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“Cultural Heroes (4): The Golden Age of Izzy Stone”

Leonard’s homage to recently passed I.F. Stone (he died in 1989 a week before this essay was written). He opens with a comparison of Stone to all of the journalists who cozy up to power to get their in-side stories vs. Stone, “…working in his garage, a very different breed of journalist.” When Stone was blacklisted in the ‘50s (he was an active member of the anti-fascist Popular Front), he started his own newsletter called I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Leonard describes Stone’s rigorous investigative methods that put him “…way ahead on human rights atrocities, Viet Nam and Watergate.” Leonard ends the piece by calling Stone “…a skeptic, but not a cynic…an agora.” – the agora reference is to Stone’s famous book The Trial of Socrates, not to be discredited just because John Edwards named it as one of his three favorite books.

You can download a free PDF of The Best of I.F. Stone or read old copies of the I.F. Stone Weekly at:

http://www.ifstone.org

New word: agora = a central spot in a Greek city, base of the term agoraphobia. Never put the two together before. Duh.

New learning: Interestingly, Stone has been accused in print of being a communist spy on several occasions. The evidence is based on hearsay and comments taken out of context, usually quoted by a conservative writer. He was sort of a Rachel Madow fighting Fox news before its time.

Here’s a recounting of one allegation made by from the I.F. Stone official Web Site:

In March 1992, Guardian journalist Andrew Brown quoted a Soviet Embassy attaché, KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, as saying, "We had an agent — a well-known American journalist — with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia ... he said he would never again take any money from us". In June 1992, Herbert Romerstein, a former official of the USIA and minority chief investigator of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Ray Kerrison reported in the New York Post that Kalugin identified Stone as that agent. The allegations were further developed in a book written by Romerstein and Eric Breindel, editorial page editor of the New York Post, The Venona Secrets.

Brown subsequently conceded that when he had "used the phrase 'an agent' to describe someone who turned out to be I. F. Stone", that he understood the term, "agent" to mean "useful contact", and that the "take any money" reference simply meant that Stone would not permit a Soviet employee to pick up the check for lunch then, or in the future, as had sometimes been done before. He adds that New York trial lawyer and author Martin Garbus recounted that in September 1992, while at the Moscow Journalists Club, Kalugin had explained to him, "I have no proof that Stone was an agent. I have no proof that Stone ever received any money from the KGB or the Russian government, I never gave Stone any money and was never involved with him as an agent."