Photo by Rowland Scherman
I.F. Stone, independent investigative journalist and author, was born 115 years ago today.
Stone self-published a newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly, which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th century.”
Born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, Stone’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His sister was journalist and film critic, Judy Stone. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a student.
Stone attended Haddonfield Memorial High School, where he ultimately graduated ranked 49th in his class of 52. He started his own newspaper, the Progress, as a high school sophomore. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and the Camden Courier-Post.
After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied philosophy, he joined the Philadelphia Inquirer, then known as the "Republican Bible of Pennsylvania.” Influenced by the work of Jack London, he became a radical journalist.
He joined the Inquirer’s morning rival, the Philadelphia Record, owned by liberal Democrat J. David Stern, and he moved to the New York Post after Stern bought that paper during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, he played an active role in the Communist-dominated Popular Front opposition to Adolf Hitler.
But in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August, 1939, Stone wrote to a friend saying “no more fellow traveling” and used his column in The Nation to denounce Stalin as “the Moscow Machiavelli who suddenly found peace as divisible as the Polish plains and marshes.”
In 1929, he married Esther Roisman, who later served as his assistant at I. F. Stone's Weekly. They remained married until his death.
In 1939, Stone became associate editor and then Washington editor of The Nation. His next book, Business as Unusual (1941), was an attack on the country's failure to prepare for war.
Stone's exposé of the FBI for The Nation during the war caused a sensation and deeply embarrassed J. Edgar Hoover, when Stone revealed the nature of the questions the FBI asked to ferret out subversives from the civil service: "Does he mix with Negroes? Does he...have too many Jewish friends? Does he think the colored races are as good as the white? Why do you suppose he has hired so many Jews?"
Many readers wrote in to thank the magazine for running the article, but The Nation was criticized for allowing Stone to conceal the identity of his sources.
In 1946, The Nation’s editor Freda Kirchwey fired Stone when she found out that he had signed with the leftist New York newspaper, PM, as a foreign correspondent covering the Jewish underground in Mandatory Palestine.
Although Stone had been a mainstream journalist in the 1930s and 1940s, appearing on shows like Meet the Press (then a radio show), in 1950 he found himself blacklisted and unable to get work.
In 1953, inspired by the example of the muckraking journalist George Seldes and his political weekly, In Fact, Stone decided to start his own independent newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. Over the next few years, Stone's newsletter campaigned against McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the United States.
In 1964, using evidence drawn from a close reading and analysis of published accounts, Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
During the 1960s, Stone continued to criticize the Vietnam War. At its peak in the 1960s, the Weekly only had a circulation of 70,000, but it was regarded as very influential.
Hundreds of articles originally published in the Weekly were later republished in The I. F. Stone's Weekly Reader (1973), and in three volumes of a six-volume compendium of Stone's writings called A Noncomformist History of Our Times (1989).
According to The Nation editor, Victor Navasky, Stone's journalistic work drew heavily on obscure documents from the public domain. Some of his best scoops were discovered by peering through the voluminous official records generated by the government.
Navasky also believes that as an outspoken leftist journalist working in often hostile environments, Stone's stories needed to meet an extremely high burden of proof to be considered credible.
Navasky argues that most of Stone's articles are very well sourced, typically with official documents. Navasky described Stone's willingness to "scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties."
In 1970, Stone received the George Polk Award, and in 1976 he received the Conscience-in-Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Stone died of a heart attack in 1989 in Boston.