This gadfly’s ghost won’t remain still

In a year of headlines about a far-away American war of disputed justification and debates about the erosion of civil liberties, an important anniversary in journalism has slipped quietly by. Fifty years have passed since, defying the anticommunist fervor of the Cold War, a politically radical reporter started a weekly journal that he put out himself and to which he gave his name: I.F. Stone’s Weekly.

When it first appeared on Jan. 17, 1953 -- the year when Dwight Eisenhower became president and Joseph Stalin died -- Stone’s newsletter was about four pages, without pictures or advertising. He produced it from his house in Washington.

“I start with no obligations except those of gratitude [to his 5,000 initial subscribers] and conscience, independent as Sandburg’s hog on ice,” he wrote. His subscribers numbered 70,000 when the publication, then a biweekly, ended 19 years later. His writing on Vietnam, the civil rights movement and arms control -- he also wrote important pieces for the New York Review of Books and the Nation -- had become must reading for government insiders, young activists and readers of his generation, who’d come of age amid the political turmoil of the 1930s.

Stone’s most famous piece was probably the 1964 Weekly essay in which he quickly dismantled the way Lyndon Johnson lied about the Tonkin Gulf episode to draw Americans into supporting escalation of the Vietnam War. He became a bridge between the Old Left and the New Left, between an era of print and one of TV. These days, as reporters increasingly work amid consolidated media control, subject to the seductions of conformity and opportunism, Stone has come to symbolize an ideal of socially conscious individuality, of truth told to power.

Leaders tell the biggest lie, he says repeatedly, by pretending to strive for peace and increased democracy while actually aiming for war and stifling criticism. He wrote about the connection, like the meshing of two great gears, between economic injustice at home and war abroad and about how technology seduces American military planners into a false sense of superiority.

Stone’s style delivered heavy loads of meaning with a populist yet well-crafted intensity. In literature and history, he found evidence for centuries-old habits of power he described with fresh outrage and with hope they might yet be broken. Even when he sharply warns against “condescension to our enemies” or laments a military that is “oriented to battle on the field of public relations,” that tone of a caring skepticism, together with his grip on what is important in the broadest sense, gives his writing its ability to reach past his time and embrace ours.

Isidore Feinstein Stone died in 1989, at 81, having been more fierce and complex a man than a generally loving 1973 documentary film made out. As a last act, he taught himself Greek and wrote a bestseller about Socrates. His ghost has proven especially resilient lately, among those who remember him admiringly and those who don’t. He figures in a new book about Kathy Boudin, the 1960s radical who was his niece, and her family -- Susan Braudy’s “Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left.”

The book offers a close picture of the man in his extended family, displaying sometimes overbearing habits of political combat at the dinner table. At one point, Stone, who started his ascent through newsrooms in Philadelphia and New York as an early advocate of intervention in World War II, yells at his daughter about a typographical boo-boo in a poem she’s written: “Typos are worse than fascism.”

Stone’s leftist politics take on a dark cast for the conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who makes him out to be guilty of the crime she names in the one-word title of her book: “Treason.” Coulter alleges that decoded Soviet cables support old allegations that Stone worked for the KGB. Harvey Klehr, an expert on the evidence she claims to have found in a book he co-wrote, says it isn’t there. Indications from the so-called Venona spy cables made public in the 1990s suggest that Stone was nobody’s agent but his own.

In London, a writer named D.D. Guttenplan, studying more than 5,000 pages from his FBI surveillance file, is working on the second biography to be written of Stone. The first, “Izzy” by Robert C. Cottrell, appeared in 1992 and offered a textured portrayal of Stone’s life as a prism through which to examine decades of changes in the American left.

In interviews, Stone’s biographers and others among the journalists, editors and academics, when reminded that the Weekly’s 50th anniversary year had passed, commented on how it had been a very I.F. Stone kind of year, filled with the kinds of developments he set out to address when he wrote a statement of purpose in the first Weekly: “I intend to fight for peace and for civil liberties -- and I believe that both are indivisible.”

“I have no doubt that he would have been very concerned about the evidence of government dissembling and the justifications being put forth for the current war in Iraq,” said Robert Silvers, a founder of the New York Review of Books and Stone’s editor there. This year, while continuing work on his Stone biography, Guttenplan covered the controversy over charges that Prime Minister Tony Blair exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein to manipulate Britain into joining the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. He says that many of the issues he finds himself writing about “seem like Izzy’s issues.”

Reading the following description of guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia in 1967, one can’t help but think of recent newspaper photos of American soldiers in Iraq, puzzling over rocket launchers hidden in donkey carts: “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.”

During the first year of the Weekly, founded in the depth of the Cold War largely because Stone’s professional horizons were limited by McCarthyism, he posed an epic question many ask about today’s America, as it fights the war on terrorism, an America where recent news reports disclosed that the Justice Department is investigating people for their antiwar activism. “The question,” Stone wrote, “is whether we are to abandon the standards and habits of a free society, fleeing the risks of freedom for the deadlier risks of oppression. The question is whether we are to relinquish the standards of Jefferson for those of Torquemada.”

When asked to name journalists who could be considered I.F. Stone’s heirs today, one name that comes up frequently is that of Paul Krugman, the economist-turned-columnist who writes for the New York Times. Mitchell Stephens of NYU gave Krugman’s name, as did Silvers. Krugman himself said he has not modeled himself on Stone but said he identified with a basic part of Stone’s journalistic creed: “No inside sources.”

Rather than compete with the Washington press corps for spin-shaped information from sources high within the government apparatus, Stone applied hard thinking, and a grounding in his subjects, to open hidden windows of insight about the public record. Said Krugman, endorsing that approach: “I am an economist who can write, more or less, and it is not anything I know, how to cultivate inside sources.”

In the tradition

Other journalists who carry on Stone’s tradition of challenging the official narratives spun by those in power include veterans like Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, Robert Fisk in the London Independent and Robert Scheer in this newspaper. They all work differently; Hersh, for example, is famous for his sources. All of them work these days in the distinctly un-Stonian context of large corporate media entities.

Younger inheritors of the Weekly’s self-reliant spirit include political Web-loggers of the Internet, especially those who combine liberal opinion with original reporting. Stone’s name still resonates with rising journalists like Washington-based Joshua Micah Marshall, who writes an independently operated blog called Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com), a site Krugman follows.

Marshall says he honors Stone’s example as a writer who “follows the questions that interest him” for an audience “that is not just interested in the quick hit.”

In Minneapolis-St. Paul, Steve Perry edits a local alternative newspaper called City Pages and writes for a site affiliated with the paper called Bush Wars (www.bushwarsblog.com), digging into the Bush administration’s actions regarding Iraq. He discourses upon Stone’s virtuosity at “applying critical judgment to public acts” the way a younger violinist might talk about how Itzhak Perlman fingers his violin.

As for Ann Coulter and others on the right who are still trying to produce evidence that Stone worked for the KGB, those efforts represent the final proof to his admirers that he lives in death, retaining his power to threaten his enemies from the grave. The debate radiates from the still-simmering interest in the so-called Venona cables in which the Soviet Union’s spy managers kept in touch with agents in the United States in the 1940s. The book that continues to stir the pot, published in 2000, is “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.”

It was written by John Earl Haynes and Klehr, a professor at Emory University. Klehr, though he continues to “privately believe” Stone might have been a Soviet agent at one time, says “we don’t have real evidence” from what he’s found in Venona. Meanwhile, Guttenplan said his book will use FBI documents to further show that Stone was the unfettered journalist he always said he was.

Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post reporter who once worked as Stone’s assistant on the Weekly, now runs a New York publishing house called Public Affairs. He includes a tribute to Stone on the last page of every book. “It is a tribute to the strength of Izzy’s whole identity that 15 years after his death, 50 years after he had to start the Weekly because of McCarthyism, that he is still the target of McCarthyism,” Osnos says of Stone’s ability to go on plaguing his adversaries. “I think Izzy would have been delighted. I think Izzy would have been proud.”