Born in 1907, journalist I.F. Stone is pretty much unknown and forgotten today. He reached national consciousness during the 1950s when he started a newsletter allowing him to report and comment, without traditional newsroom self-censorship, about government and politics, war and peace.
Stone had no logical reason to believe that the four-page newsletter, named “I.F. Stone’s Weekly,” would succeed financially or in any other way. Yet he kept the newsletter afloat for two decades, achieved fame because of its contents and is remembered today, 17 years after his death, as an iconoclastic muckraker.
Stone regularly admonished his fellow muckrakers, “If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words, ‘governments lie.”‘ Exposing official lies was Stone’s greatest legacy, but there was an important flip side to his skepticism. Stone, as his biographer Myra MacPherson writes, “never stopped praising the American freedoms that allowed him to speak and to think as he did. That is why he fought so hard against those who were bent on tarnishing them.” Those flip sides of Stone only hint at his many dimensions.
Professionally, Stone is absolutely worthy of admiration. In his personal life, the evidence is more mixed – few icons are paragons of virtue 24/7. Still, the reasons to admire the private Stone far outnumber the reasons to dislike him.
Lots of biographers find that the more they come to know their subjects, the less they are able to muster admiration. Not MacPherson, a long-time newspaper, magazine and book journalist. “Today, Izzy’s remarkable immediacy leaps off the pages. Not only is he a sheer joy to read, his views take on vital importance, sounding as if he had written them this morning, illuminating the tumultuous first five years of the twenty-first century.”
MacPherson’s book is highly recommended, partly for the breadth and depth of her research about the public and private Stone. It is also remarkable for its hybrid nature. It is a biography, sure, meant both as a fact-based examination of his life as lived and as a document to defend Stone from, MacPherson says, “posthumous lies perpetuated by today’s right-wing media.”
But it is a biography with an unusually rich context. Three books in one, if you will, with the other two consisting of, in MacPherson’s words, “a historical treatise on the press” and “Stone’s running commentary on twentieth-century America.”
Stone got his start as a newspaper reporter and editorialist in Philadelphia and New York City in the 1920s as a teenage prodigy. MacPherson explores the factors leading to Stone’s unconcern about being considered a troublemaking outcast by those within the establishment.
That unconcern yielded powerful enemies. Stone’s file at the FBI is thick, in part because the journalist never stopped opening the curtain on J. Edgar Hoover’s secretive abuse of power. Stone called Hoover a “glorified Dick Tracy” and a “sacred cow” within government. Both of those characterizations are undeniably true, but other journalists never dared to publish them while Hoover lived.
Stone’s gutsy, relentless reporting played a role in ending Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reign of anti-Communist terror, and information he uncovered about Richard Nixon’s paranoid tendencies helped Washington insiders and outsiders alike grasp that the occupant of the White House was making crucial decisions based on something other than logic. Stone influenced investigative reporting as it is practiced today by never kowtowing to those in government who controlled access and by his close reading of documents previously thought boring or otherwise untouchable.
The skepticism about government that emerged during the Vietnam War led to Stone’s enshrinement as a journalistic icon. His reporting about the war received so much justifiable attention that the newsletter made money for a change.
The charm of MacPherson’s book is hinted at in this passage about Stone and his newsletter during the Vietnam era: “A toiler outside the system, Stone was never one to take a vow of poverty and reveled in buying his wife a mink coat, joking that he had become a war profiteer. His irredeemable optimism made it all sound simple, but he worked long and furiously, relying on his own digging so that by the time he approached an official he was ready to confront him with facts.”
Steve Weinberg is a freelance writer in Columbia, Mo.
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All Governments Lie
The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone
By Myra MacPherson
Scribner, 592 pages. $35
