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CounterSpin
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This week on CounterSpin: Some of the current conversations about the
future of journalism trade on some pretty rose-colored notions of
journalism's past. The reality is journalism has always been a very
mixed bag, with just some reporters doing the challenging, talking
truth to power work that later generations may imagine everyone was doing.
This week on the show we're going to take a look back at a couple of
critical institutions in the history of what we now think of as
investigative journalism the sort of hardhitting, independent
reporting current discussion is focused on 'saving'.
One of those institutions was actually a personI.F. Stone. Stone
wasn't just among the greatest American investigative reporters, he
was also an activist and a man of the left. Earlier this year,
CounterSpin spoke with D.D. Guttenplan, author of the latest
biography of the journalist, American Radical: the Life and Times of
I.F. Stone. Because he challenged U.S. power, often just by reporting
the contents of official documents, and because he was a leftist,
Stone's reputation has been under assault by vestigial McCarthyites
who have been claiming for decades that he was a Soviet agent.
Guttenplan discussed those charges, and Stone's actual ideas, in this
interview about a man whose story, even after his death, has much to
tell us about U.S. media and politics.
Also on the show: Ramparts magazine has also been important even to
people who never read it. Originally a small literary magazine
pitched to the "mature American Catholic," Ramparts became a
rollicking left-wing muckraking enterprise that exposed CIA misdeeds
and Vietnam War lies and atrocities. Contributors to Ramparts
resemble a who's who of progressive journalism and the American left,
including Angela Davis, Seymour Hersh and Robert Scheer to name a
few. The story of Ramparts' rise and fall, and its impact on U.S.
journalism, is told in a new book, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the
Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. CounterSpin
spoke with author Peter Richardson.
A little media history, this week on CounterSpin.
--
D.D. GUTTENPLAN
CounterSpin: In his new biography of I.F. Stone, American Radical:
the Life and Times of I.F. Stone, author D. D. Guttenplan looks at
the entire career of the great investigative reporter and scourge of
official power, who seemed to play a role in nearly every major story
of his time, with a portrait of the independent gadfly that the
author says, still matters, even twenty years after his death.
D.D. Guttenplan is the London correspondent for the Nation
magazine.Welcome back to CounterSpin D. D. Guttenplan!
D.D. Guttenplan: Pleasure to be here.
CS: Well, why to use your own words, does I.F. Stone still matter?
DG: Well, look at the world around you. There are newspapers that are
struggling for survival, there are governments that don't tell the
whole truth, we're still at war in Afghanistan, we're still at war in
Iraq, and I suppose, I called the book American Radical very
deliberately to point out that what I.F. Stone did: his career was an
example of being politically engaged through journalism. And also we
live in an era when people on the left are abashed to call themselves
radicals, where you have to beat somebody up to get them to admit
that they're a liberal half the time. And I.F. Stone never pretended
to be a liberal. He was an unashamed radical, and in a way, the most
important way in which he matters is he shows us, he reminds us
what's possible. He reminds us what the left can do, he reminds us
what our country can do, he reminds us what our government can do if
we keep on its back and we make sure it delivers on its promises.
CS: And he reminds us what journalism can do, too.
DG: Absolutely.
CS: Well, you write that, and this is touching on what you've just
gone over, even with all that has been said of Stone, "it is not as
clear as it should be that Stone was not merely, or even primarily a
newspaperman. He was also a radical, an irritant to those in power."
You go on, but I want to ask, how did he challenge power?
DG: Well, he challenged power by using power's own record against
itself. I mean, one of the things that happened in Stone's life that
was a matter of bad luck at the time, but good luck for journalism
and for the rest of us, is that in 1937 he began to go deaf. So up
until that point, he had been a very ambitious, left-of-center,
insider political journalist. He had very good friends in Washington,
he had really good sources in the FDR White House and throughout the
New Deal, he was, in a way, a journalist like many other journalists.
But when he began to go deaf, he began to pay less attention to, in a
way, what the government said and more what they did, he wouldn't go
to hearings because he couldn't hear well enough. Instead he'd go the
next day, and he'd look at the transcript, and he'd see things that
nobody else caught because they were caught up in the rhetoric of the
moment or because they were rushing to make a deadline. And by paying
attention to documents, you know Stone famously said, "All
governments lie, but the truth still slips out from time to time,"
and what he was an expert at was using the truth. Let me give you a
short example but it was one of his favorite examples, which was: in
the '50s Harold Stassen was Eisenhower's negotiator with the Russians
on a test ban treaty, and the Russians offered the United States to
have monitoring stations every thousand kilometers throughout the
USSR so that we would detect if they were having nuclear tests. And
at the same time the U.S. started doing underground tests, and the
Russians started doing underground tests, and Edward Teller, who was
the father of the H-bomb said, "well that shows that we can't have a
treaty with the Russians because they'll simply test underground and
they'll hide the results." And they announced that the U.S. tests
proved that nuclear tests couldn't be detected for more than 200
miles, so it basically made Stassen look like a liar and it made the
test ban treaty like a hopeless cause. But Stone dug out the fact
that, first of all from a New York Times, what he called a
shirt-tail, a little item after the main story, that stations in
Tokyo and in Europe had picked up this American test that was only
supposed to be detected from 200 miles. Then he went to the U.S.
Geodetic Survey Department, and he got the government's own
seismologists to say "well we're not sure about these Tokyo results,
but we have American results that we know that we can trust as far as
Fairbanks, Alaska," which was 1700 miles away from the test site, so
essentially what he did was he forced the government to admit that a
test ban treaty was still possible and was still a realistic political goal.
CS: Well, in reading your book about Stone, one of the things that
struck me was how often Stone came down on the right side of things,
and not just from a progressive viewpoint. What does it say about
Stone's journalism that makes his judgment seem to hold up so well?
DG: Well, it is interesting how often when we read what he wrote 30,
40, 50 years ago, how prophetic it seems. In 1956, he covered the
Suez war and he wrote that the road to peace for Israel must go
through the Arab refugee camp and that Israel would always be able to
win military victories but that those victories would never matter
until it made peace with the Palestinians. I think the thing, though,
is not so much to say that he was always right, because he was often
wrong. He was in a sense very lenient on Stalinism in the early '30s.
You could argue that the did that because he was concerned about the
Spanish Civil War but for whatever the reasons, he felt that he had
given the Soviet Union too easy of a ride in the early '30s. But what
he did say is that a journalist has a choice: you can either be
consistent or you can tell the truth. If you're going to worry about
what you said last week, and you see something that doesn't fit,
you're going to have to throw out what doesn't fit. On the other
hand, if you're reporting honestly what you see in front of you, then
you're going to change your mind and you have to be able to change
your mind, you have to be able to recognize when your old model
doesn't fit. And he was always willing to be surprised by the facts.
CS: You mentioned the role of being a radical and a reporter. Doesn't
that role fly in the face of U.S. journalism notions of, or
pretensions to, objectivity?
DG: Well, you know, it's interesting because when you look at the
press in the days of the founding fathers, you see that we had a very
partisan press in the beginning and, in a way, a very engaged and
contentious one. We have this 19th century idea that journalists are
supposed to be cool, objective, and detached and Stone didn't buy
that at all. I mean, he basically thought that anybody who could be
detached, for example, in the face of what was happening to Jews
during the Nazi period in Germany, had to suppress their own humanity
and he didn't think that you were a better reporter for suppressing
your own humanity. He did say that you needed to be honest about what
your engagements were, what your political commitments were, and
equally important, you needed to be open to evidence that went
against your preconceptions.
CS: In your preface you tell how Stone was a regular on Meet the
Press before the worst of the McCarthy era set in, and that after his
effective blacklisting in the early '50s, he never appeared again on
that show, though he lived until 1989. Did Stone's fight against the
McCarthyism, which cost him very much, ultimately win him respect?
And do you think the scarcity of forceful left commentators today
suggests that perhaps we're still living under some sort of McCarthy hangover?
DG: Well, I think we are still living in a hangover of a timewhen
the left takes power we try and advance our policy goals, when the
right takes power, they advance their policy goals and they try to
deprive us of any legitimacy. And I think we are still living in that
kind of imbalance. The interesting thing about what I call Stone's
disappearance, because he was a regular on Meet the Press, both on TV
and on the radio until 1949, and his last appearance on TV was
debating a spokesman from the American Medical Association about
national health program. Now, you know, that debate hasn't moved on
very much in 60 years and one of the reasons is because our side of
that debate hasn't been heard.
CS: Well, you suggest in the biography that one work that got Stone
excluded from polite journalistic company was his book The Hidden
History of the Korean War. What was the price he paid for writing that book?
DG: Now the Korean War book essentially arose because he was living
in Paris and he just noticed that regardless of political
orientation, the European press covered what America was doing in
Korea with much more skepticism than any American reports. And so he
kind of applied this kind of parallax phenomenon of seeing it from a
different point of view and said, "well we said we were going into
Korea to go back to the status quo before the war but when the
American armies reached the 38th parallel they didn't stop, they kept
going, so there must be something else. We must have another agenda
here and what might that agenda be?" And of course this was before
Lyndon Johnson's credibility gap, it was before George W. Bush
declared mission accomplished, so the idea that the United States
might conduct a war and wasn't honest with American citizens about
what it was doing, the idea that the government might lie to us about
a war, was seen as shocking at the time.
CS: And in a sense, it makes him sort of the godfather of the modern
genre of journalists opposing the government and speaking for the
anti-war movement, too.
DG: You know, it's an interesting thing to consider that when the
Vietnam War opposition held the first moratorium in Washington, the
first march on Washington against the war, Stone was the only
journalist asked to speak. And I think that it was very much his
isolation and his record during the 1950s that gave him credibility
with the new generation of American radicals, and it meant that they
trusted him and that they were willing to listen to him in a way
that, you know, other people his age were not listened to and were
not taken seriously. So he had credibility that he earned and paid
for by essentially being made a pariah by the establishment.
CS: Well, speaking of McCarthyism and its hangover, at least since
Stone's death in 1989 the right has leveled accusations that he was,
variously, a Soviet Agent or a paid KGB asset. You have been
addressing these charges for years. Commentary magazine recently
re-launched the charges, alleging categorical proof that Stone was a
Soviet spy. What can you tell us about Stone's career, his contact
with Soviet officials, and the periodic charges from the right?
DG: Well I think the first thing to know about the periodic charges
from the right is that Stone didn't do anything in his relationship
with Soviet officials or the Soviet Union that other American
journalists didn't do. Even if you look at the most recent book,
Spies, which is where these charges come from, they say that Stone
tried to avoid meeting with some official from TASS, which was a
Soviet news agency, who was actually a KGB agent, but that Walter
Lipmann met with this person many times. And yet they say that, of
course, Walter Lipmann wasn't a spy because they liked his politics,
whereas when Stone met with the same person under the same
circumstances, he's seen as a spy. No serious personeven these
people when you sort of put the point to themmaintains that Stone
was a spy in the sense that you or I would use the word. In other
words, that he had access to classified information and turned it
over to a foreign government. What they do claim is that he acted in
collaboration with the KGB during the 1930s, and I think there are
several points to make about that. One is there's no real evidence to
back this up. What they rely on are KGB reports from the 1930s
transcribed by somebody who no other person, no other scholar has
access to these archives, nobody can see the documents, so we just
have to take this guy's word for it. And as it happens, I was in
court in London five years ago when this guy, who's the source of all
this, lost a libel judgement. In other words, he couldn't convince a
jury of ordinary British people that he was a competent historian.
But let's say that his notes are accurate. Let's say that Stone
really did meet with somebody who he thought was a TASS correspondent
or maybe even he knew was a KGB agent in 1936 and talk about William
Randolph Hearst or talk about the best way to combat fascism; well,
what does that prove? I mean, why not? You know in 1936, the Soviet
Union was not viewed by most Americans as a hostile power. In fact,
most American who had an opinion, you can look at the Gallup data on
this, they supported, in terms of the Spanish Civil War, they
supported the Spanish government, which was aided and armed by the
Soviet Union. So you know, Stone would've, he thought that in the
1930s that opposing fascism was the most important cause of our time
and probably of his life. His fear of fascism led him to change his
name from Isidor Feinstein to I.F. Stone. He would've worked with
anybody, he would've worked with the devil to oppose fascism and to
oppose Nazism in the 1930s. What you have are a bunch of people who
are sort of seeing the past through the standards of the far right in
America in 2009 and you know it may suit them polemically, but it's
poor history to do it that way.
CS: Well, the notion that somehow Stone was something of a Manchurian
Candidate, is strange, given that he seemed to have been fairly
openly a friendly critic of Moscow until the Hitler Stalin pact in
1939, when he became a less friendly critic. What do you suppose is
the usefulness, I think this gets to what you were talking about a
minute ago, to the right of accusing Stone of being a Manchurian
Candidate for the Soviet Union, still, going on twenty years after his death?
DG: Well, because the idea that you can be an honest journalist, that
you can influence people's views, that you can tell the truth, and
you can be an unabashed radical is threatening to them. So they need
to delegitimize him. If they can't delegitimize his views, in other
words, nowadays most people are in favor of national health coverage,
most people are in favor of equal rights for black people, most
people agree that the Vietnam War was a disastrous idea, so if you
can't delegitimize his view, you have to attack his associations. And
if you grant the possibility that someone like Stone could be an
independent radical, in other words someone who was not dancing to
Moscow's tune, if you grant the idea that American radicalism has a,
and you know this is a major theme in my book, that there's a
tradition that goes back from, you know, the Shay Rebellion and
Samuel Adams and forward to the CIO and, you know, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, if you grant that the people in
that line and in that tradition are as much genuine American patriots
as anybody else and that they formed this country's history, then
that's dangerous to the right because it suggests that they can't say
"stop we can't have anymore change; we have keep things the way they are."
CS: Indeed, rather than being an ideologue, like many of his neo and
paleo-con detractors, your book suggests that Stone was limber, an
independent thinker, openand you've touched on this alreadyopen to
changing his mind on learning new information…
DG: Well, you know, it's interesting if you look at whatever period
his critics allege he was too close to Moscow or he was too close to
the American Communist Party, you can always find things he wrote
during that period that were extremely critical. I mean, he wrote
during the purge trials, he wrote, "the trials show either that
Trotsky was a monster or that Stalin's a monster." During the '50s
when the first Polish workers rose in revolt in Poznan, Stone hailed
their revolt, and he said you know "if socialism in the East is going
to have any future, it's going to be from movements like this, of
workers rising up against the oppressive state." So you know, he was
very much someone who was prepared to be surprised by the evidence
and prepared to be surprised by history.
CS: And prepared to change his mind.
DG: And prepared to change his mind.
CS: We've been speaking with D.D. Guttenplan, London correspondent
for the Nation magazine, and the author of American Radical: The Life
and Times of I.F. Stone, just out from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Thanks again for joining us today on CounterSpin, D.D. Guttenplan!
DG: It's great to be here. Thank you.
--
PETER RICHARDSON
CounterSpin: Somehow, a small literary magazine originally pitched to
the "mature American Catholic" turned out to be something else
entirely; a rollicking, publicity-seeking left-wing muckraking
enterprise that exposed CIA misdeeds and Vietnam War lies and
atrocities. Contributors to Ramparts magazine resemble a who's who of
the American left and progressive journalism; Noam Chomsky, Seymour
Hersh, Robert Scheer to name just a few.
The story of the rise and fall of Ramparts, and what it meant for
American journalism, is told in a new book, A Bomb in Every Issue:
How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.
We're joined now by the author of the book, Peter Richardson.
Peter, welcome to CounterSpin.
Peter Richardson: Thank you, Peter.
CS: Well, there's no shortage of historical inquiry, or nostalgia
even, into the personalities and politics of the Bay Area of the
1960s. It seemed like plenty of folks have very fond memories of
Ramparts and what it meant to their own political maturation, but the
history of the magazine hadn't been nailed down until you decided to
do it. For those who didn't come of age reading Ramparts, tell us why
you thought this was an important story to tell.
PR: Well, the truth is that I didn't come of age reading Ramparts. It
was only when I began researching my last book on Carey McWilliams,
editor of The Nation, that I started hearing about Ramparts. So for
me it was a kind of a curiosity; how come I've never heard about this
magazine if all these important people had contributed to it? So my
interest in the story was quite personal. I just wanted to figure out
as much as I could about the magazine, and then I discovered that it
was incredibly successful and influential, if short lived. So to me
it just looked like a project that I could take on and finish and
that people my age and younger; I'm 50 years old; might be interested
in. And as you point out, there is a reservoir of good will among the
magazine's readers and contributors, so in a way it was a kind of an
easy book to put together because everyone was willing to talk about it.
CS: You do tell the story of the personalities there, which I think
it's sometimes were almost as powerful as the journalism they were
producing. Warren Hinckle and Bob Scheer and kind of these clashes of
egos maybe. Also the look of the magazine was something that's
striking as somebody who didn't grow up reading this either. That
look, the very professional look of Ramparts was part of what people
at places like Time magazine found so disturbing because it looked
professional and yet you opened it and it was so radical.
PR: Right, and that was why Warren Hinckle and others called it the
nation's first radical slick. They used all the high production
values of the slick magazines of the day, including Time, which hated
Ramparts, partly because it used many of its own mainstream methods
to advance a very different kind of politics. But I'm really glad you
mentioned the look because that was indispensable part of its
success. And Dugald Stermer, who was you know the first really
powerful art director at the magazine, made this contribution
possible, and it often included a kind of whimsy even if the stories
were very hard hitting. There was a kind of irreverence and a kind of
irony in the way the covers would appear, for example. Even with very
grave, sometimes lethal stories; whistleblower stories on Vietnam and
Napalm and the CIA covert operations and so on. So it was this
interesting combination of visual irreverence and also there was a
lot of humor in the text as well in very hard hitting whistleblower stories.
CS: For people who didn't grow up reading Ramparts, give us sort of
the one minute description of where you would place their
investigative journalism or their muckraking. What kind of stories
came out of Ramparts that the mainstream media weren't telling?
PR: A lot of it started with Vietnam. Robert Scheer returned from
Vietnam and joined the magazine and his proposition could be boiled
down to the simple fact that the mainstream media just simply wasn't
covering what was really going on in Vietnam at the time. He brought
a lot of expertise to that subject. He had been a graduate student at
the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley before he joined the
magazine, and as I say, he had been on the ground there, so they did
some big stories on Vietnam. One was actually a contribution from a
special forces sergeant named Don Duncan who was a staunch
anti-Communist, obviously Green Beret, Catholic; it was a Catholic
magazine still at that time; who said you know the whole thing is a
lie, I mean what's going on in Vietnam in no way resembled what
you're being told.
So Vietnam was a big part of it. The CIA was another target for
muckraking stories by Ramparts and I suppose it should be pointed out
that really no other magazines were doing this kind of muckraking at
the time, and once other news outlets, new organizations, even CBS
news, the New York Times, Washington Post, once they saw that there
was an appetite for this kind of work, they began to pick up their
game. So Ramparts had this indirect effect on the media as well.
Mainly, you know, other organizations thought, you know, maybe we
should be doing this, maybe that's part of our job. And that sort of
diminished the need for smaller magazines like Ramparts who sort of
constituted these savvier fringe players in the media ecology at that time.
CS: A victim of their own success. You didthe name of the book is A
Bomb in Every Issue, that's what Time magazine called Ramparts. Talk
a little bit about that relationship between Ramparts and the
mainstream media. I know in the book you made the argument that 60
Minutes, of all places, kind of picked up some of what Ramparts was
doing many years later. But at the time what was the general media
reaction to Ramparts' stories?
PR: Well, Ramparts had a very, kind of, special connection with the
New York Times and the New York Times picked up several of its
stories, probably a half dozen of its stories over a ten-year period
and put it on the front page. And that was very much part of
Ramparts' plan. They knew they couldn't reach everybody they wanted
to reach, so their notion was let's do big stories that the other
media, mainstream, big mainstream media outlets can't ignore and then
let them run it and get to their readers.
They had a slightly more entangled relationship with Time magazine
who also ran a number of stories on Ramparts, but mostly to disparage
the stories and discredit the magazine. And CBS news, I mean I don't
know if there's a direct connection, but just chronologically,
Ramparts won the George Polk award, very prestigious journalism award
for what the committee called the revival of the muckraking tradition.
That was 1967, the next year CBS news started 60 Minutes magazine,
which of course, did investigative reporting as well, but mixed in
some lighter cultural fare. A couple of years later the New York
Times did the Pentagon Papers story with Daniel Ellsberg, and you
know some people I interviewed thought you know it's hard to really
pin it down, but they may not have taken that chance had not Ramparts
been doing stories like this for five years with some success.
And of course Washington Post picked up the Watergate story a couple
of years after that. Not from the experienced political reporters,
but from the police reporters, the young guys who stumbled upon a big
story, but they had the guts to run it. And, you know, prior of that
period, the pre-Ramparts period, there were very few outlets doing
this. The Nation, under Carey McWilliams was doing a lot of big
stories but often lacking the kind of showmanship that Ramparts
brought to its major stories.
CS: We've been speaking with Peter Richardson. He's the author of the
new book A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of
Ramparts Magazine Changed America. It's available now from the New Press.
Peter Richardson thanks for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
PR: Thank you very much for having me.
.
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