Biographer Myra MacPherson (from All Governments Lie!) said he "went from a young iconoclast in the 1930s to an icon during the Vietnam War. In the fifties, he spoke to mere handfuls who dared surface to protest Cold War loyalty oaths and witch-hunts. A decade later, he spoke to half a million who massed for anti-Vietnam War rallies. (Deservedly) He became world famous."
Earlier, he supported Progressive Party nominee Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election campaign, civil liberties for everyone, including communists, and advocated for peace and co-existence with the Soviets. He fought the loyalty purge, FBI, House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Pat McCarran's virulent anti-communism as Senate Judiciary Committee and Internal Security Subcommittee chairmen, and Joe McCarthy.
He wrote the first article against the Smith Act for its 1940 use against Trotskyites and other leftists with suspected subversive leanings.
His idea was to make the Weekly radical by providing information readers could check out on their own. He "tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible." He wanted every issue to provide facts and opinions unavailable elsewhere in the press. He felt like "a guerilla warrior, swooping down in a surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry."
Unlike beat reporters for major dailies or wire services, he was immune to the pressures they faced. He said Washington has lots of news. If information on some are blocked, go get others because "The bureaucracies put out so much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from the time to time." And by asking tough questions, a whole lot can be learned that as an independent can be published freely without fear of employer retribution.
It's why no bureaucracy likes independent journalism, especially radical muckrakers digging out the most sensitive material it wants suppressed. The fault Stone found with most newspapers wasn't the absence of dissent. It was the absence of real news, the timidity of journalists to write it, and the power owners held over them.
"Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling." Most newspaper owners are businessmen, not journalists. "The news is something which fills spaces left over by advertisers."
Most publishers aren't just hostile to dissent, they suspect any opinions likely to antagonize readers, consumers, and mainly advertisers. As a result, most newspapers "stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news, prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons." Even the best papers are timid. They don't question the Cold War, arms race, or stand up for civil liberties and the rule of law. Only a few "maverick" dailies are around making it "easy for a one-man four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course opinion they would rarely express."
Journalism was a "crusade" for Stone. What Jefferson symbolized for him was being "rediscovered in a socialist society as a necessity for good government." During the height of the McCarthy era, he felt like a pariah but believed he stood for and was preserving the best of America's traditions. It inspired what he did to the end.
DD Guttenplan's "American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone"
Guttenplan described him as a journalistic "irritant to power for his uncanny ability to seize on the most inconvenient truths and for his vociferous opposition to the existing order." After becoming radicalized, he was brash, forthright, anti-fascist, pro-labor, a supporter of New Deal politics, and a passionate activist for the oppressed, disadvantaged, and social justice.
In his preface, Guttenplan described the fateful December 12, 1949 moment when Stone went from prominence to a non-person in American politics and his profession. It was during an interchange with the AMA's Dr. Morris Fishbein on Meet the Press, an ardent foe of universal single-payer health insurance he denounced as "socialistic." Quoting Stone, Guttenplan wrote:
"Dr. Fishbein, let's get nice and rough. In view of his advocacy of compulsory health insurance, do you regard Mr. Harry Truman as a card-carrying communist, or just a deluded fellow-traveler?"
After that, he slowly vanished, was never again on Meet the Press, couldn't get his passport renewed after a year in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Compass, and when it closed in 1952 was blacklisted as a reporter. As he put it at age 40: "I feel for the moment like a ghost." And as Guttenplan wrote:
"For some time he live(d) in a kind of internal exile (sitting) in (a) Washington, DC....rented office waiting for the phone to ring (and) after three years (getting no) visitor apart from building maintenance workers and the mailman....(so he gave) up the office....work(ed) from home," and launched the IF Stone Weekly as a platform to produce radical commentaries for his readers...."slowly, almost imperceptibly, his audience return(ed)" to its final year 1971 peak 70,000 circulation level.
According to Guttenplan, Stone "rode into battle not as a paladin of the powerless or a gadfly, but as an insider, a confidential agent of the (left-wing) 'party within a party' that served" progressive politics in the 1930s. He later broke with Harry Truman and supported Wallace. The FBI followed him everywhere, investigated him for five years, and accumulated 6,000 pages in his file, threefold its size for Al Capone. His phone was tapped and his mail intercepted on suspicion he was a Soviet spy, that was, of course, untrue.
