I.F. Stone, Self-Crafted Icon
Asahina, Robert
black people--screaming that women have a "constitutional right" to have babies without latching on to a husband, and that teenage girls have a "constitutional right" to get pregnant any time...
...When I was a boy," Stone has said, "I believed that a newspaperman ought to use his power on behalf of those who are getting the dirty end of the deal...
...Sure enough, they found that black children who don't have fathers at home test significantly lower on intelligence tests than otherwise identical black children who do have fathers in the home...
...You search out internal contradictions...
...So they were in 1924...
...In thirty-nine years the essentials ot this condition have not changed...
...I t ' s possible to regard Stone's current study of the classics as the harmless pastime of a colorful old gentleman, or as genuine (though failed) scholarship...
...it's another matter when they are a power in their own right...
...In 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he wrote: "We can now see by hindsight how beautifully even providentially--the Soviet invasion fit the needs of American politics...
...All this could be merely a longoverdue acknowledgement of a prematurely right man of the Left...
...And by 1968, he was quick to condemn Israel as "a steep and arid mountain of prejudice" for its treatment of the Palestinians...
...How glad I've been not to have agreed about McCarthy...
...during its final year, more than 70,000...
...The National Press Club readmitted Stone in 1981, 33 years after he resigned in protest for being refused service when he brought a black friend (a former federal judge and aide to the Secretary of War) to lunch...
...Need any more be said...
...black people--screaming that women have a "constitutional right" to have babies without latching on to a husband, and that teenage girls have a "constitutional right" to get pregnant any time they want...
...The University of Pennsylvania, which Stone'had left in 1927 after three years as anundergraduate, gave him a bachelor's degree (Class of '28) in a one-man graduation ceremony in 1975...
...But in 1976, the magazine published an unfavorable review of John Chabot Smith's Alger Hiss: The True Story by Allen Weinstein, who was later to argue in his own book, Perjury, that Hiss was "guilty as charged," that he "did in fact perjure himself...
...Dulles, he coatinued, "somehow made the aggressed rather than the aggressor seem to blame for what was happening...
...Actually, Rovere was being a trifle unfair...
...and that Israel should wind up being so embarrassingly pro-West...
...the villain of the book turns out to be (guess who...
...By the late fifties, he had already arrived at a fairly predictable set of political positions that dovetailed neatly into mainstream liberalism: in favor of racial justice, "peaceful coexistence," disarmament, recognition of Communist China...
...Freedom of thought and speech, Stone has conceded, is "threatened by authoritarianism everywhere, on the Left as on the Right, by Communist as well as by Catholic...
...And it's not likely to result in accurate translations or interpretations...
...Thirty-five years ago he criticized the Irgun and the Stern Gang for their terrorist activities in Tel Aviv, then under British martial law...
...So much for blaming the victim...
...In fact, it is very different...
...I do not like to hear opponents shouted down, much less beaten up," he wrote in the Weekly...
...Eventually, however, his "independence" reasserted itself, not in his relationship to Moscow but in his attitude toward extremists on the Left...
...Intended to refute criticisms of the Soviet Union by "fascists and their friends" (John Dewey and others, that is), the letter disparaged "the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike" and insisted that "Soviet and fascist policies are dramatically opposed...
...Some psychologists decided to test the idea, and when they set out to find a large group of children who didn't have fathers--wouldn't you know it--the first place they looked was among American blacks...
...Stone should try to learn which are which before explaining them all away as "political" in motivation or rooted in a simpleminded and anachronistic model of class struggle...
...Stone's about-face can best be understood, once again, against the background of Soviet policy, which had favored Israel in the forties, but shifted to the Arab states in the late fifties...
...Plato made Socrates the secular martyr of the struggle against democracy," says Stone...
...What happened...
...In the meantime, he has continued to espouse a socialism that has become little more than the simple faith that he's caught the right historical train...
...Two Superpowers remained in the world...
...The Bonn constitution and the Federal Republic of Western Germany were soundly democratic, anchored safely to the West...
...This was, to be sure, an effective technique in the early-to-mid-sixties...
...And in 1948, even before he formally broke with the USSR, he wrote: " I know that if the Communists came to power, I'd soon find myself eating cold kasha in a concentration camp in Kansas gubernya...
...Of course, "peace" is one of those When he began the Weekly thirty years ago, Stone predicted: "I'm going to graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if I last long enough I'!i be regarded as a national institution ." fascism...
...No doubt Stone has managed to offend more than a few Jews with his ideas about the Holocaust...
...Stone's Weekly, narrated by Tom Wicker, was made in 1973...
...Stone founded the Weekly in 1953 partly because he couldn't get a job anywhere else...
...As Stone sees it, "the lower classes were bred or bullied into believing the myth that they are intrinsically inferior to their rulers," who ex"damaging fact" that he remained in Athens during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants...
...John Lukacs's most recent book is Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Doubleday...
...You go back to the texts in the original language, so that you can evaluate every nuance...
...Stone, reportedly "terribly upset and unhappy" (perhaps even more so because Weinstein's piece was featured on the cover of the issue along with his own article on Daniel Schorr), resigned from the Review, though he has continued to write for it...
...I f you live long enough," I.F...
...I am prepared to sit down anywhere with you at the soonest possible convenience and buy you a drink...
...The Haganah are no more gangsters than were the men of Concord or Lexington," he wrote in the Nation (January 12, 1946...
...I rejoiced when my side won...
...against segregation, the "military-industrial complex," HUAC, the Cold War, John Foster Dulles, Joe McCarthy...
...by the late sixties, he was being described, sympathetically, as a "chubby cherub" (in the New Republic...
...A documentary, LF...
...And last year, Stone made the front page of the "Style" section of the Washington Post for his "latest scoop": his new translation and interpretation of Greek philosophy, which led him to attack Socrates and Plato in a crowded two-hour lecture at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies...
...We are told that our lives are so difficult because we cannot find ourselves in these times when things change so fast, in these times of the frightful acceleration of history...
...This "premier loner and dedicated maverick of American journalism" (the New York Times) had become, by the early seventies, "a merry, pixielike sixty-threeyear-old man with dimpled cheeks and double bifocal glasses"(McCall's), "a hero with enough warts to produce a satisfying i m a g e . . , the Establishment's favorite rebel, the Rebellion's favorite establishmentarian"(Ramparts...
...on another level it had not...
...Paeans to Stone's political prescience began appearing in mid-decade, first in the radical press (Ramparts) and the liberal journals of opinion (the New Republic, Commonweal), then in the news magazines (profiles in both Newsweek and Time), finally in the slick magazines (Life and even McCall's...
...It might seem immodest for Stone to criticize the father of Western philosophy, but humility has never been one of his virtues...
...The Weimar writers, artists, theorists, philosophers, from the worst to the best, from Herbert Marcuse to Alfred Doblin, from Georg Lukacs to Walter Benjamin, from George Grosz to Kurt Tucholsky have become respectable again...
...To his credit, as he never stops telling anyone who will listen (like those 34 million viewers of "Sixty Minutes"), Stone has recently ventured into a new area of study: classical Greek...
...A companion piece, "The Other Zionism," which became part two of the epilogue, first appeared in the September 1978 Harper's...
...What their revolt is against is man himself," he said in an interview in, of all places, Christian Century (November 4, 1970...
...Agreement on ends, disagreement on means: Was Stone turning into a liberal apologist for radicalism...
...Stone has been consistent about one thing: a binational Israeli-Palestinian state, which he advocated even in Underground to Palestine, and continues to argue for today...
...But does anyone these days...
...His thesis was that the West German state and nation were largely immune to the sickness that had destroyed the Weimar Republic and helped to bring Hitler to power...
...In the Christian Century interview, he was asked, "Were you particularly affected by the genocide of World War II...
...On the Middle East, freedom of debate is not encouraged," he charged in 1978...
...he even defended Cedric Belfrage, editor of the Communist National Guardian, who was deported in 1955...
...I f there is, 1 have a message for you...
...Stone couldn't be moved by the facts until they came from what he seemed to regard as a more reliable source--Nikita Khrushchev in his "De-Stalinization" speech before the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956...
...The Kremlin was at the same time prepared to come to an agreement with Germany as an alternative...
...no orthodox Stalinist would have defended Trotskyist union activists, as Stone did in 1941...
...It is peculiarly American . . . . The only absolute v a l u e . . , is freedom of the mind...
...If Stone isn't satisfied with that much exposure (not to mention regular appearances on the op-ed page of the New York Times and other papers), I'd be interested to know how much he thinks he needs for true "freedom of debate" on Israel...
...We live in a time of dreadful stagnation...
...In 1970, he called the Weathermen "spoiled brats...
...But as long as he enjoys the protection of the First Amendment, safe in his native land with its unique history and society, Stone can indulge in the fantasy of a " s y n t h e s i s . . . of Marx and Jefferson" (the "greatest task of our time"), without having to break the vow he made as a young reporter to be "independent," "not to join in those stale surrenders which are called the practical realities of the world...
...Stone seems to have forgotten what he carefully noted 38 years ago, that the leaders of the nascent Jewish state did not support the Stern Gang then, as the Arab states do the PLO today...
...The opposite is true...
...To use contemporary terminology (not Plato's) that Stone would understand, the "form" of the dialogues is inseparable from their "content...
...The USSR, he finally realized, "'is not a good society and it is not led by honest men...
...In other words, what's important is preserving your purity, even if it means throwing away your vote...
...Germany was conquered...
...My proudest awards are my scars...
...Their confrontation grew out of their division of Europe, within which took place the division of Germany, within which took place the division of Berlin...
...A writer gives his reader an earnest of his dependability if he's not afraid to be inconsistent," he once said...
...All journalism is investigative," Stone has said dismissively, but there's a world of difference between a reporter who actually reads a government White Paper and one who thinks the best way to get at the truth is to allow himself to be manipulated by self-serving sources whose "leaks" are impossible for a reader to assess, since they've been guaranteed anonymity...
...and when in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 21...
...But how "radical" was Stone's journalism...
...Long before then, Stone ceased to be a journalistic outsider...
...This class-based analysis of "elitism" simply ignores the primacy of the question of virtue in the Republic...
...And by the early sixties, in the light of the civil rights movement and the shadow of the Vietnam war, the Old Left and the New could easily join hands in opposing George Wallace, General Curtis LeMay, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon, Mayor Richard Daley, Barry Goldwater...
...For Stone, this has always entailed an absolutist position on the First Amendment...
...In the twenties and thirties, this meant espousing socialism, at least to many writers who were, like Stone, the children of Jewish immigrants...
...This was true then, and on the level of politics it is still largely true today...
...it was, in fact, the party line...
...In the forties he had been an ardent Zionist, decorated by the Haganah...
...Stone's "facts" reveal the "troth" only to readers who 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 accept his definition of journalism: "My job here (at the Weekly) is to notice things that most reporters overlook and to analyze these events from a radical point of view...
...Critical of any plan to "reduce Israel in size or sovereignty," Stone argued emphatically that "more desert is the least of Arab needs...
...Old iconoclasts never die, they just become icons themselves...
...The Communists are doing a major part of the work of the Wallace movement, from ringing doorbells to framing platforms...
...He has taught himself the language and picked up the philosophy books he left behind at the University of Pennsylvania in 1927...
...The Germans are a people who are slow in changing their minds...
...What a disappointment to the Soviet Union, not to mention Stone, that the British should cease to play an important role in the Middle East after Suez (no more devil theory of history...
...A year later, in another Times oped article, he speculated, "Perhaps we keep the enemy alive because if the Soviet Union ever dropped dead of hunger, there would also be starvation here, though of another kind, in our military-industrial complex . . . . What would the Pentagon do without Moscow...
...everybody makes mistakes, particularly journalists, who are too often so caught up in day-to-day events that they miss the significance of" what they're reporting...
...As if bureaucracy and inefficiency were the real dangers...
...It's not so different from digging the real truth out of a Pentagon or State Department document...
...one child born without an arm, or blind, is enough...
...Stone should talk, given his own record on Poland...
...But it is neither...
...But nobody's called him that for a long time...
...There's a name for this kind of selective reading: historicism...
...His comic characterization of that possibility suggests how remote he regards it as being...
...My wife and I have just become parents, and we've started reading a lot of those "First-Three-Years-of-Li f e " - t y p e books...
...The 1920s were the last modern decade...
...In 1982, on the op-ed page of the New York Times, he laboriously tried to draw the analogy indicated by the title of the piece: "When Tel Aviv was 'West Beirut.' . . . . Can we Jews not recognize the image in our mirrors...
...The current theory is that fathers play a very crucial role in developing a child's native intellectual abilities...
...Characteristically, Stone has preempted this line of criticism...
...I hate, hate, intolerance and violence...
...And in his recent op-ed pieces for the New York Times, Stone has taken a position on Russia that differs little from his stance of 40 years ago...
...During the last twenty years the nostalgia for Weimar has become a staple of the German intellectual and cultural diet...
...In 1984 the gods of The Copy-Book Headings are Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Picasso...
...How glad l've been not to have agreed about McCarthy...
...Or was this just another variation on his past Popular Front strategy...
...Just as "London surrendered Czechoslovakia in the hope of pushing Hitler east, Moscow handed Danzig and the Corridor to Hitler in the hope that he would go west...
...That was in 1937, though it could have been written yesterday, for all the difference the intervening years have made to Stone's understanding of politics...
...It's one thing to be wrong...
...As respectability darkens my door," he announced in the early seventies, "it's sort of comforting to know someone still thinks I'm a dangerous man...
...And he would probably like to forget what he wrote in a series of articles for the New Republic after Israel achieved statehood in 1948: "Fear of an armed Jewish state seems the best way to make the Arab nations accept peace...
...But the radicalism of this much acclaimed and self-proclaimed "independent man of the Left" has often kept him from being in the right...
...I tried in every issue to provide fact and opinion not available elsewhere in the press...
...Stone must come to grips with Platonic irony before confidently announcing what Plato did or did not say or believe...
...He certainly reached Stage Two a long time ago...
...Although such tortuous reasoning could be called radical, it was scarcely "independent...
...Because so many bonds attach me to Israel," he wrote after Suez, "I am ready to condone preventive war...
...But the front page of the very same issue of the Nation announced the signing of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact...
...His 70th birthday was celebrated by 350 people in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza...
...As a reporter, he had followed the trail of "illegal" Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to Palestine, and had written a quite moving account o f their plight, Underground to Palestine, published in 1946...
...And Stone proudly quotes the reaction of Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, the Russian Ambassador to Britain, after a visit to a kibbutz: "We have reached socialism, but you [Jews] have already achieved communism...
...Is he really unable to distinguish between a chance birth defect--an act of God, if you will-and a monstrous crime perpetrated by man against man...
...In 1937, he praised "the establishment of a constitution [in the USSR] which moves, at least formally, toward the adoption of democratic practices . . . . There is only one party, but the introduction of the secret ballot offers workers and peasants a weapon against bureaucratic and inefficient officials and their policies...
...Voting responsibly...
...Call them the rational and the prophetic, the libertarian and the egalitarian traditions--or, as they manifest themselves in Stone's thoroughly modern world-view, "Jeffersonianism" and "Marxism...
...His answer: "Well, you don't have to go to such dramatic effects as a holocaust...
...There was no nostalgia for the Weimar period, not even among intellectuals...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 Of course, his Jefferson has about as much to do with the real Founding Father as his Marx does with the actual father of Communism...
...What's depressing about such rhetoric is how little it reflects new analysis, how much it rehashes stale Popular Front arguments...
...By 1956, however, he had begun to characterize his Zionism ironically...
...She was looking through one the other day and came across a section about the importance of fathers in developing children's intelligence...
...But such a claim is based on an extremely crude pressed "the ethos of the landed aristocracy...
...For years," McCall's gushed, "Stone was treated as a social and political pariah in Washington, because he stood up for civil liberties and for racial justice and against witchhunting...
...One of the stupidest ideas of our times is that we live in a revolutionary age...
...If the Russians suddenly withdraw from Afghanistan, the American Presidential campaign, which now seems in the bag for Carter [!1, will be up for a recount . . . . Look at it from a realistic point of view and ask yourself: Do we really want the Russians out of Afghanistan...
...The Second World War was over...
...Independence from what...
...But that could be attributed to a general policy ofpas d'ennemis ~ gauche...
...As for the Greeks' attitude toward "democracy," Stone seems to think that "freedom" is an absolute value that meant (or should have meant) the same thing in fourth-century Athens as it does in twentieth-century America...
...Allemann, an intelligent and perceptive observer of the German political scene, wrote a cogent little book, entitled Bonn Ist Nicht Weimar, Bonn Is Not Weimar...
...Lifelong dissent," he wrote in 1969, "has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat...
...Thirty-nine years after the First World War another world war had come and gone, and the world had changed beyond recognition...
...Along with his recent Georgetown lecture, these articles contain the main themes of a book he is planning to write that will "enrich the past by seeing it anew through the eyes of the present...
...But when Allemann was writing "Weimar" was still a term that evoked mixed associations in Germany...
...And is Stone really serious in claiming that his views on Israel aren't being given a fair hearing in the media...
...The world looks different from week to week...
...After he closed the Weekly, he sold its mailing list to the New York Review of Books, of which he became a contributing editor...
...Today, at the age of 76, he's lived long enough to see at least half of his prophecy come true...
...His old part-time position of Washington correspondent for the Nation, which he held between 1940 and 1946, had been filled by someone else...
...The role of the press as 'Fourth Estate' we owe to Jefferson...
...In 1981 Stone was also featured on "Sixty Minutes," and Ed Bradley praised his "sincerity and dedication to free thought...
...and soon became a familiar name and sight to "the Movement...
...Milton and Jefferson are my heroes," he has said...
...He probably thinks he's been consistent in his attitude toward terrorism in the Middle East...
...On the surface, he seemed to have flipped 180 degrees from his position of twenty years earlier...
...I am not only thinking of the political map of Europe and Germany[ I am thinking, too, of the ways in which people live and of the ideas that rule them...
...The three left-wing papers he worked for between 1940 and 1952--PM, the New York Star, and the New York Daily Compass-had folded...
...Nonetheless, he was careful to temper his criticisms with forthright admiration for "the most sensitive of a generation which feels in its bones what we older people only grasp as an unreal abstraction, that the world is headed for nuclear annihilation and something must be done to stop it...
...I t wasn't until 1956 that Stone could announce, with a drama that today seems comical, that a trip to the Soviet Union made him feel "like a swimmer under water who must rise to the surface or his lungs will burst...
...Robert Asahina I.F...
...But now things are different: It's okay, evidently, when Jews are martyrs, refugees in search of a homeland, or beleaguered defenders of an infant state...
...Jeffersonianism" means simply freedom of thought to Stone...
...He says his "academic qualifications" include "chutzpah plus zest plus temerity...
...Its leaders are bitterly critical of the Jerusalem bombing (by Jewish terrorists...
...I do not like much of what they are saying and doing...
...According to Stone, "nobody ever got away with so much unmitigated nonsense as Plato did out of sheer charm...
...I'm not even going to try to cope with the legal sophistries of that one...
...How did Stone react to this shattering of the Popular Front illusion that, as he put it, "the Soviet Union was the core of the world front against as those who are going to vote for Truman and the bipartisan Cold War, and expect to get peace, housing, and better p r i c e s . . . Wallace has had his effect on both parties already, and a big vote for peace in November might have its effect, too...
...About twenty-five years ago the Swiss journalist F.R...
...But the change in his arguments over the years reflects a predictable double standard...
...STONE, SELF-CRAFTED ICON A long, hard look at a venerated Old Left/New Left troublemaker...
...And his new interpretations of Socrates and Plato appeared in the New York Times Magazine (1979) and Harper's (1981...
...The case against Socrates was political," and "the charge of corrupting the youth was based on a belief--and considerable evidence--that he was undermining their faith in Athenian democracy...
...In his old age, Stone has finally become a "national institution" with an institutional affiliation: Distinguished Scholar in Residence at American University, where he is busy criticizing Socrates for calling himself" 'the gadfly' of Athens [even though] it seems his sting was not much in evidence when Athens needed it most [during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants...
...And one of the dangers in that is that perfectionism can be a horror...
...Did Stone ever stop to think that those "contradictions" might be deliberate rhetorical and philosophical strategies...
...the British, for "trying to build an alliance with the Moslem upper classes in the Middle East against the Soviet Union...
...In the August 26, 1939 issue of the Nation, for example, Stone was one of "more than 400" signers (including Corliss Lamont and Max Lerner) of an open letter, dated August 10 of that year, addressed "to all active supporters of democracy and Peace...
...Indeed, the Greek and the Jewish traditions are the opposing poles of his own philosophy...
...In 1948, for instance, he cheerfully confessed to being a "dupe" for the party in supporting Henry Wallace for President...
...I had no inside information," Stone said in the film named after his paper...
...And Rovere should know...
...I admit everything," Stone wrote...
...But some of the Platonic virtues (like justice) are rooted in the city, others in the activity of philosophy, which has ends that are very different from those of politics...
...Indeed, as recently as 1974, no less a respected liberal than Richard Rovere could still attack Stone (in philip Nobile's Intellectual Skywriting) for being a "Stalinist...
...It is "no accident" (to use Marxist jargon that Stone would recognize) that his main argument neatly tracked the Moscow line: The United States was indirectly responsible for the conflict...
...Of course, there was the inconvenient fact that the North Koreans, not the South, crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, but even that could be explained away...
...he edited the pieces Stone wrote for the Communist New Masses...
...John Dewey's commission of inquiry into the Moscow trials had exposed the horrors of Stalinism in 1937, but Dewey and his collaborators were "fascists...
...And in the next issue, the editors wrote that "the events of the past week [i.e., the German invasion of Poland from the west, which was to be followed by the Russian invasion of Poland from the east] serve as an effective commentary on the claims of the 400 signers...
...The point is not merely that Stone was a rather unapologetic apologist long after diehard fellow travelers had abandoned ship...
...Still, his libertarianism has more often been a check on his Marxism...
...And it is to Stone's credit that he did, that he was truly an "investigative reporter...
...What's equally important is the way he has, true to his own prediction, come to be "praised for virtues" that he "never had": independence and a commitment to the truth...
...So starting his own journal was, as he put it, a "last resort...
...I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible," he wrote on another occasion...
...reading of the Platonic dialogues...
...Stone began with 5,000 subscribers and claimed the Weekly was in the black from the very first issue...
...Stone once claimed in the Nation that "the bogey of Communism" was "a method of diverting attention from real problems to imaginary ones...
...In the past twenty-four years I have been asked to speak in a synagogue only once . . . . Finding an American publishing house willing to publish a book that departs from the standard Israeli line is about as easy as selling a thoughtful exposition of atheism to the Osservatore Romano in Vatican City...
...My proudest awards are my scars...
...hunt and the cold war," the product of a self-described "independent c a p i t a l i s t . . , a wholly independent newspaperman...
...By the way, does Stone regard as "damaging" the fact that he himself remained in the United States during the McCarthy era and other periods when he was a ' 'pariah" ?) But it has also led him to exaggerate the significance of constitutionalism, as if it were independent of social structure, history, and politics...
...Chamberlain, according to Stone, hoped that "failure to obtain the pact would lead the Poles to surrender...
...It is, he has fervently proclaimed many times, "an essential fact about the modern world" that "socialism is coming everywhere...
...John Lukacs TWO-FACED GERMANY Having it both ways is an old German tradition...
...After ten years, it had 20,000 subscribers...
...As proof of Socrates' antidemocratic tendencies, Stone cites the "How glad I've been not to have agreed about Castro...
...In his old age, Socrates was given hemlock by the democratic citizens of Athens...
...How glad I've been not to have agreed about Vietnam...
...He won a George Polk Award in 1971 ("my first Establishment award," he said...
...Consider Stone's 1952 book, The Hidden History of the Korean War...
...It's another thing, however, to be wrongheaded, particularly since Stone's journalistic methods have earned so much praise...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 19 When he began the Weekly thirty years ago, Stone predicted: "I'm going to graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if I last long enough I'il be regarded as a national institution...
...How glad I've been not to have agreed about Vietnam...
...That complaint appeared as part one of the epilogue to a new edition of Underground to Palestine, published by Pantheon, a subsidiary of Random House, one of the largest American trade publishers...
...By blaming the British...
...Stone's Weekly (actually biweekly since 1968), the four-page Washington newsletter of which he was the sole editor, writer, researcher, copy editor, proofreader, typographer, assistant to the circulation manager (his wife, Esther), and chief PR man...
...he asked, condemning the massacre in Lebanon while trying backhandedly to justify the activities of the PLO...
...Okay, if you want it that way, so they 'dominate' the party...
...His first translations--of poems by Sappho, Aeschylus, and others--were published in the New York Review of Books in 1979...
...The italics are his, and they cost him 5,000 subscribers, as he never fails to remind people in an effort to demonstrate his "independence...
...It's impossible to resist noting that Stone himself provided the best rebuttal to this kind of reasoning...
...This supposedly showed Socrates' affinity for tyranny, confirming the accusation made later that he was "undermining . . . faith in Athenian democracy" and thus deserved to die...
...Thirtynine years after Waterloo Europe had been convulsed by three waves of revolutions...
...The Weekly picked up 5,000 subscribers after he was a guest on the "Dick Cavett" show in 1969...
...Here's Stone on his method: "You reexamine all the source material for yourself...
...Reporting accurately, and without bias...
...At various times he's also suggested a comparison between himself and Moses as well as Isaiah...
...Thirty-nine years ago an era in world history had come to an end...
...But here's a countersuggestion...
...I haven't read this book yet but the title is surely wrong...
...Yip" Harburg ("Over the Rainbow") wrote him a birthday song...
...by 1968, 40,000...
...That was in 1971, the year he shut down LF...
...Stone regards his recent acclaim differently, and diffidently: "How glad I've been not to have agreed about Castro," he said upon his return to the National Press Club...
...In a 1953 Weekly article, he criticized John Foster Dulles for believing (in 1935) that "the road to p e a c e . . , was to give Germany, Italy and Japan what they wanted...
...Stone started receiving other kinds of recognition as well...
...Laying waste to whole hamlets of bureaucrats with the weapon they feared most: facts," was how Life described it...
...Who better than we should understand Palestinian desperation and homelessness...
...In 1884 the European world was ruled by Bismarck, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Wagner, Spencer, Manet--planetary years away from 1824, from the world of Metternich, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Byron, Rossini, Ingres...
...Widespread opposition to the Vietnam war, which he had criticized from its start, had made him something of a cult hero in the sixties...
...Now let me ask you this: Is there a black leader or civil-liberties attorney anywhere in this whole land who is ready to start a class-action suit to reform the welfare system on behalf of all black children, on the grounds that they have a "constitutional right" to develop their genetically endowed intelligence by growing up with a father in their home...
...So what...
...And it's a mistake simply to identify the words of any of the characters--whether Socrates in the Apology or the Republic, or the Athenian Stranger in the Laws--with the teaching of Plato (just as it would be to attribute Hamlet's sentiments to Shakespeare...
...The piece originally ran as an article ("Confessions of a Jewish Dissident") in the March 8, 1978, issue of the New York Review of Books...
...Even Underground to Palestine, when examined with the attention that Stone gave to government documents, is revealing in this regard, though perhaps unconsciously so...
...its map (and the map of the United States) had been drastically remade...
...Like what...
...After World War II the intellectual climate in Germany was conservative, not radical...
...It was to be a "radical paper, fighting the witch Robert Asahina is senior editor at Simon and Schuster, and theater critic for the Hudson Review...
...And the New York Post, for which he had written editorials from 1933 to 1939, was--under the command of a former PM colleague, James Wechslermno longer congenial to the radical politics Stone still espoused at the height of the McCarthy era...
...Certainly not from viewing the world through rosy lenses...
...Chamberlain's desire for further 'appeasement' is shown, above all, in the interminable delay in negotiating a Soviet pact," he wrote in the Nation (September 23, 1939), after mulling over the matter for three weeks...
...Lyndon Johnson's "credibility gap" and the Pentagon's "numbers games" were choice targets for journalists who took the time to read between the lines of presidential speeches, official pronouncements, bureaucratic reports, congressional transcripts...
...Maybe to prove that he isn't just a "character," during the past decade Stone has reverted to Popular Front form in his semi-retirement...
...Stone took part in some of the first "teach-ins" (remember them...
...Opposed to reunification, plagued with domestic difficulties, and supported by Chiang Kai-shek (and to a lesser degree by President Truman and General MacArthur), "Syngman Rhee provoked the attack from the North," according to Stone...
...Stone once said, "you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had...
...But once they change their m i n d s . . . On one level Germany reverted to the twenties...
...I too, like the rest of them (and maybe you), am a hypocrite...
...During the last several years, however, he has found himself not only socially and politically acceptable, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 17 but an exalted hero in the pantheon of the peace movement...
...Now that he's become so acclimated to success that he can, like LBJ, show off his scars, it's worth taking a second look at how he got them...
...Plato wrote dialogues, not transcripts, reports, or White Papers...
...Politically, I suppose I am what everybody right or left calls a troublemaker," Stone wrote in the early fifties...
...Consider Stone's charge that Plato was an "elitist" whose dialogues were "glamorous packaging" for the "ancient and disdainful notion" that "ordinary people cannot be trusted to govern themselves...
...Any doubts on this score could be put to rest by Stone's criticisms of Israel, which increasingly isolated him from the American Jewish community after the mid-sixties...
...the ruling ideas are Evolution, Progress, Technology, Sex Education, Female Emancipation, Atomic Science, Modernization...
...Stone is uninterested in disinterested research, though he takes very seriously the "familiar story of Greek civilization as it relates t o . . . what concerns me most: freedom of thought and expression, and how to preserve it against the new excuses for repression bound to arise in every generation...
...The intellectual best-seller of this season is the Englishman Paul Johnson's history of the twentieth century, entitled Modern Times...
...In a disingenuous mix of candor and irony, he argued: "But I don't think I'm quite as big a dupe loaded words in Popular Front rhetoric, though not as loaded as "war...
...During the McCarthy era, he was proud he "had not confined [himself] like a respectable liberal to mistaken identity cases...
...Stone would have Socrates be a modern bourgeois individualist concerned with personal freedom, instead of a philosopher concerned with virtue and its complicated relationship to the pol/s...
...Of course, "one man's fact is another man's delete" (as Dwight Macdonald once said...
...he was still a long way from openly breaking with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
