And he showed how good journalism can make a difference, the kind so lacking then and now with no IF Stone around to write it.
He "challenged power by using power's own record against itself." And after his hearing failed, he relied increasingly on documents to prove what he famously said:
"All governments lie, but the truth still slips out from time to time," and it's up to good journalists to find and report it. Stone did, what the powerful wanted suppressed in his Weekly and numerous books, including (a treasured signed used copy this writer owns of) his "Hidden History of the Korean War."
Published in 1952, Monthly Review co-founders Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote in the preface:
"This book....paints a very different picture of the Korean War - one, in fact, which is at variance with the official version at almost every point." Stone's investigations into official discrepancies led him "to a full-scale reassessment of the whole" war.
First published, in part, in the Compass and two articles in France's L'Observateur, its publisher, Claude Bourdet explained in his article titled, "The Korean Mystery: Fight Against a Phantom?"
"If Stone's thesis corresponds to reality (and it did), we are in the presence of the greatest swindle in the whole of military history....not a question of a harmless fraud but of a terrible maneuver in which deception is being consciously utilized to block peace at a time when it is possible."
Stone called it international aggression. So did Huberman and Sweezy writing in August 1951 (14 months into the war):
"....we have come to the conclusion that (South Korean president) Syngman Rhee deliberately provoked the North Koreans in the hope that they would retaliate by crossing the parallel in force. The northerners (who wanted a unified Korea, not war) fell neatly into the trap." Truman was the instigator who took full advantage when they did, as Stone believed in writing:
"we said we were going to Korea to go back to the status quo before the war but when the American armies reached the 38th parallel they didn't stop, they kept going, so there must be something else. We must have another agenda here and what might that agenda be?"
The same one, he later learned, we had in Vietnam that made him outspoken against it. He was the only journalist asked to speak at the first nationwide November 15, 1969 "Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam War," that half a million to Washington one month after a global event was held.
He matched his anti-war spirit with his support for the disadvantaged, the oppressed, social equity, and above all accuracy and truth, and used his journalism as a "crusade" to produce it. He wrote:
"I was heartened by the thought that I was preserving and carrying forward the best in America's traditions, that in my humble way I stood in a line that reached back to Jefferson. These are the origins and the preconceptions, the hopes and the aspirations" behind all his writings and the legacy that's now ours.
On June 17, 1989, he died of heart failure in Cambridge, MA and is buried there at Mount Auburn Cemetery, leaving behind his wife, Esther, of 60 years, and three children, Celia, Jeremy and Christopher. He once told his wife that "if (he) lived long enough (he'd) graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if (he) lasted long enough, from a character to public institution." He omitted a legend, a committed radical, consummate independent, and ideological hero symbolizing what Public Affairs' Peter Osnos called his "stubborn tenacity, ferocious independence, and extraordinary will" in pursuing truth.
Or as Guttenplan ended his book:
"IF Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his 'brand'), but to change the world. We read and work - and wait."
