Books |
The Best of I.F. Stone
By
Published: Mar 20, 2012
Category:
Non Fiction
Guest Butler Eric Jason Silverman is a New Yorker, a published poet, and at work on a novel about a spiritual leader living in suburbia. He lives in California with his wife and daughter.
Google “I.F. Stone quotes.”
You’ll get 579,000 citations.
Izzy Stone wasn’t quite that quotable. But he was close.
Like this:
“Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.”
“A newspaperman ought to use his power on behalf of those who were getting the dirty end of the deal…. And when he has something to say, he ought not to be afraid to raise his voice above a decorous mumble, and to use forty-eight-point bold.’
"You cannot get intimate with officials and maintain your independence."
“Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.”
“Screw you, you sons of bitches. I may be just a goddamn Jew Red to you, but I’m keeping Jefferson alive!”
"If the Government makes a mistake, the newspapers will find out and the problem may then be fixed. But if freedom of the press were lost, the country would soon go to pieces."
“The biggest difference between ancient Rome and the USA is that in Rome the common man was treated like a dog. In America he sets the tone. This is the first country where the common man could stand erect.”
“I believe that no society is good and can be healthy without freedom for dissent and for creative independence.”
“You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the Secretary of State invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.”
Izzy Stone ne Isadore Feldstein, was an Idealist, shoe-string capitalist and publisher of a four-page newsletter called I.F. Stone’s Weekly. He once described himself as “an anachronism” and a “cross between Galahad and William Randolph Hearst.” An admirer had a simpler description. Stone, he said, was an “investigative reader,” for Stone much preferred to spend a day with official documents than to talk to government officials.
Stone’s newsletter contained no advertising — he believed that the problem with the media is advertising. Then there was his problem with newspapers: not so much the absence of dissent as the absence of news. There were, he thought, “perhaps a handful of American newspapers worth reading.” This was useful to his purpose; he was almost the only journalist who would take the trouble to “dig the truth out of hearings, transcripts and government documents” with flair, humor, and originality. The result: For nearly two decades, I.F. Stone’s Weekly was eagerly read by the politically savvy subscriber who was wary of misuse of power and trusted “information that (he) could check for himself.” And now we have his “best” in print. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The man who told Bill Moyers that “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested” was “an ‘independent newspaperman, beholden to no one but my good readers.” His desk overflowed with transcripts and government testimony, and hidden behind it, Stone culled facts.
Stone described Washington as “a town with a great story hanging from every tree.” He didn’t attend news conferences, because that’s not how he thought you were supposed to get news. His newsletter was the forerunner of the modern blog, whose invention Stone would probably have embraced.
Stone knew from experience which trees to shake. A self-described radical, he had a thirst for the truth and the good fight; he stood up to Joe McCarthy, Stalin, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Pentagon, dogmatic Arab and unthinking Zionist. If there was a bully on the block, Stone was never far away.
This service to a principle came with a price. At the inaugural 2009 “Izzy Award” honoring blogger Glenn Greenwald and Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman, Izzy’s son Jeremy described his father quitting the National Press Club when it refused to serve his black guest and Jewish institutions refusing him when he supported the rights of Palestinians. In the McCarthy era, when Stone spoke about Jeffersonian principles, people were afraid to be seen with him.
Stone’s faith was free expression. He was sharply critical of those who used fear of Communism to call for war. Yet in 1956 he wrote about the Soviet Union: “This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men.”
No one, perhaps, expresses the fly in the ointment of Israeli statism with such clarity as Stone, writing more than sixty years ago. A co-religionist, reflecting to his audience, which included prominent American Jews, Stone writes of accommodation to peace. While it may seem innocent or quaint to read in 2012, the more I read, the more I saw that he understood human nature in a way most policy-makers were blind to, and are sadly unwilling to accept today.
The Arab has benefited from the Jewish influx, but only indirectly. The Zionist has not hurt him, but the Zionist has made him feel shut out. This exclusiveness is natural and understandable, but it needs to be corrected if the Jews are to build for themselves a secure life in the Middle East.
I understood after seeing Egypt and talking with Christian Arabs in Lebanon — many of them anti-Zionist only in public — why the Yishuv will fight and has a right to fight against permanent minority status under present conditions in an Arab state. But I understand why the Palestinian Arabs — to whom Palestine is also home, who has fully as much right there as the Jew — do not wish to live as a minority in a Jewish state.
No one likes to be ruled by an alien people, and though I, as a Jew, found the friendliest sort of welcome visiting the Arabs, I found no Palestinian Arab in favor of a Jewish state.”
“The Best of I.F. Stone” should be a revelation for a new audience, web-savvy and hungry for the type of independent spirit of journalism for which Stone became known. In these pages, taken from Stone’s work from the 1950s to the early ’70s, we see the inner doings of politics, the bureaucrat, the social activist, the dictator, the best and the worst of us, with insights as revealing as tomorrow’s headlines.
This book is timeless. And it couldn’t be more timely.
