[Pen-l] Exchange on I.F. Stone

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/the-i-f-stone-question-again/
November 19, 2008, 1:46 pm
The I. F. Stone Question (Again)
By Barry Gewen
I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence(Courtesy the Nieman 
Foundation for Journalism)

Like millions of others, I have long been troubled by the philosopher 
Martin Heidegger’s political associations: he was an enthusiastic 
supporter of Hitler and, for a while at least, a member of the Nazi 
Party. Shelves of books have tried to work through the connection 
between his thought and his politics, and though I personally don’t have 
any easy answers, what I do know is that as much as I value his ideas, I 
would never praise him for his “spirit of independence, integrity, 
courage and indefatigability,” or be happy to see a major educational 
institution name an award in philosophy after him. These thoughts came 
to me when I learned that the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at 
Harvard University has recently established an I. F. Stone Medal for 
Journalistic Independence.

There is much to admire in Stone’s work (as there is in Heidegger’s). He 
was a passionate fighter against McCarthyism and segregation. He stood 
as a useful counterbalance to the bellicose war mentality that infected 
much of America after World War II; he opposed the Vietnam war from the 
very beginning. His newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which he published 
as a one-man operation from 1953-71, is a triumph of American 
journalism. The Nieman Foundation is right to honor him for these reasons.

And yet there is more to Stone than the honorable. He was never a member 
of the Communist Party in the way Heidegger was a member of the Nazi 
Party, but he was, for much of his life, an admirer of Stalin - in the 
parlance of the time a “fellow traveler.” Stone abandoned his Stalinism 
in 1956 - which, one might observe, was rather late for a talented and 
inquisitive journalist — but he went on to praise Fidel Castro and Ho 
Chi Minh. Why did he keep making the same mistake of falling for 
left-wing dictators? Maybe his alleged independence of mind was more a 
case of what Jeane Kirkpatrick called blaming America first. Certainly, 
that’s what he did in his 1952 book, “The Hidden History of the Korean War.”

To establish a medal in his honor, one has to fudge the facts of Stone’s 
career. The Nieman Foundation fudges the facts. The brief description of 
Stone on the Foundation’s website is a classic case of — to use a polite 
word — dissembling. It says “Stone’s passion for speaking his mind 
incurred the wrath of the powerful.” It says nothing about Stone’s 
supine apologias for the powerful on the left. It does not say, as Paul 
Berman did in a piece for the Book Review, that Stone “wrote journalism 
he knew to be untrue.” (Another clarifying, if more one-sided, comment, 
by Ron Radosh, can be found here.)

What Berman points out, and what the Nieman Foundation apparently does 
not know, is that during the years of the cold war it was possible to be 
a critic of American society, to oppose McCarthyism and segregation, and 
also to be a vigorous opponent of Stalin and Communism. If it did, it 
might have elected to name its medal after another American journalist 
who ran an important magazine of his own for a while, who was a paragon 
of the “independence, integrity, courage and indefatigability” that the 
Nieman Foundation claims to value, who could, it is true, make political 
and cultural mistakes (the price of his independence), but who never was 
seduced by totalitarianism. He saw the truth more clearly than I. F. 
Stone ever did, and seems to me a more appropriate model for young 
journalists. (He was a better writer too.) His name is Dwight Macdonald.

----

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/defending-i-f-stone/#respond
November 20, 2008, 4:12 pm
Defending I. F. Stone
By D. D. Guttenplan
I. F. StoneI. F. Stone in 1987 (George Tames/The New York Times)

As I. F. Stone’s biographer, I share Barry Gewen’s bemusement that 
establishment institutions, most recently the Nieman Foundation at 
Harvard, have embraced Stone — who was a radical all his life. Though 
his many admirers in the mainstream media make what might be deemed a 
heroic effort to overlook or airbrush out his radical commitments, my 
sympathies as a historian are always with those who would correct the 
record. I’ll leave it to Times readers to decide whether it is really 
honorable to compare someone who was, however briefly, a journalistic 
“fellow traveler” to Martin Heidegger, who not only welcomed the Nazi 
Party’s rise to power, but remained a proud member of the Nazi Party 
until the end of the war.

My own objection is not to Gewen’s opinion but to his weak command of 
the facts. Gewen is correct when he says that Stone was never a member 
of the Communist Party. In fact, Stone was briefly a member of the 
opposing Socialist Party from about 1928 to 1933. Though scarcely less 
radical than the Communists, the Socialists were led by the humane and 
charismatic Norman Thomas, whom Stone admired for his “capacity to deal 
with American problems in Socialist terms, but in language and specifics 
that made sense to ordinary Americans.”

It is also true that in May 1933 Stone, who had voted for Thomas the 
previous November, wrote a pseudonymous article that claimed “Roosevelt 
Turns Toward Fascism,” bemoaning that, with Roosevelt’s inauguration, 
the “road to a Soviet America, the one way out that could make a real 
difference to the working classes, was closed.” But even this obvious 
echo of the Communist candidate William Z. Foster’s campaign slogan has 
to be considered in light of the fact that Stone (unlike his friend 
Matthew Josephson, or for that matter Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley and 
Sidney Hook!) actually supported Foster’s rival leftist. As important, 
the magazine in which the article appeared, Modern Monthly, was anathema 
to American Stalinists, who regarded it as a Trotskyist rag.

Still, it is probably fair to say that in the 1930s Stone was an 
enthusiastic fellow traveler. 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.” Personally, I think Stone’s early and fervent campaigning 
for American involvement in World War II — at a time when Soviet 
sympathizers in the U.S. were still harmonizing to “The Yanks Aren’t 
Coming” — stands up pretty well against the position of Gewen’s hero 
Dwight Macdonald, whose blinkered pursuit of socialism in one editorial 
office led him to oppose aid to Britain (which Stone favored) and who 
was still telling the readers of Partisan Review that “all support of 
whatever kind must be withheld from Churchill and Roosevelt” as late as 
July 1941. Like Time magazine and Douglas MacArthur, Stone was grateful 
for the sacrifices of the Red Army; but he never viewed Stalin as 
anything other than a ruthless dictator. His warm endorsement of the 
Marshall Plan led to bitter attacks from The Daily Worker, as did his 
support for Tito. But then Stone also preferred Eisenhower to Truman.

Far from being a belated break with Stalinism, Stone’s justly famous 
1956 report from the Soviet Union — “This is not a good society, and it 
is not led by honest men” — was actually an answer to those, like Isaac 
Deutscher, who thought the socialist commonwealth was at hand with 
Khrushchev in power.

Readers who want more of this sort of thing can look at my reply to Paul 
Berman’s review. Those who want to know what Stone actually had to say 
in the Weekly so rightly praised by Gewen can now look for themselves 
here. And of course anyone who wants to know the fascinating story of 
this extraordinary man — and of his extraordinary times — is advised to 
wait until June, when my book, “American Radical: The Life and Times of 
I. F. Stone,” will be published.

D. D. Guttenplan is London correspondent for The Nation and the author 
of “The Holocaust on Trial.”
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