RJN: I.F. Stone

In this Sunday’s New York Times , Paul Berman has a thoughtful review of two books , one about I.F. Stone and another that is a collection of Stone’s journalism. "Izzy" Stone, who died in 1989, is still a hero of the left¯an icon, as it is said. I.F. Stone’s Weekly was read avidly in the 1960s by all of us who were in "The Movement." I recall only one extended conversation with the man. He and Bill Coffin and I were in a hotel room in D.C., between our obligations at one demonstration or another, and Stone was regaling us with insider stories about personalities and goings-on in Washington.

I remember thinking at the time that some of the stories were probably not true, and that he knew it, which did not diminish his delight in telling them. When you’re "speaking truth to power," you need not be too scrupulous about the truths you’re speaking. Izzy Stone was a hard-of-hearing, thick-spectacled, quizzical little man who exuded delight in fighting the good fight, as he understood the fight. He had no difficulty in separating the children of light from the children of darkness, and there was no room for shadows or ambiguities.

But as Berman observes, "Stone’s career does have its oddities." There is, for instance, the fact that, if he was not actually working for the KGB, there is no doubt that he was what in those days was called a communist fellow-traveler. The iconoclastic Izzy Stone again and again toed the line in serving as an apologist for dictatorships of the left. Berman notes that, to his credit, Stone did sign the Joan Baez protest of 1979 against the totalitarian politics of the victorious communists in Vietnam. The horrors of what Hanoi was doing were evident long before 1979, however. Stone declined to sign a 1975 protest that some of us ¯including Father Dan Berrigan and Jim Forrest of the Fellowship of Reconciliation ¯ drew up and sent to, if memory serves, 104 nationally prominent opponents of U.S. policy in Vietnam. Among those asked to sign, the split was almost exactly 50-50, with Stone being among those for whom the maxim held: No criticism to the left.

Berman is a careful student of the history and ideological convolutions of the left. He compares Stone with Jean-Paul Sartre : "Sartre was, in his own extremely idiosyncratic fashion, a totalitarian¯someone who got swept up in the craziness of the twentieth century because he wanted to subsume himself into a mass movement, and who therefore ended up taking a sort of masochistic pleasure in distorting his own best thoughts and intuitions. But Sartre was, at the same time, not a totalitarian. Sartre was a lover of freedom, who felt a positive aversion to the idea of submitting his own thoughts to anyone else at all. Sartre was a paradox. He did not add up, and that was his attraction. This has got to be the explanation for Stone as well. Those years of doing favors for the K.G.B. do suggest that Stone, too, was, in his own fashion, willy-nilly a totalitarian¯at least sometimes. He wrote journalism he knew to be untrue. That was why, in a rueful moment, he spoke about ‘the morass into which one wanders when one begins to withhold the truth.’ But Stone was also not a totalitarian. He was a lover of freedom. A part of him always rebelled against the culture of mendacity he helped foster in his own corner of the American left. He was a paradox. He did not add up."

I suppose Paul Berman is trying to be charitable, and that is always an admirable intention. But charity is not to be confused with incoherence. Sartre and Stone were lovers of freedom only in the sense that they adamantly insisted upon their own right to do what they wanted, while being indifferent to or even, as was often the case, celebrating the powers that enslaved and killed millions of others. This is not a "paradox." This is a deep corruption of intellect and soul.

Paradox, said Chesterton, is a truth standing on its head and wiggling its legs in order to attract attention to itself. Sartre, Stone, and their ideological epigones today stand truth on its head for very different, and distinctly non-paradoxical, reasons.