Not the President's Men (Page 3)

Nobody would ever say such a thing about I.F. Stone. This was a journalist who claimed his own power and then got others to see it--even if it meant raising hackles. Not exactly crippled by self-consciousness, the prickly, independent Stone spent his life assailing powerful Tailgunners and J. Edgars who strove to ruin him, fighting with bosses he didn't like and bosses he did, pissing off friends and colleagues with criticisms and then playing dumb when they were wounded. Because he's now canonized as the left-wing hero "Izzy" Stone--his greatness accepted by the mainstream, though denied by right-wing mouthbreathers--it's easy to forget he spent years in the wilderness of an Eisenhower-era Washington where conformity was not just king but bling.

Stone's whole life was a peculiarly American story of self-creation--Rocky for left-wing intellectuals. In her fine and useful new biography "All Governments Lie!": The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, veteran reporter Myra MacPherson traces in perhaps excessive detail the triumphant arc of the man she too often calls "Izzy."

Born Isadore Feinstein, the diminutive, unprepossessing son of immigrants--"I look like a Jewish bullfrog," he once cracked--Stone lived the kind of purpose-driven life most journalists (and ministers) can only dream of. Although he seemingly emerged from the womb reading Gibbon, he was too interested in the world ever to thrive in academe (although he was haunted by his rejection from Harvard). After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, he plunged into a full-time journalistic career that, during the 1930s and '40s, took him from the Philadelphia Record to the New York Post (where he became a feisty, and well-paid, editorialist) to The Nation to the progressive paper PM. Along the way, he changed his name to sound less Jewish--for solid political reasons. He quit the National Press Club when it wouldn't serve his black guest, the dean of Howard Law School--this in 1941. And he made a celebrated (and illegal) journey to the Middle East in the 1940s with the Zionist underground--then infuriated American Jews two decades later by suggesting a binational solution in Israel/ Palestine.

This alone would make for a whopping résumé, yet in a sense it was merely preparation for his life's defining achievement. Inspired by the model of George Seldes's In Fact, he launched his own paper, I.F. Stone's Weekly, in January 1953, boasting such early subscribers as Bertrand Russell, Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. (J. Edgar Hoover read it compulsively, in order to be outraged--he downed Stone's words like Red Bull.) Even as Stone fought deafness and failing eyesight, his Weekly ran the most original and iconoclastic pieces on the Korean War, outstripped the likes of Edward R. Murrow in unmasking what he called the "McCarthy-Hoover Axis" and pounded Eisenhower and Kennedy for their feebleness on civil rights. During the heyday of the New Left (which he supported though it made him nervous), he was transformed from an iconoclast into an icon.

By the time Stone closed shop in December 1971, his maverick muckraking had also made him rich; and though he kept writing (even about ancient Greece), he began a victory lap that lasted nearly as long as the run of the Weekly. No ascetic, Stone took voluminous pleasure in being lionized; he adored being the one true embodiment of First Amendment freedom. (As with so many outsiders, he secretly craved the insiders' approval.) Although you couldn't blame him, there was something slightly nauseating about watching such a bold soul be appropriated for the greater glory of an American journalism renowned for being gutless. Mainstream media folks embraced "Izzy" as if he was somehow one of them, when his glory was that he'd spent years refusing to be.

Rather than rely on inside contacts--whose favor must be curried, even at the cost of printing the truth--Stone steered clear of the power loop. Instead, he scanned news articles for revealing lacunas and unspoken patterns; he pored over government documents ("Read them back to front," he taught his acolytes) in search of the one glittering revelation buried in all the bureaucratic lard. MacPherson pointedly puts Stone's career next to that of insider columnist Walter Lippmann, who for decades pulled more cultural weight than Rich, Friedman, Krugman and Dowd yoked together. Seduced by the journalist's deadliest illusion--the belief that you can bend the ear of the powerful--the fastidious Lippmann now seems less a titan than a cautionary tale, a second-string Raymond Aron still renowned for helping define the vanished American Century but irrelevant today--a fascinating exhibit in Jurassic Park's media concourse. In contrast, Stone's style and methods (if not all his opinions) make him our contemporary.

MacPherson's biography shows just how central the historical crucible of the early twentieth century was in forming Stone's flinty left-wing values--values not much rarer in his era than Rich's sensible liberalism is now. What's rare is that Stone didn't lose them. Indeed, at times they could leave him blinkered, could cause him to make what he called "mistakes of the heart." Nowhere was this clearer than in his perception of the Soviet Union, and it's one of MacPherson's virtues that she's clear about the nature of his fellow-traveling.

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