I.F. Stone was one of my heroes. I didn’t know his writing much first-hand, since he published mostly in his I.F. Stone’s Weekly, to which I didn’t subscribe. But what I read and heard of him made me feel deep admiration for his iconoclasm, his struggle to write the truth at all cost, his fearless quest for political knowledge. He was uncompromising in a world in which politicians did nothing but compromise to the detriment of whatever their political program might be.
He was the very model of what an investigative reporter should be. In fact, I doubt much there would be a Sy Hersh or Bill Moyers or Chris Hedges or Noam Chomsky had there not been an I.F. Stone to pioneer that path. David Carr, in his review of the new biography, American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone, also makes another astute connection between Stone and political blogging:
After reading Mr. Guttenplan’s extensive, loving reconstruction of Stone’s outside-in approach to journalism, it might be tempting to suggest that Stone was a protoblogger, a postmodern journalist who hacked his own route to an audience long before there was something called the Internet. But his insistence on shoe leather over rhetoric has yet to be replicated in digital realms.
I think what many of us progressive bloggers are trying to do is be another I.F. Stone in whichever political niche we’ve chosen.
I.F. Stone is one of my heroes! He had a brutal compulsion for the truth.
Ditto that!
Walter
Yeah that “all governments lie” quote is hugely influential. Stone did also have a newsletter that he circulated for a while that looked at deconstructing the official positions of the govt and which was popular in his time but unfortunately not financially viable. In the age of the blogopshere he would have thrived.
More perhaps could be said on his complex relation with Zionism, since he seems to have moved from a fairly orthodox Labour Zionist position to a more critical one by the end of his life. Chomsky’s earlier work is full of arguments on what Stone said when; particularly during the 1948 war and the early years when he was an enthusiastic supporter of Labour Zionism and the establishment line in Israel.
Yes, Richard, I agree with you about I.F. Stone. My ripe old age has allowed me to be fortunate enough to have read him first hand in P.M. and other sources. I haven’t yet read Guttenplan’s book, but I have read Myra MacPherson’s magisterial “All Governments Lie, the life and times of rebel journalist I.F. Stone.” You should read that, too, if only for the section on Stone’s writings on, and relationship to, Israel. His attitude was akin to Einstein’s as brought out in another excellent new book: “Einstein on Israel and Zionism,” by Fred Jerome.