Studying the Trial of Socrates : Washington’s I. F. Stone at 80: Iconoclast Is Retired, Not Tired

Some reporters make a living and their reputations by cultivating informed sources over lunches in fancy restaurants or meeting tipsters in drafty parking garages. NoF. Stone. He reads.

His lifelong passion for the written word (a 1908 edition of Sappho in his jam-packed home library is inscribed, “I. F. Stone owned and loved this book”) led him to his latest scoop--one about the trial of Socrates 2,500 years ago.

Never mind that he’s 80. Never mind that he’s nearly blind. Never mind that he started studying Greek as a senior citizen.

Isidor Feinstein Stone may not be the oldest journalist in Washington, but he is among the most respected. He is the ultimate free-spirited free-lancer, a radical political commentator who has been an institution in the capital for almost half a century.

Another old-timer, former Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who came to share some of Stone’s skepticism about the Vietnam War, said of Stone: “I think he was one of the best commentators on the Washington scene we ever had.”

He’s Finally ‘Old’

The man who has spent half a century dissecting Washington refers frequently to his “old age,” but concedes that he only recently began thinking of himself as old.

“After a lifetime of considering myself a juvenile delinquent, I’ve acknowledged that I’m one of the ancients,” he said.

Stone vividly recalls launching his first newspaper, The Progress, at age 14. He remembers failing to get into Harvard because he “graduated 49th in a class of 52” from high school in Haddonfield, N.J. He also remembers the name of the one boy who finished below him.

He remembers impressing a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, which he attended briefly before dropping out because, “I felt college interfered with my reading.” He remembers borrowing $1 for the 1927 blind date on which he met Esther, the woman who has been his wife for 58 years.

But Stone is too busy to dwell on the past.

In addition to making regular contributions to The Nation, of which he was Washington editor, and writing occasional opinion pieces for other publications, Stone has written a book on the trial of Socrates, published by Little, Brown & Company.

“I wanted to launch a study in depth on freedom of thought and expression,” Stone said, explaining how he got started 15 years ago on the effort that led to the book.

Two years earlier, due to heart trouble, he had given up work on I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the anti-Establishment journal of opinion he wrote for 19 years. He single-handedly published that newsletter--his wife kept the books and answered the mail--from 1953 to 1971.

The weekly crusaded for civil liberties and opposed the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the military-industrial Establishment.

Stone studied the fine print in government documents, where he sometimes found contradictions and official deceptions. He used the government’s own words against itself, without relying on unidentified sources.

“I was running the weekly in a very hostile atmosphere,” he recalled. “To make my weekly authoritative, I had to quote sources (and information) from government documents. I always believed in providing ammunition to my readers.”

His best scoop, he said, came in 1956, when he discovered that underground nuclear explosions could be detected thousands of miles away. The Eisenhower Administration had insisted that such tests could be detected no farther than 200 from the site. The question was crucial in the debate over whether compliance with a nuclear test ban could be verified.

The weekly had grown in circulation to 70,000 (from 5,300) by the time Izzy and Esther Stone retired. It was the only job Esther Stone ever had, aside from raising their three children, Celia Gilbert, Jeremy and Christopher. The paper provided the couple with a comfortable retirement fund.

For his study of political philosophy, Stone amassed about 1,000 volumes on the Greek and Latin classics, including a 1546 Latin edition of Plato that was the first translation from the Greek. Then he felt obliged to learn classical Greek, a daunting task because, as he said, “there’s only about one regular verb in the whole damn language.”

He focused on the trial of Socrates, the Greek philosopher and teacher sentenced to death 2,500 years ago for corrupting the young and showing disrespect for religious traditions. Socrates carried out the sentence himself, by drinking a cup of hemlock poison, after he had passed up several opportunities to escape.

“I got a fresh scoop,” Stone said. “The biggest scoop was how easily (Socrates) could have won his case if he hadn’t wanted to die and provoke the jury.”

Politics of Socrates

Stone contends that Plato, a young associate of Socrates, failed to show that Athens’ democratic government, threatened by an aristocratic dictatorship, perceived Socrates as having undermined the people’s faith in democracy.

“If you approach the classics with a strong democratic preconception, you will see things that weren’t written about before,” Stone said.

Now that the project--his 12th book--is done, Stone will get back to his work on freedom of thought and expression.

In his preoccupation with the ancient, Stone hasn’t forgotten the present.

He is dismayed with the crop of presidential candidates and hopes for the emergence of an alternative, such as New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia or Sen. Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina.

He describes his politics as “independent left.” Although he made a career of attacking Establishment and conservative views, he doesn’t reject all Republicans, least of all Ronald Reagan. This may come as a shock, Stone acknowledged, to “a lot of screwy people in this town who think I’m Karl Marx’s little brother” and who may never have read Stone’s criticisms of the Soviet and Chinese systems.

“I’m not anti-Reagan at the moment,” Stone said, his wiry eyebrows rising in surprise. “When he got elected, he separated himself from the kooks. . . . He’s sort of reverting to being a Democrat.”

The President does take some lumps. Stone decries what he considers the undermining of the middle class and the plight of homeless people in the United States.

In repose Stone looks his age, but when he speaks--as he can, nonstop, for hours--he is still the diminutive dynamo he has been all his life. He remains defiantly iconoclastic.

The independence of the Philadelphia-born Stone, whose father owned a general dry goods store in Haddonfield, is simply part of his nature. He has charted his own course.

- He recalls as his “greatest journalistic adventure” and “a filial duty” his illegal entry into Palestine in 1946 with Holocaust survivors, about which he wrote the book “Underground to Palestine.” Yet he has become estranged from the mainstream Jewish community because of his concern for the rights of Palestinians. Speaking in September, 1982, at a memorial service for those massacred in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Stone said he was shocked that Israel was involved in “a pogrom against its Arab neighbors.”

- In 1943, Stone quit the National Press Club after the distinguished black guest he had invited to dine with him there, Judge William H. Hastie, was refused “even a glass of water.”

- The FBI investigated Stone in 1940, after he wrote in The Nation about discord between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the attorney general, The Nation reported in March, 1986. Hoover, a frequent target of Stone’s criticisms, ordered the background check on Stone because “he obviously is either a colossal liar or someone is passing stuff on to him which he accepts without checking,” the magazine said, citing documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

- His concern over American involvement in Vietnam began early. In 1961, long before most Americans had even heard of the place, he warned that: “The real causes of the disintegration in South Vietnam lie in the failure of the Diem regime to build a viable government in the seven years since the Geneva settlement; its corruption, its false elections, its concentration camps, its suppression of democratic liberties, its mistreatment of minorities, are the causes of the growing rebellion.”

After years of receiving accolades from fellow journalists, Stone could have a huge ego, but he doesn’t.

His self-image is strong--how else could he have run a one-man newspaper for so many years and thought enough of his columns to publish many of them in books? (A 13th volume, to be called The War Years, a collection of his writings for The Nation during World War II, is to be published this fall by Little, Brown. The same publisher will issue uniform editions of his political books.)

In 1939, he added Stone to his surname, Feinstein, because it was “a bad year” when anti-Semitism was rampant, and he thought a neutral name would be helpful. Still, he thinks of himself as a Jew in a WASP world.

Stone remains thrilled that he was invited in 1973 to speak at St. Anthony’s College at Oxford. He meticulously names the many universities at which he has lectured on Socrates. The list includes Princeton, Georgetown, Berkeley, Loyola--and Harvard, which accepted him at last.

Stone also isn’t afraid to change his mind.

In 1982, he presented a Conservative of the Year Award to then-Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), whom Stone had lambasted repeatedly in his weekly. “We were all unjust to him,” he said. He praised Goldwater for standing up to the Moral Majority and for insisting on a thorough inspection of the military budget, among other things.

Failing eyesight has made life more difficult for Stone. When he pulls a book off the shelf, he must hold it an inch from his eye to see the title. Crossing a street is hazardous.

Technology has helped him adjust to the handicaps of age. He uses a contraption that magnifies the printed page and a computer prints out his writings in headline-size type.

Initially he resisted such new-fangled gizmos as incomprehensible. “The one thing God didn’t do to Job was give him a computer.”

When Stone was working on the Weekly, he read numerous newspapers each day. Now he mostly sticks to the classics. “My eyes aren’t good enough” to waste time on anything else, he said.

It is left to Esther to describe for him the sunset visible through their living room window. Stone doesn’t bother walking over to see it. He can’t. Yet life still seems full of joy for the couple.

“I couldn’t have done any of this without her,” Stone said of his wife, urging a reporter to interview her.

Esther Stone at first resisted the idea, then changed her mind, saying, “There are a few things I want to say.

“Living with Izzy has made me about the happiest person I know,” she said. “I’ve never met anybody more fortunate than I have been.”