Stone on the '60s
Knoll, Erwin
BOOKS Stone on the '60s In A Time of Torment, by I. F. Stone. Random House. 463 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Erwin Knoll It is time for someone to expose the real I. F. Stone. He is not—he couldn't...
...On May 22, 1961, when some of us didn't know about Vietnam and few cared, he wrote: "One of the tasks of counter-guerrilla forces will be to eliminate suspected subversive influences in the villages...
...He is co-author with William Gaffin of "Anything but the Truth," a book about the credibility gap to be published in May by Putnam...
...He has reviewed books on art for The New York Times...
...He has been denounced as "subversive" and "un-American," but he is possessed by a love of America and a faith in its promise that defy all rebuffs and survive bitter disappointments...
...WILLIAM McCANN frequently reports on paperbacks in these pages...
...Stone, Murray Kempton writes in his introduction to In a Time of Torment, "has managed to be unique without being cranky, to be moral without being self-righteous, to be emotional without being sentimental, and to be passionate without being unjust...
...C. HUGH HOLMAN teaches English at the University of North Carolina and is co-author with C. Floyd Stovall of "The Development of American Literary Criticism...
...Perhaps it also proves that I. F. Stone is real after all...
...RALPH STONE teaches history at Miami University...
...How could one explain that "Stone" manages to extract from the slag heap of each week's news the few essential nuggets of fact that the rest of us usually miss, or that he mounts them in a setting of pellucid analysis that puts most contemporary "interpretative journalism" to shame...
...It has its able staff of researchers who pore over he Monde, the Neue Zuricher Zeitung, and the Saigon Post, who slog through the endless inanities of the Congressional Record to find the rare relevant or revealing quotation, who sit by the hour in stuffy offices on Capitol Hill scribbling extracts from unpublished transcripts of committee hearings...
...If followed, it not only will fail to spread democracy abroad but will poison it at home...
...RICHARD KOSTELANETZ is a free lance writer and critic...
...He calls himself a "socialist," but I have heard him relay the wistful observation that the only thing socialists have managed to nationalize in our time is socialism...
...It has its data storage and retrieval system, programmed to produce on an instant's notice the citation from Schwar-zenberger's Manual of International Law the passage that illuminates the latest Cambodian border violation or the Gulf of Tonkin incident...
...This new course is a deadend street...
...times with understanding born of rigorous intellectual effort and profound compassion...
...WAYNE ANDREWS is the author of the forthcoming book, "Architecture in Chicago and Mid-America...
...KON-RAD H. JARAUSCH specializes in European diplomatic and intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin...
...A reader pondering the primary election exertions of 1968 can profit from Stone's 1964 essay that begins, "The process of picking a Presidential candidate bears only a distant relation to sober discussion of political issues...
...What's more, Stone is indispensable, and no committee can make that claim...
...Regular readers of /. F. Stone's Weekly and the New York Review of Books will find little in In a Time of Torment that they have not seen before, but they will find ample rewards in the book nonetheless...
...The encomium is well deserved, but it is also patently absurd in our age of specialization...
...He is invariably described as a "radical," but in an age when alienation is the stamp of radicalism, he remains the most unalienated of men...
...No, the real I. F. Stone is obviously a cabal—well-heeled, resourceful, automated...
...Can this be done without eliminating the very men who want reform and leaving the dull and acquiescent...
...Stone is clearly a committee...
...If that were the real I. F. Stone or the only I. F. Stone, how could one account for the Weekly issued under his name for the past fifteen years, or for this latest collection of his pieces...
...The man who masquerades as I. F-Stone defies classification...
...He is not—he couldn't possibly be—the smallish, slightly rumpled man who, operating out of a modest brick house on Nebraska Avenue, scurries about Washington, a newspaper or two under his arm, surfacing at a news conference once in a rare while to ask a polite question in a disarmingly mild tone of voice...
...And he has survived as the only idealist alive who can make every person who wants to be a realist depend upon his wisdom...
...On almost every page, In a Time of Torment proves that it is possible to view our troubled and confused THE REVIEWERS ERWIN KNOLL is White House correspondent for the Newhouse National News Service...
...He edited "Beyond Left and Right," just published by Morrow...
...Stone's journalism is remarkably unperishable, and many of the pieces that date back to the early '60s might well have been written today...
...He has written movingly and lovingly of Israel's struggle for survival, but his incisive comments on the six-day war last June and its aftermath stirred Zionists to wrathful invective...
...It has its think tank of experts who can penetrate the mysteries of the Chinese cultural revolution, the Chilean economy, and Dean Rusk's turgid prose...
...Military methods of this kind weaken the reform elements at the bottom of the pyramid, or drive them into the arms of the Communists, and at the same time strengthen the rulers and ruling classes who are the principal enemy of reform...
...I know of no group that has so consistently been right...
...As we approach another summer with every expectation of renewed and escalated urban warfare, Stone's comments on black power and white indifference provide important if depressing insights...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
