I.F. Stone

I’m convinced I.F. Stone is part of the reason I was not hired as a reporter by a newspaper in northern Ohio. This was about 25 years ago. I had been in the business for three or four years, and was working for a paper that fancied itself the smallest daily in the state. I wanted to move to a larger paper, preferably a metro, and managed to arrange an interview with a roomful of editors. According to my memory, we toured the paper, talked about my clips and engaged in the usual pointless banter that is standard for such occasions, until one of the editors asked me to name the journalists I most admired.

I was prepared for that one: H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Murray Kempton and I.F. Stone. The first three names sparked no recognition in the faces surrounding me in the conference room, but one editor thought he recognized the last name I cited: “I.F. Stone? Wasn’t he a Communist?” I don’t recall my answer but clearly the editor was disturbed, and kept coming back to Stone’s reputed adherence to Bolshevism. My memory of the day stops right there, but I never heard again from that newspaper.

Stone is a legend among journalists – at least some journalists. He was dedicated to the truth and taught generations of reporters to mine the documents in search of the damning facts. His I.F. Stone Weekly was an amateur-looking publication with a severe dedication to professionalism. His prose was workmanlike, and the other journalists mentioned above put Stone to shame as stylists, but for him words were crystallized truths. Chrstopher Hitchens reviews a new biography of Stone in Vanity Fair. Here are some of typically tart remarks by Stone quoted by Hitchens:

"It was hard to listen to Goldwater and realize that a man could be half Jewish and yet sometimes appear to be twice as dense as the normal gentile. As for Agnew, even at a convention where every speech seemed to outdo the other in wholesome clichés and delicious anticlimaxes, his speech putting Nixon into nomination topped all the rest. If the race that produced Isaiah is down to Goldwater and the race that produced Pericles is down to Agnew, the time has come to give the country back to the WASPs."