I.F. Stone Dies; ‘Conscience of Investigative Journalism’

Author and journalist I.F. Stone, often dubbed “the conscience of investigative journalism,” died at 81 of a heart attack in a Cambridge, Mass., hospital Sunday.

Stone published his first newspaper as a New Jersey schoolboy of 14 and proceeded to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted for the rest of his life. He worked for seven newspapers, was Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine and wrote 13 books. Although his politics were well to the left of center, Stone was best known for a conservative-looking four-page paper, The I.F. Stone Weekly, which he published with his wife, Esther, for 18 years.

Most recently, he relearned Greek to research a book called “The Trial of Socrates,” published to favorable reviews and sales last year. Afterward, the University of Pennsylvania dropout achieved a longtime ambition by being asked to lecture on Socrates at Harvard and several other leading universities.

Stone was the subject of a documentary film, one biography and was called a “modern-day Tom Paine” by Amherst college historian Henry Steele Commager. Although Stone described himself as an independent radical, “the way he practiced journalism was conservative,” said Tom Goldstein, dean of the UC Berkeley journalism school. Stone got the bulk of his stories by poring over a labyrinth of government documents and hearing transcripts that nobody else had the patience to wade through.

Many admirers noted Sunday that Stone was ahead of public opinion on many issues, ranging from McCarthyism to the Vietnam War.

“If you read him in the 1950s and the early 1960s, he was off the beaten track in many ways,” said New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, who narrated a 1975 documentary film about Stone’s life. “Then the Vietnam War came along and it became apparent that the government didn’t know what it was doing and would lie about it and he’d been saying that all along.”

A Man of Curiosity

Stone’s legendary curiosity about virtually any subject remained strong until the end, said his sister, Judy Stone, a San Francisco Chronicle film critic. “A few weeks ago, he came out of surgery and the first thing he asked the nurses after the anesthesia wore off was: ‘What’s going on in China.’ ”

Just last week, he called his brother, Lou, in Philadelphia to tell him how pleased he was about interviews with Chinese dissidents that he had seen on the nightly news. In fact, he was ahead of the pack on this story too.

Two years ago, he was trying to draw attention to the emerging pro-democracy sentiment in China. On a drizzly day, he stood across from the White House in Lafayette Park and lit a candle in support of Chinese students. He had invited a Voice of America reporter and the ensuing radio story prompted official Chinese news agencies to denounce him.

Stone looked like a scholar--a 5-foot, 6-inch, 140-pound man who wore glasses with thick lenses and was often found tearing through newspapers and stuffing the scraps into a jacket pocket for future use.

But there was a whole other side to Stone. Into his 80s, Stone was the last to leave a dinner party. He spent many Friday nights dancing with his wife to 1960s rock ‘n’ roll at a Washington club called Deja Vu. He frequently walked four or five a miles day near his home in Washington, said a friend, columnist Cody Shearer.

Some Reactions

“In many ways, he was a boyish man, not what you’d expect from someone who spent his life with documents,” said Frances Fitzgerald, author of “Fire in the Lake,” a highly acclaimed book about Vietnam.

“I have a tear in my eye,” said longtime CBS producer and Columbia University journalism school dean Fred Friendly. “He was the conscience of investigative journalism.”

“He was the scholar of our profession,” said James Reston, the former Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. And Jack Nelson, the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau chief, said: “He was one of the great investigative reporters of the 20th Century.”

Even conservative author William Buckley praised Stone, although he was more measured in his appraisal. Buckley described Stone as an “intellectual-journalist-polemicist in confrontation with whom the establishment always needed to keep in fighting trim.” But he criticized Stone for backing Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace for President in 1948 and for supporting Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and Ho Chi Minh in the 1960s.

Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia on Dec. 24, 1907. But in 1939, concerned with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and its possible growth in the United States, he formally changed his surname to Stone and became I.F. Stone.

As a boy reporter in Camden, N.J., Stone saw himself as “a cross between Galahad and William Randolph Hearst, rescuing the poor and saving maidens in distress,” he said in an interview in 1981.

Reporting for the Philadelphia Record, the New York Post and The Nation magazine, he decried the rise of Fascism in Europe, exposed big business chicanery, denounced the treatment of migrant farm workers and criticized the Supreme Court for overturning New Deal reforms and for approving the blanket internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

He practiced what he preached. Stone gave up his membership in the National Press Club in 1941 when it refused to serve a black judge he took to lunch there.

Secret Assignment

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he wrote for three liberal weekly newspapers in New York--PM, the Compass and the Star. On secret assignment for PM, he was the first journalist to accompany a group of Eastern European Jewish refugees who ran a British naval blockade to “the promised land” of Palestine. He expanded the PM articles into perhaps his most moving book, “Underground to Palestine,” published in 1946.

When the Star folded in 1952, he started his Weekly.

Launched with a $10,000 loan from a New York businessman and Stone’s $3,500 severance pay from the Compass, the Weekly seemed to be starting at an unpropitious time. Many government officials were shuddering under attacks on their loyalty from Wisconsin’s Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

At the start, he had 5,300 subscribers, including Albert Einstein. The price was $5 a year. He published weekly for 14 years and biweekly for another four after he developed heart problems. When he closed the paper in 1971, he had 71,00 subscribers, including the Nixon White House. The price: still $5.

Stone was branded a communist because of his criticisms of the Korean War and a host of other issues. He was an early critic of the Vietnam War and was never afraid to be controversial, even making some skeptical remarks about President John F. Kennedy’s term in office amid the gush of praise after Kennedy’s assassination.

“I think that Izzy represents a unique force in American journalism,” said Carl Bernstein, who had known Stone since his youth and who, with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, unearthed the Watergate scandal. “At a time when the herd instinct ran rampant in our profession, he almost alone remembered what being a real reporter was about.”

Controversial Stands

For almost two decades, with self-described “maniacal zest and idiot zeal,” Stone demonstrated the logic of halting the arms race. Long before it was safe to do so, he attacked McCarthyite loyalty purges. He probed the origins of the Korean War and made swiss cheese of the Pentagon budget.

For years, Stone urged the nation’s presidents to devote more resources to problems in places like Selma, Ala., than in propping up what he considered corrupt regimes in Saigon.

He reminded his friends on the Left of the consequences of thought control in Moscow. That cost him subscribers. He pleaded for justice for Palestinian as well as Jewish refugees. That cost him subscribers too.

But his independent stance on the issue also won him admirers. “He was often cast into the role of a critic because he recognized that this land was meant to be shared by two peoples--the Jews and the Palestinians,” said Leonard Beerman, founding rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in West Los Angeles.

Stone is likely to be best remembered as a reporter who asked questions that others didn’t think of, poring over documents that others found too obtuse and scoring scoops on a shoestring budget.

One of the exclusives he was most proud of was a 1958 story exposing how the Atomic Energy Commission had lied about how far from a test site an underground nuclear blast could be detected. The question of distance was critical in determing whether the test ban treaty was being monitored.

Vietnam War Issue

But the issue that brought him widespread attention of many people, particularly students, was Vietnam. He spoke at the first Vietnam teach-in at Berkeley in 1965 and at the massive march on the Pentagon in 1967.

One of his most moving and briefest pieces on the war, written in February, 1967, was entitled “More Than Steel and Chrome Could Bear.”

Stone asserted that “everything America stands for” and “everything the modern world (both capitalist and communist) admires” was at stake in Vietnam.

“It is the Machine, it is the prestige of the Machine that is at stake in Vietnam. It is Boeing and General Electric and Goodyear and General Dynamics. It is the electronic range finder and the amphibious truck and the night-piercing radar. It is the defoliant, and the herbicide, and the deodorant, and the depilatory. It is the products and the brand names we have been conditioned since childhood to revere. . . .

“Down there in the jungles, unregenerate, ingenious, tricky, as tiny as a louse or a termite, and as hard to get at, emerged a strange creature whose potency we had almost forgotten--Man. To sit down now and deal with him is to admit that the Machine is lost to Man, that our beautifully computerized war, with the most complicated devices for killing ever assembled and the most overwhelming firepower ever mustered has failed.”

In addition to his wife, sister and brother, Stone is survived by a daughter, Celia Gilbert, a poet; two sons, Jeremy Stone, president of the American Federation of Scientists, and Christopher Stone, a law professor at USC, and four grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.