LF. Stone: The Last Optimist

...But to have it exposed and to have a chance to think about it—that's wonderful...

...it's not the heart of the question...

...The saying, "Sooner shall a camel pass through a needle's eye than a rich man enter the gates of Heaven"—that's not in Karl Marx's Das Kapital, that's in the Gospels...

...STONE: Yes, that's right...

...That doesn't mean that Mao was wholly bad, or even that Stalin was wholly bad, I suppose...

...Q: So we keep reinventing the wheel and painfully learning the things others learned before us...

...For him, virtue is knowledge—but lots of knowledgeable people are pretty awful...

...Then there's no more Constitution, no more Politburo, no time to get the President out of bed, no time for debate...

...So man was made in the image of God...

...And the human race is like the birds, and its poets are the birds that sing...

...I never thought that would happen...

...There was a revealing moment when President Kennedy called in David Halberstam [of The New York Times] and General [Victor] Krulak of the Marines, who was head of intelligence for the military in Vietnam, and said, in effect, "Hey, you guys—I read Halberstam's reports in The Times and I read Krulak's secret reports and it reads like two different wars...

...It was drizzling last Easter Sunday when I arrived at the comfortable house on 29th Street, off Albermarle, in which Izzy and Esther Stone have lived for many years...

...STONE: That was Jefferson's ideal...

...STONE: No, and he wasn't thinking about the electronic media, and all that can become a serious problem...

...There were some great muckrakers—if you want to use the term—before the first World War, and I don't rank with them at all...

...Of course, the real war was being reported in The Times and The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and the phony war was the stuff that came in over the President's desk...

...Right at the beginning of the Bible you have God saying to the angels, "Let's make man in our image...

...Augustine and in Calvin, who believe that if someone's rich and powerful, it shows he has grace...

...I never thought, at the time of the witchhunts, that I would live to see the day when J. Edgar Hoover would be recognized as the kind of jerk he really was, and when guys like me would find a certain amount of acceptance, if not applause...

...It's a portrait of a Jacobin, a terrible mixture of idealism, cruelty, brutality, love, humanity and inhumanity, justice and injustice—all in one personality that really summed up the whole French Revolution...

...The virtue of a free society is that it doesn't have to depend on spies and secret police...

...Q: In your sixty-two years as a working journalist, I would guess you've experienced at least two great disappointments...

...Q: Isn't that a rather formidable mission to impose on what is, after all, a business enterprise...

...The system is not perfect, and it's not monolithic...

...The New York Times was just godawful in the 1920s...

...If you affirm the myth of equality, it's still a myth—but it gives people self-respect, and it makes them feel equal...

...It's wonderful that Deng Xiaoping tossed a lot of Mao Zhedong in the ash can...

...It's a misfortune that complete socialism came first to a country as backward as Russia...

...In the Peasant Revolt, when they finally got the Bible away from the Church and translated it so common people could read it, it spread revolution just as liberation theology is doing right now in Latin America...

...You never can tell, sometimes you win...

...It comes out of Pilgrim's Progress, and just as the terms Tory and Whig were once insults but became respectable appellations in British politics, so muckraker has become more or less respectable...

...Q: I've often heard you described as America's greatest muckraking journalist, but I seem to recall that you don't particularly like that title...

...If the icecaps were suddenly to melt, polar bears would die out...

...Q: Given that—I don't want to call it bias—given that institutional inertia on the part of the mass media, how will we ever reach enough people in this country with enough information and analysis to bring about fundamental political change...

...And it was true: The first followers of Jesus were all humble men, unlettered, the kind of people Socrates and Plato despised...

...That's not a question of capitalism or communism, free society or dictatorship...

...Even when talking, as we are right now, about the most grim and threatening developments, I've always found you hopeful...

...Unless he can free himself from his own primitivism, unless he can learn to master technology instead of being mastered by it, he's doomed...

...Except for the tape recorder I brought with me, the conversation was just an extension of the one we have been carrying on for more than twenty-five years...

...It's still a free society, but it'll become less so if people don't have the courage to utilize it...

...Unless we get a freeze very soon, Moscow and Washington will both lose control of their own destinies...

...It also says we all come from the same father and mother...

...that doesn't demean him, it elevates him...

...But if our media should be wholly swallowed up by big interests, the day may come when people will have to enact laws making printing presses and electronic time available to critics...

...It's worth all the agony of learning Greek...

...As St...

...A friend once gave me a word of hope: He said, "You know, Izzy, if you keep on pissing on a boulder for about a thousand years, you'd be surprised what an impression you make...

...Who would have thought that a Senate committee would expose the dealings of the CIA, the attempts to kill Fidel Castro, the dirty work against Salvador Allende...

...he asks, and this is what he says: One man decides he'd rather turn around and die than run—and he does...

...In that vision, the lower classes obey the higher classes, and the higher classes give the poor an occasional pat on the head and a beggar's mite...

...After every great war, the victors square off against each other for the next one...

...For example, when [Senators Wayne] Morse and [Ernest] Gruening opened up on the Tonkin Gulf resolution [authorizing fullscale U.S...

...military intervention in Vietnam], I covered it in the Weekly...

...It's mostly dark, but then there are the bright spots...

...In 1953, several years before the Russians launched their first Sputnik, you saw clearly a danger that very few other people saw—the danger of space war— and you raised the alarm in the Weekly...

...If you regard the revelations about the Soviet Union not as crushing destructions of hope but as life, uncovering mistakes, giving us a second chance, giving us time for thought and time for hope...

...Quite often you find in the daily newspaper bits and pieces of information that run counter to what I call the party line...

...Socrates and Plato demean the common man, but the playwrights celebrate him...

...You see, Christianity is a marriage of two very diverse strains...

...Here we are, thirty years later, having advanced relentlessly toward that danger...

...If our antagonist today were a republican Russia or a czarist Russia, it would make no difference at all in the arms race...

...You don't come to understand what's happening by peeping through keyholes and seeing how a foreign leader goes to the toilet...

...Q: What do you enjoy these days, Izzy...

...That's the "evil empire"—that other guy across the valley...

...I don't have to sell myself in my old age...

...STONE: I'd had my own little paper, The Progress, in 1922, and then I worked on a country weekly and did sports for the Camden Post-Telegram...

...Q: How would you define the function of the press...

...Those people are all paranoid, trained to look for plots, but history is not made by conspiracies...

...When I was a young man and Hoover was President, The Times had a Washington correspondent named Richard V. Oulahan who used to play medicine ball with Hoover almost every morning...

...It's not as bad as the Soviet press, it's not as rigid, but there is a defined realm of respectable discourse...

...STONE: The duty of the press is to inform the public and police the Government...

...Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr...

...People can change it at least a little bit, and they have a duty to try...

...You know there's a chorus in the Antigone, and very few scholars have stopped to think about what it really means: It's a celebration of the common man—of the wonders of learning how to sail and how to fish, how to hunt, how to communicate...

...So the idea of equality comes right out of those early chapters of the Bible...

...This has to do with the trap created by human nature and the make-up of the international system...

...Q: You graduated from high school at the age of sixteen, and had already begun working as a newspaper reporter...

...That's what Reagan wants to do to Russia...

...You know, there's one good idea in the Soviet constitution: When Stalin's constitution was promulgated in the 1930s, he claimed it was better than the American constitution on freedom of the press because it provided that printing presses and other necessary materials should be made freely available to anyone who wished to express himself...

...STONE: Look, history is a tremendous symphony— music full of anguish and horror and discord, but there's also beauty in it...

...And the second, I suspect, would have been the failure of the Zionist vision...

...Q: And what about the Zionist dream...

...It was all there in the Congressional Record, but nobody bothered to read it, and editors weren't interested enough to have reporters cover it...

...But you're right about my not liking the word muckraking...

...One is the deeply democratic strain of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels—the strain that elevates the common man...

...Q: Do you believe there will ever be a society that provides that kind of freedom of expression...

...Henry Demarest Lloyd, the man who wrote Wealth Against Commonwealth—he was the greatest...

...STONE: The public is very well informed on this...

...STONE: What I learned from the Jews is more important...

...An essential premise both of liberal philosophy—Locke, Milton, Jefferson—and of Marxist philosophy, which is also part of the English materialist tradition, is that history is not made by conspiracies...

...You talk about history as something that was accomplished by a great team of which we are all members...

...But I did support LaFollette for President in 1924, the year I graduated from high school...

...STONE: History is not a totally fatalistic drama...

...Only a few old men like me...

...And just about every day there'd be a front-page story in The Times that wasn't really a news story at all but a disguised editorial about what a great guy Herbert Hoover was...

...Stone's Weekly— his wife, Esther, ran the business side—and I was a charter subscriber...

...There's certainly a strong peace movement in Israel, and a recognition that the invasion of Lebanon was a complete failure, that terrorism today is worse, not better, and that it was folly to try to destroy the PLO just when it was moving in a more moderate direction...

...The Gospels are a cri de coeur of the poor...

...I wish kids would start studying history again...

...Q: We haven't talked about what you are learning from the Greeks...

...All that is superficial and propagandistic...

...People realized that at the time...

...In fact, nobody in this generation ranks with the great muckrakers whom Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Brass Check...

...It's madness to reach out to the stars and begin the great adventure of going to the moon and the planets and maybe beyond and still be divided here on Earth by all these stupid, anachronistic quarrels...

...I covered my hometown, Haddonfield, New Jersey, for the Camden Courier as its correspondent while I was in high school...

...The freeze movement is doing its best...

...There's no respect for the lowly...

...That's made to order for the ruling class, for the rich against the poor...

...STONE: Most of the press has never been very good in this country...

...And I think it's a citizen's duty— and a journalist's duty—to fight...

...they're very democratic— Aeschylus, Sophocles, and above all, Euripides...

...That's what you do in The Progressive and what I did in the Weekly...

...Godawful...

...It's a poem to man...

...It was a dreadful thing to live through the French Revolution, just as dreadful as the Russian Revolution, and it had the same admixture of idealism and horror and irrationality...

...You're relegated to publications that reach only a small number of Americans...

...I was a young radical then, and very strong for the LaFollette-Wheeler Progressive ticket...

...If you cross over the bounds to the right or to the leftit's a little more flexible to the right than to the left, but it applies on both sides—then you don't have to write for the desk drawer or hide your writing under the bed, as in the Soviet Union, but you submit it to the American equivalent of samizdat— The Progressive, The Nation, In These Times...

...So the dissidents here are allowed to talk to each other, but they don't get a chance to talk to the wider public...

...STONE: No, you don't have to reinvent the wheel...

...There's so much to learn and so many things I haven't read and it's so much fun—just so damn much fun...

...He spoke about a soldier's duty: Irrespective of whether he's going to win or lose or die, it's his duty to fight...

...It didn't fit the party line—just as you don't get stuff in Pravda or Izvestia that tells the Russian people that the war in Afghanistan is a big mistake...

...Q: You're just about a year older than the magazine...

...That was wonderful...

...I go to bed with a whole pile of books, and I check out things in the encyclopedia, and it's all one seamless web: human history and human destiny...

...You said just a moment ago, "There's still hope...

...One, I suspect, would have been the failure of the socialist dream that captivated so many people's imaginations earlier in this century...

...The Weekly was really quite successful toward the end, in the last ten years, and it gave me a little retirement fund...

...They're very mixed as it is, and they're going to get more mixed...

...it was wrong to put it all on one man, because the Party was full of little Stalins— here in America as well as in Russia...

...There's a parable in the Gospel about the seeds that fall on stony places...

...You can be a great scholar and a bad human being, or ignorant and a wonderful human being...

...There's no compassion in the Greeks...

...STONE: So let's start the interview with my saying I'm awfully sorry that I wasn't a charter subscriber...

...Is it doing it less well than it did when you went into newspaper work more than sixty years ago...

...But that's our duty...

...I was working at David Stern's Camden Courier, which was nominally a Republican newspaper, but it was the most friendly paper in the Philadelphia area to the LaFollette-Wheeler ticket...

...It's wonderful to hear the birds in the morning, and to see the trees, and to see babies...

...It's possible for people to keep informed...

...They're not repeated, they're just dropped...

...STONE: No, I think the press is better than it was in the 1920s...

...It's so much fun to be learning again, to have time to study in my retirement...

...The whole history of the human race is fascinating...

...The following interview is condensed from a session that lasted almost two hours...

...A good journalist has a fire in his belly and a duty to expose abuses...

...But the human race is trapped by its primitive instincts, the macho appeal of war, and the obsolescence of the nation-state system...

...I mean that very seriously...

...In writing history or journalism—it's the same thing—you get to understand by looking at the fundamental struggles, the interests, the classes, the ideas that become facts, and you try to make sense of all that...

...Secrets play a very small part in human history...

...STONE: Yes, but I don't consider them complete failures...

...Of course, he never obeyed it...

...Jerome says, "Who reads Plato and Aristotle any more...

...Socrates and Plato always talked about the human community as a herd, but Aristotle talked about it as a polis—a...

...It was, despite its name, a morning paper, and it made a point of breaking the rules: a publication that carried no advertising, a tabloid that respected the intelligence of its readers, a freewheeling sheet that poked into stories other papers ignored...

...No species seems to be able to adapt beyond a margin, and man may be in the same position...

...Man may now be an endangered species...

...Does Reagan know what he's doing with this religious issue...

...STONE: Well, we do—somehow...

...We know that if a great change in climatic conditions requires drastic changes in the behavior of a species, it will probably die out...

...When it was over, we went for a walk in the rain and talked some more...

...That's a compliment...

...How do you sustain your optimism...

...After all, you're not just raking muck, you're trying to help people understand what's happening in the society...

...One reason the Government is so badly informed is that it has too damned many intelligence agencies...

...If there were no law at home, we would all arm ourselves with machine guns, and every little quarrel could flare up into a gun battle...

...We sat in a small study lined with the classical Greek texts that have become his passion since he shut down the Weekly in 1972...

...And Homer is wonderful—he's just a mishmash in English, but in Greek he's such a great artist...

...There's a myth about the great country papers and the fearless country editors— it's a lot of malarkey...

...it's a wonderful grass-roots movement—the most encouraging thing that's happened in the last ten years...

...There's still hope, but the end could come at any time...

...Q: Since this interview is for The Progressive's seventy- fifth anniversary issue, let me begin by asking how old you are...

...Q: You've written about great moments in human history and about terrible moments, but you tend to remember the great moments more forcefully than the terrible ones, don't you...

...What do you do for sheer fun...

...It made me independent...

...STONE: I don't know...

...Some day, there's going to be a synthesis...

...Q: How do we break out of this trap we've devised for ourselves...

...And on television—my God, you almost never get to see anyone on the Left...

...It's a mistake to think people are unaware of the danger...

...There's a lot of conscience awakening in Israel on the Arab question...

...But it's completely contrary to the Gospels...

...Would you agree that those are great disappointments...

...That's what De- Tocqueville recognized: Myths can be very creative...

...They don't make the front page, and they're not amplified by editorial writers, columnists, speechmakers...

...Not to treat the Arabs as brothers flies in the face of everything that's best in the Prophets and the Jewish tradition...

...I read The Birds of Aristophanes in Greek last year, and it was so joyful that it gave me a new appreciation of the birds outside my window...

...He was the principal writer, editor, and sole proprietor of 'I.F...

...As the Declaration of Independence states, people will suffer great evils for a long time before they act to bring about change...

...A dozen years later, when I went to work for a newspaper in Washington, PM had long since vanished, but Izzy Stone was still covering the news everyone else missed...

...They were the founders of a new religion, and they spoke for the oppressed and the poor, for equality and social justice...

...STONE: Well, you have to remember both, and they're often so mixed up...

...Don't you find even that discouraging...

...How does that happen...

...Q: It seems to me that what we've been talking about all afternoon, in one way or another, is your pride in the human experience...

...I was also lucky enough to become his friend and occasional companion at lunch or on long walks through the city...

...Where there is no law, you assume the worst about your enemies...

...Anatole France, who's unjustly no longer read, wrote a wonderful novel, Les Dieux Ont Soif—The Gods AreAthirst—which is really a handbook for the study of revolution...

...The American press has a party line...

...What is it supposed to do...

...What's happened in the Soviet bloc shows that socialism is no good without freedom of thought and expression...

...It's wonderful that Khrushchev pulled the chain on Stalin and Stalinism...

...Q: And what about the rest of the press...

...Q: And you believe people can still turn the defeat we all face into a victory...

...On the other hand, we have the neo-Platonic and hierarchical view of a society made up of orders—not just of classes but of rigid orders—and that idea, too, passed into Christianity...

...Hazlitt has a wonderful essay on the French Revolution in which he makes the same point: People don't revolt until conditions become intolerable...

...Which is the real war...

...The latest figures in a poll commissioned by the Committee on the Present Danger, who are hawks and arms-race buffs, show that 81 per cent favor a nuclear freeze, and 31 per cent favor nuclear disarmament...

...STONE: My God, I'm not the greatest...

...Human beings are rational, to some degree, and that rationality gives hope, and we journalists are supposed to feed this rational element, to inform, to persuade, to illuminate, so people can make decisions on the basis of debate, and so that a government that's on a bad track can switch to a good track...

...Somehow we transcend our fate, we transcend death by poetry...

...Andrei] Sakharov is right when he says there will be a convergence of the two societies...

...With the advance of technology and the reduction of warning time, the good old days when we had thirty minutes' notice of an ICBM coming across the Atlantic are just about over...

...The human race has learned a little bit...

...STONE: It's not over yet...

...We need a world polis...

...civilization—and koinonia— a community...

...Imagine, you pick up a poet who lived more than 2,000 years ago—like Sappho—and she speaks to you with such immediacy, such power, such pride...

...But the human being is still very much a caveman, and he figures that the solution to any problem is to get rid of that bastard across the valley, and that the only way to create peace is to get a bigger club and go in there and smash his brains out...

...Socrates never speaks of the wisdom of the poor and the humble, the wisdom that comes from sacrifice, experience, and suffering...

...I was a teen-aged fan 0/PM, and I soon learned to look for the provocative stories, usually datelined Washington, that appeared in it under the byline of I.F...

...Q: But how can you apply this enlightened, rational, but leisurely process of public deliberation to the threat of nuclear holocaust, which may confront us with the prospect of catastrophe not in a matter of years or months, but in perhaps days or even hours...

...We may see a better policy...

...It was coined as an insult by Teddy Roosevelt...

...sometimes you win' BY ERWIN KNOLL For a few years in the 1940s, New Yorkers were treated to a short-lived but memorable experiment in journalism—a newspaper called PM...

...I figure if you treat common people as dogs, as they did in ancient Rome, you make a rabble out of them...

...I've been a pious Jewish atheist since my Bar Mitzvah, but I am pious, and at my age, every day is a gift from God...

...STONE: By talking about it, agitating, organizing...

...Even the Bolsheviks looked to the German revolution to save them, and the Mensheviks asked how you could make the leap from a peasant society to a communist society without passing through a bourgeois society...

...But the term really does a disservice to journalism...

...It's the hierarchical strain we find in St...

...A lot of it can be found right there in the press, and even more of it can be found in the public record—in Congressional hearings and debates, in official documents...

...Q: Do you believe journalism is generally performing that function of helping people understand what's happening...

...But our rusticani—our peasants—and our piscatores— our fishermen—the whole world resounds with their wisdom...

...If you're a careful reader, you pick up these droppings and develop their inferences, their meanings, for your own audience...

...Q: But you still hope...

...STONE: I think so, yes, though I wouldn't want to bet on it...

...Q: But Jefferson wasn't thinking about entrusting this mission to great conglomerate media corporations...

...Civilization means people can live together in peace...

...How can you still believe that we'll be able to get a handle on it...

...Q: I've known you for a long time...

...delivered the commencement address in 1871,1 think it was, at Harvard—the only wonderful commencement address I've ever read...

...The Bible's a revolutionary document...

...I'm in love with the Greeks, but when it comes to these problems we've been talking about, the Hebrew Prophets—and I include Jesus among them, and Marx, too, for that matter—have it all over the Greeks...

...But we're learning...

...That's deterrence...

...We may see [Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak] Shamir defeated...

...It looked like the real stuff because it was stamped SECRET, but it was a bunch of bullshit...

...History is made by fundamental forces, not by dark conspiracies...

...STONE: I read Greek poets, and other poetry, Hebrew poetry...

...Aristotle tells a wonderful story about how a defeated army in headlong flight suddenly begins to turn around and make a stand and fight...

...Then a second man follows him, and a third man, and a fourth man, and soon there's a whole knot of resistance, and before you know it the whole army has turned around and what looked like a defeat has become victory...

...STONE: My birthdate is December 24, 1907...

...The Times is a far better paper today...

...But the difference between the Soviet press and the American press is that if you look hard enough, here, you can find a lot of good stories...