I.F.Stone, 1907-1989
Memo from the Editor I.F. Stone, 1907-1989 Everyone who knew I.F. Stone has a favorite memory. Mine is of an afternoon, some time in the mid-1960s, when we attended a State Department briefing put...
...To paraphrase what Heywood Broun wrote about Eugene V. Debs, when Izzy died everyone said he was a good man—but he was no better and no worse when he was despised by his government, shunned by his colleagues, and ignored by the publishers and broadcasters who mourned his passing in June...
...Among his many magnificent qualities was the willingness to stand alone or in a lonely minority—against his fellow members of the National Press Club who expelled him for daring to bring a black friend to lunch, against the McCarthyite madness that seized this country in the early 1950s, against the catastrophic U.S...
...We weren't even supposed to be there...
...All governments are run by liars, he reasoned, because if they began to tell the truth they would have to divulge their mistakes, their miscalculations, and, yes, their crimes...
...Columnists and commentators memorialized Izzy Stone's fierce independence, his persistent and ingenious investigative reporting, his devotion to peace, civil liberties, and human rights...
...But he understood that information is power, and that a monopoly on information is indispensable to those who want to have a monopoly on power...
...This show was strictly for the out-of-town-ers, not for correspondents who regularly covered Foggy Bottom and other miasmic precincts of the nation's capital...
...That wasn't cynicism...
...Finally, it was over, and the audience was invited to pose questions to the all-star cast assembled on the stage...
...Nothing they say should be believed...
...So we made our way into the State Department's auditorium, along with a hundred or more editors, and for several hours we sat there, our eyes glazing over, while Secretary of State Dean Rusk and platoons of his deputies, assistants, and sundry "experts" recited their incredibly simplistic public-consumption version of the complicated state of the world and this country's role in it...
...He lived long enough for his prediction to come true, and his death on June 18 made front-page news and drew editorial tributes...
...But Americans were beginning to question the Johnson Administration's policies—especially its increasingly bloody and costly adventure in Vietnam—and we were curious to hear what sort of official version would be dished out to the visiting editors from the provinces...
...He didn't care to hobnob with those who wielded influence or power, and he didn't succumb to their empty slogans and bland lies...
...It was every bit as bad as we had expected—even worse—but some of the editors seemed impressed and grateful for the "inside information," though they could have learned as much and more from an attentive perusal of any issue of My Weekly Reader circulated in their home-town junior high schools...
...Izzy Stone was on his feet in an instant...
...Mr...
...Those who miss him and praise him can honor him best by imitation...
...He did that work, admirably and with total honesty, for more than six decades...
...His Weekly, published from 1953 to 1971, was not only an extraordinary venture in personal journalism but an inspiration to a couple of generations of journalists...
...intervention in Indochina...
...So they lied...
...Most important of all, he was willing to stand against the conventions and seductions of his craft...
...Secretary," he said, "some of these editors have come all the way from California to attend this briefing, and it isn't even worth my bus fare from Albemarle Street...
...He said—the words have hung over my desk at The Progressive for many years—"Every government is run by liars...
...Mine is of an afternoon, some time in the mid-1960s, when we attended a State Department briefing put on for the benefit of local newspaper editors who had been flown in from around the country...
...His mistakes were almost invariably the mistakes that flow from an excess of optimism or an undue faith in the good intentions of one's fellow human beings...
...Izzy was, in fact, the least cynical of journalists...
...When I last wrote about Izzy Stone in this space, in the June 1988 issue of The Progressive, I quoted his prediction that if he lived long enough "I'd graduate from being a pariah to being a character, and then if I lasted long enough after that I'd go from being a character to being an institution...
...His job, he assumed, was to expose the lies, to tell the truth, and, therefore, to help redistribute power...
...And that would diminish their authority, undermine their power...
Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8
