Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24 1907 – June 18 1989; born Isidor Feinstein, better known as I.F. Stone and Izzy Stone) was an iconoclastic American investigative journalist. He is best remembered for his self-published I.F. Stone's Weekly. At its peak in the 1960s, it had a circulation of about 70,000, but was regarded as very influential. In fact, The Weekly was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists, "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century".

Early years

Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and as a student he wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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, he joined the The Philadelphia Inquirer. Influenced by the work of Jack London, he became a radical journalist. In the 1930s, he played an active role in the Popular Front opposition to Hitler.

Marriage

In 1929, he married Esther Roisman, who later served as his assistant at I.F. Stone's Weekly. They remained married until his death, and had three children: Celia (m. Gilbert), Jeremy, and Christopher.

New York Post

Stone moved to the New York Post in 1933 and during this period supported Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. His first book, The Court Disposes (1937), was a critique of the Court's role in blocking New Deal reforms. On the advice of an editor that his political writings would be better received if he were not perceived as Jewish, he changed his name to I. F. Stone in 1937. He would later recall he "still felt badly" about the change, and referred to himself as "Izzy" throughout his career.

The Nation

After leaving the New York Post 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. Underground to Palestine (1946) dealt with the migration of Eastern European Jews at the end of the Second World War.

At that time he shared many of the Zionists' positions. While he strongly supported the State of Israel, he supported a binational state in which Jews and Palestinians lived together, and he became further sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in the Sixties.

PM

In 1940, Stone joined the progressive afternoon newspaper PM which went under in 1948 and was replaced first by the New York Star and then the Daily Compass until it ceased publication in 1952. A critic of the emerging Cold War, Stone published the Hidden History of the Korean War that same year. One of Stone's more famous books, Hidden History speculated that South Korea initiated hostilities with constant and unprovoked cross-border attacks, and that the United States and Syngman Rhee welcomed the conflict.

I.F. Stone's Weekly

Inspired by the achievements of the muckraking journalist George Seldes and his political weekly, In Fact, Stone started his own political paper, I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1953. Over the next few years, Stone campaigned against McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the United States. In 1964, Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

During the 1960s, Stone continued to criticize the Vietnam War. His newsletter enjoyed a circulation of 70,000, but in 1971, angina pectoris forced Stone to cease publication. After his retirement, he learned Ancient Greek and wrote a book about the prosecution and death of Socrates called The Trial of Socrates, in which he argued that Socrates wanted to be sentenced to death, to shame the Athenian democracy, which he despised.

In 1970 Stone received a Special George Polk Award, and in 1976 he received the Conscience-in-Media Award, from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Death

He died in 1989 in Boston.

Journalistic style

According to Nation Magazine 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."

For himself, Stone had this to say about his style of reporting:

"I made no claims to inside stuff. I tried to give information which could be documented, so the reader could check it for himself... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these pressures."

Allegations of a relationship with Soviet Union

Evidence from decrypted KGB telegrams from America to Moscow suggests that someone code-named Blin was approached by the KGB during the Second World War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union were allied. Some have suggested that Blin was Stone. But these Venona telegrams provide "no evidence" whatsoever that the KGB succeeded in recruiting Blin to do anything. As indicated below, there are many reasons to think Blin was someone else. Furthermore, records of investigations of Stone through the 1970s by the FBI, CIA, Army, State Department and U.S. Postal Service have been declassified; years of tailing by agents, informants, illegal car searches, and even pawing through his trash produced not a shred of evidence of clandestine activities.

Stone had, from time to time, during World War II and after, lunched with a Soviet Embassy press attaché named Kalugin. There is no evidence that Stone knew that Kalugin was working for the KGB. Decades later, in an interview with British journalist Andrew Brown, Kalugin alluded to these lunches with a “well-known American journalist” and said that, after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the journalist would not even permit Kalugin to pay for the lunch.

Brown’s report of these lunches applied the word “agent” to the journalist and referred to the journalist telling Kalugin, that he “would never again take any money from us”. But Brown said, later, after consulting his notes, that he never understood Kalugin to mean “paid” agent, that he used the word “agent” as meaning “useful contact”, and that the “take any money” reference meant that Stone would not permit a Soviet employee to pick up the check for lunch then, or in future, as had sometimes been done before.

When a New York Review of Books editor asked Brown what exactly Kalugin had said, Brown reinterviewed Kalugin to confirm his understanding. In the second interview, Kalugin flatly denied that he had mentioned Stone as a paid agent and said that the reference to money was that Stone “refused to be paid for the lunch. That’s all.” Brown wrote about this in the New York Review of Books.

But Brown’s unfortunate drafting had opened the door to an attack on Stone by Herbert Romerstein, a former employee of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. His point of view is amply described in his response to Brown’s letter in the December, 1992 issue of the New York Review of Books.

A companion response by a lawyer Martin Garbus, who had had dealings with Romerstein, calls Romerstein “utterly untrustworthy”. Garbus, who had interviewed Kalugin himself said that Kalugin had told him that Romerstein had “misreported” a conversation which Romerstein had had with Kalugin. Garbus said “the entire story circulated by Romerstein and Accuracy in Media, the right wing pressure group, is scurrilous and false.”

Others who interviewed Kalugin and received similar comments opposed to Romerstein’s position include Don Guttenplan who wrote about Kalugin’s denials in both the Nation and the New York Post and Myra MacPherson who interviewed Kalugin in 2006 and was told “We had no clandestine relationship. We had no secret arrangement. I was the press officer...I never paid him anything. I sometimes bought lunch.”

The press attaché, Kalugin, who was working for the KGB undercover, met with many journalists in Washington including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, Drew Pearson, Chalmers Robers and Murray Marder of the Washington Post and others.

According to Kalugin, Stone had followed a practice of having lunch with a Soviet press attaché from time to time, but had broken off this luncheon relationship after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 and hearing Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. Stone had returned home from this trip to Russia and wrote in his newsletter: "Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men." (italics in original)

Stone's conclusion that "nothing has happened in Russia to justify cooperation abroad between the independent left and the Communists" cost him several hundred subscribers to the Weekly.

Kalugin stated that later, Kalugin had persuaded Stone to lunch with him until after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent quelling of the revolt when Stone angrily refused to let Kalugin pay for the lunch and stopped lunching with him.

Miriam Schneir, writing in The Nation, said that Kalugin's memoirs merely mention Stone as one of many "leading journalists and politicians" Kalugin knew in Washington, DC and that "KGB headquarters never said [Stone] had been an agent of our intelligence service..." The only mention of a money matter between Kalugin and Stone was that after the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring, Stone "angrily" refused to let Kalugin pay a lunch tab and (in Schneir's words), "They never met again. End of story."

In their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr identify Stone as BLIN in VENONA Project cables. Venona transcript #1506 October 23 1944 from the New York KGB office to Moscow, after a meeting with Vladimir Pravdin states, he is "not refusing his aid," but "had three children and did not want to attract the attention of the FBI." Allegedly Stone’s fear "was his unwillingness to spoil his career", since he "earned $1500.00 per month but... would not be averse to having a supplemental income." But the FBI never identified Blin/Pancake as Stone but argued among themselves about who Blin was and had another suspect for being Blin who also had three children named Ernest K. Lindley. Some FBI agents noted that Blin should have been someone “whose true pro-Soviet sympathies were not known to the public...” and hence could not be Stone and the agents gave other reasons also. Indeed, Stone was not showing any fear of attracting FBI attention as was Blin. On the contrary, Stone suggested to the Soviet press attache Kalugin that they lunch at Harvey’s, a favorite Hoover haunt, to ‘tweak his [Hoover’s] nose.”. So Blin may have been afraid of attracting Hoover’s attention but Stone was not. Hence Blin was not Stone.

Klehr and Haynes, who reported the cable contents, state that there is no evidence in Venona that the KGB had recruited Blin. The authors Romerstien and Breindel in "The Venona Secrets" do report Stone agreed to work for the NKVD(Soviet Foreign Intelligence Service)and to meet regularly with an NKVD officer. Stone further indicated he "wasn't adverse to having a supplementary income.

Walter and Miriam Schneir writing about this particular passage remark at length on the difficulties with the Venona materials (their hearsay nature, with many steps between a conversation and the sending of a cable; language difficulties; possibility of imperfect decryption; etc.), concluding, "the Venona messages are not like the old TV show You Are There, in which history was re-enacted before our eyes. They are history seen through a glass, darkly." However, Stone is specifically named in the former"TOP SECRET" documents.

In a 1992 Nation article, D.D. Guttenplan claims that the evidence shows clearly that Stone was never a witting collaborator with Soviet intelligence, while leaving open the question of exactly what the Soviets may have meant by the term "agent of influence".

Cassandra Tate, of the Columbia Journalism Review, argues that accusations of Stone’s involvement with the KGB are based on a few lines at the end of the KGB officer's speech and that after some research into Stone's history she concluded that he was not an "agent" and there is no evidence he was a collaborator with the agency.

Legacy

Composer Scott Johnson makes extensive use of Stone's voice taken from a recorded 1981 lecture in his large-scale musical work, How It Happens, completed in 1991 on commission for the Kronos Quartet.

The 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards lists Stone's The Trial of Socrates as one his three favorite books.

On March 5, 2008, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced plans to award an annual I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence and an associated I.F. Stone Workshop on Strengthening Journalistic Independence.

Quotations

"You may just think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive." [on journalistic marginalization of him]

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

"I am going to tell you a number of things, but if you really want to be a good journalist you only have to remember two words: governments lie."