Not the President's Men (Page 4)

Regrettably, she's forced to spend time defending Stone (yet again) against the scurrilous charge that he was on the Soviet payroll. He wasn't--case closed--and the only people who still say so are poisonous right-wing ideologues who haven't spent much time grousing about those anti-Castro reporters cashing government checks in Miami. MacPherson makes it clear that Stone's true failing was his tardiness in grasping the full monstrosity of actually existing Communism, especially Stalinism. The tiger eyes that could spot the threat to liberty in the footnotes of a Congressional report couldn't clearly see the meaning of show trials, slave labor and class-based mass murder. To fault him for this isn't redbaiting or Monday morning quarterbacking. If I'd been young in those days--when choosing sides was a moral imperative--I probably would have made the same errors. But good intentions aren't everything, and these were enormous errors. Faced with one of the most tyrannical political regimes of his lifetime, he got things so badly wrong that another man might have died questioning his own judgment.

But Stone was not a self-doubter. Nor does MacPherson pretend that he was always a joy to be around. Sure, he could brim with joie de vivre, doing "The Hustle" with his beloved wife, Esther, into their 60s. But he also bristled with the sheer cussedness that, experience suggests, is one of the main professional tools of the successful maverick journalist. He was a demanding (if doting) husband and an often difficult father--the whole house hustled to his rhythms--and he was not above arrogant self-righteousness. He didn't easily brook disagreement, and like many such men, he found plenty of fools not to suffer.

No matter. "Izzy" Stone was a brilliant journalist, and one of the happy benefits of reading "All Governments Lie!" was that it got me dipping back into pieces I hadn't read for years. While there's not a single duff entry in the essential new collection The Best of I.F. Stone, he doesn't need to be cherry-picked. Just open The Haunted Fifties at random and you'll discover something worthwhile on almost every page. Here he's tweaking the New York Times for burying Hoover's shocking words of praise for Joe McCarthy's character. There he's pondering the dark notion that humanity may not deserve a future of satellites and sky platforms: "It might be better, after all, if space were left to a newer species, bred to live in peace and to take joy in diversity. Our first reactions, like all our past, show how unfit men are for the heavens. We would only stain red the Milky Way."

Reading all this, I realized that were he working today, Stone would be the greatest blogger who ever lived. Not only would the guy be indefatigable--linking everything crucial--he wouldn't be content with commenting on other people's work the way nearly all our bloggers do (yes, I know there are exceptions). He'd escape the meta-media hothouse by going out and reporting--uncovering new facts that other people could link and comment on. And he'd tie all this together with a rich sense of how such facts fit in to the way people actually live, beyond ephemeral pop moments. "He had a genius for reading documents," Murray Kempton told MacPherson, "but he also had this great gift of historical imagination."

This imagination was fueled by passion, by a driving conviction, far less common these days, that what he did mattered--profoundly. This wasn't sheer egotism, although that figured in. Stone sincerely believed that the whole world hinges on how we conduct our politics, and that belief meant that every uncovered lie, every article about Vietnam, every single edition of the Weekly belonged to the epic struggle to create a better world. And not just better in the dinky ways you often read about in DLC white papers or liberal blogs, where restoring a Democratic Congress often marks the far horizon.

A natural-born radical, not a gaga utopian or modest meliorist, Stone was a man of hope who never shied away from the biggest of pictures--or the biggest of arguments. Back in the heyday of a liberalism that took pride in being tough and muscular, he was exposing the media's war machinery in terms that couldn't be more timely. When a 1961 Life magazine headline claimed that ninety-seven of 100 Americans could survive a nuclear war, he asked readers, "Just as Ivory Soap is sold as 99 percent pure, is thermonuclear war to be sold as 97 percent safe?"

Wouldn't you love to see what I.F. Stone would have written about the greatest story ever sold?

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