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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I. F. Stone, who spent most of his childhood living upstairs from his immigrant parents' drygoods emporium in Haddonfield, New Jersey, devoted most of his middle age to operating a mom-and-pop store of his own: I. F. Stone's Weekly, the ardent and combative four-page paper, looking much like an eighteenth-century pamphlet, that he published, with the ceaseless help of his wife, Esther, from the small house where they lived in Washington during the fifties and sixties. In the age of the blogger, it takes some effort to understand why Stone, who for much of the nineteen-year run of the Weekly reached an audience not much bigger than twenty thousand, was so important. He has already been the subject of three books, and a fourth, possibly the most ambitious, is a long-in-the-works biography by D. D. Guttenplan, the London correspondent of The Nation, which Guttenplan expects to finish later this year. This year brought a biography of Stone by Myra MacPherson, a Washington Post reporter for many years, called "All Governments Lie!," and a collection of his own pieces called "The Best of I. F. Stone." And they have set off a hot-blooded new debate about Stone, which is no less intense for his having been dead for seventeen years and for the issues in dispute being more than half a century old.
One way of explaining Stone's lasting power is to offer what is more or less the official catechism: Stone was a courageous independent voice in the conformist Cold War years, who shunned organizational life, stood up for civil liberties, and aggressively questioned the government at a time when the best-known journalists were cheerleaders. He was an impassioned advocate of civil rights long before the great events of the civil-rights movement. He opposed the Vietnam War well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in 1964, and was one of the first journalists to question it. This is the argument that Myra MacPherson makes, although she is also a thorough and honest enough reporter to make it clear that Stone had the obsessive self-centeredness that often characterizes crusaders, and that he made at least as many enemies as friends.
But a resume and a list of positions taken don't capture the extraordinary qualities that have made Stone last. He had a dazzling mind. A small book called "I. F. Stone: A Portrait," by Andrew Patner, published in 1988 (the year before Stone died), which is made up of tape-recorded quotations stitched together with Patner's prose, shows him to have been a conversationalist on the level of Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher, with the same knack for mixing raffishness and erudition. Here is a representative passage:
By the way, did you ever read George Moore's novel "Heloise and Abelard"? It's a wonderful story and it's a beautiful evocation of what life was like in medieval Paris. It is beautiful! Beautiful! Read it some time. But Abelard did a book called "Sic et non"--Yes and no. From deeply respected canonical sources he took contradictory statements...
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