life,
with almost no juicy gossip because Stone appears to have led an
astoundingly blameless personal life (and also because the author had
the cooperation of Stone's family).
But what makes the book outstanding is Guttenplan's sense of Stone's
brand of skeptical, independent radicalism as shaped by larger
movements, starting with the 1927 execution of the "good shoemaker
and poor fish peddler," Sacco and Vanzetti, for murders they may not
have committed. It was then that the young and penniless Stone,
walking off his first newspaper job in protest, realized the deadly
consequences of dissent.
Guttenplan's book is a colorful, rambunctious left-of-center American
cavalcade, from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War whose young
protesters, in exuberance so like Stone, plucked him from his long,
lonely "internal exile."
I have a fantasy. What would happen if the deaf, half-blind, cocky
and unputdownable I.F. Stone, with his "streetwise, lapel-grabbing
voice," was reincarnated in the middle of an Obama press conference?
My guess is that he'd go after our iconic president like a hungry terrier.
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