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I.F. Stone

1907–1989 · 82 years Tier II

Forty-ninth in a class of 52, and blacklisted at 42

Portrait of I.F. Stone — Kzitelman — 1972-04 — CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

His parents were Russian Jews who kept a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and he founded a newspaper in his second year of high school, where he finished 49th out of 52. He worked the Haddonfield Press and the Camden Courier-Post, read philosophy at Penn and left without a degree, and turned up at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He married Esther Roisman in 1929, and the marriage ran 60 years. At the New York Post he fought his own publisher over transit editorials, took it to the Newspaper Guild, lost the arbitration and quit. In 1937 an editor told him his political reporting would go down better if he sounded less Jewish. Isadore Feinstein Stone became I. F. Stone, and he said later that he was sorry he had agreed.

The Nation took him on in 1939 as associate editor and Washington correspondent. PM followed, then the New York Star, then the Daily Compass until 1952. By 1950 nobody would hire him — he had said out loud that he was a fellow traveler. On January 17, 1953, following George Seldes's example, he mailed the first issue of I. F. Stone's Weekly to his own subscriber list, with Esther working as his assistant, and he kept it up until December 1, 1971. He claimed no inside stuff. He read the Congressional Record, hearing transcripts, committee prints and agency reports, and printed what he found in boxed paragraphs a reader could go and check. Circulation peaked near 70,000. In 1964 he was the only American reporter to contradict Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin, working entirely from published material.

Whether he worked for Soviet intelligence is still argued and has not been settled. A KGB cable from New York on September 13, 1944 discusses an agent codenamed BLIN who was avoiding Vladimir Pravdin and did not react when a TASS man sounded him out. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev concluded that Stone cooperated consciously with Soviet intelligence between 1936 and 1938, while granting that he was no spy and had no classified access. D. D. Guttenplan, Myra MacPherson, Jim Naureckas and Max Holland read the same files as a reporter talking to sources. Oleg Kalugin, the Soviet press officer who knew him, said he had no proof Stone was an agent, no proof he took money, and that he sometimes bought lunch.

Angina shut the Weekly down in 1971. He went back to Penn, finished the bachelor's degree he had walked away from, took it in classical languages, and learned enough ancient Greek to write The Trial of Socrates in 1988 — a bestseller in 11 languages arguing that Socrates wanted the death sentence in order to shame a democracy he despised. He died of a heart attack in Boston on June 18, 1989, at 81. NYU's journalism department later put the Weekly 16th on its list of the century's hundred best works of American journalism. In 2008 Harvard's Nieman Foundation created a medal in his name and the Park Center for Independent Media created the Izzy Award.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

I.F. Stone's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Court Disposes book
On the Supreme Court blocking the New Deal 1937
Underground to Palestine book
He travelled with displaced Jews running the British blockade 1946
I. F. Stone's Weekly other
Self-published for 18 years and built entirely from public documents 1953
The Killings at Kent State book
Published the year the Weekly folded 1971
The Trial of Socrates book
Written after he learned ancient Greek in his late sixties 1988

Life in brief

with age at each point

December 24, 1907 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia as Isadore Feinstein His parents kept a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey.
1929 aged ~22 Marries Esther Roisman The marriage lasted 60 years and she became his assistant at the Weekly.
1937 aged ~30 Shortens the byline to I. F. Stone on an editor's advice He said afterward that he regretted conceding to the antisemitism behind it.
1939 aged ~32 Joins The Nation as associate editor and Washington correspondent
January 17, 1953 aged 45 Mails the first issue of I. F. Stone's Weekly He was blacklisted and out of work, so he became his own employer.
1956 aged ~49 Returns from the Soviet Union and prints what he saw He wrote that it was not a good society and was not led by honest men. Hundreds cancelled.
1964 aged ~57 Alone among American reporters, challenges the Gulf of Tonkin account He used only published material anybody could look up.
December 1, 1971 aged 63 The last issue of the Weekly, after angina forces him to stop
June 18, 1989 aged 81 Dies of a heart attack in Boston at 81