I.F. Stone

Isidor Feinstein Stone, the progressive investigative journalist who was a successor to such socialist muckrakers as Jack London and George Seldes (and a precursor to such modern newspaper crusaders as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein), was born Isidor Feinstein on December 24, 1907 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to ethnic Russian Jewish parents, who were shop-owners. His interest in journalism started in high school, and he began publishing his own newspaper as a sophomore. Later, he got experience as a cub reporter for The "Philadelphia Inquirer" while a philosophy student at the University of Pennsylvania, and he went to work for the paper full-time after dropping out of Penn.A radical leftist in terms of politics, he moved to the "New York Post" in 1933, where he was a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Around the time of the publication of his first book in 1937, he took the by-line "I.F. Stone". He had adopted the surname "Stone" as a pen-name in order to avoid the then-rampant anti-semitism which blocked Jews' entry into schools and jobs. Subsequently, he joined the liberal-leftist weekly newspaper "The Nation" as associate editor in 1939, later becoming its Washington editor, and also wrote for the left-wing New York afternoon newspaper "PM" from 1940 to 1948, when it ceased publication. As an unapologetic leftist who was many considered a "fellow traveler" of American and Soviet communists by the federal government, he was investigated thoroughly; nothing was ever proved against him during that "Scoundrel Time", as Lillian Hellman called it, when an association with the Communist Party, one of its alleged "Fronts" or a liberal organization in which communists were involved could mean blacklisting, expulsion from employment, and the denial of civil rights such as that of travel.In the early 1950s, Stone became an unspoken critic of the Cold War and of McCarthyism, publishing his seminal book "The Hidden History of the Korean War" in 1952. It was unique for the times in that it alleged that the government and the big media had lied about the origins of the war. Stone is best remembered for his political newsletter "I.F. Stone's Weekly," which he started in 1953, during the high-water mark of McCarthuism. The newsletter had enormous influence well out of proportion to its small circulation: Not only did it challenge the status quo, but it gave courage to other journalists who otherwise were intimidated by the vast array of forces aligned against progressives in the 1950s.Stone also was an early critic of the Vietnam War: he was the only American journalist to challenge President Lyndon Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that precipitated wide-scale US involvement in Southeast Asia. The incident is now known to be largely fabricated, with such witnesses as Senator John McCain -- who was flying over the Gulf of Tonkin in support of the American destroyers allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese warships -- maintaining that an attack by the North Vietnamese never happened.As America grew more liberal during the 1960s, the circulation of his newsletter increased, reaching a height of 70,000. However, Stone ceased publication in 1971 Dru to failing health and poor eyesight. The ever-remarkable Stone then learned Ancient Greek to research the "The Trial of Socrates", the book her published in 1988.The following year, I.F. Stone died on June 18, 1989 at the age of 81. He is remembered as avatar of that particularly American prototype of the crusader for free speech. Show less «