Tough as Nails, Honest as Stone

JERRY BRUCK'S hour-long documentary I.F. Stone's Weekly carries on in the spirit of the publication after which it is named: brief, to the point, black and white, without frills, honest, clear, and filled with Stone's energy and courage. Like Stone, Bruck uses a traditional narrative voice effectively, relying on the importance of his subject and an honest presentation to engage his audience.

Stone has been a journalist for 52 years, during all of that time a relentlessly conscientious critic of the powerful. In 1952, after 30 years of writing for such newspapers as the New York Post, the New York Star, and P.M., Stone found himself without a job when the New York Daily Compass ran out of money. During Joe McCarthy's heyday, no one was hiring left-wing journalists. And by that time, Stone's leftist reputation was well-known; he was barred (and he still is) from the National Press Club in Washington for inviting a black jurist to lunch there once in the forties.

Stone decided to publish an independent newsletter, forced by necessity as much as by principle to adopt the style of operation he would follow for 18 years. Because he felt, as he later wrote, that "a radical publication in the atmosphere of 1953 could only grow slowly anyway," he recruited readers from old P.M. and New York Compass subscription lists rather than attempt to mount an advertising campaign. Stone said in 1971 that he had figured only the paper's quality could sustain it, so he adopted a sober typography and straightforward tone. After eight cautious printers refused to help Stone publish his newsletter, he found two men who would. I.F. Stone's Weekly debuted on Jan. 17, 1953.

The newsletter appeared each week for 15 years, usually four pages long, almost always written by Stone alone. In 1968, the Weekly started bi-weekly publication, and, in December 1971, Stone closed down entirely, finally finding the required discipline too great a strain on his health.

Aside from its iconoclasm, one of the most striking features of Stone's journalism was his means of locating information for his exposes. Because he had no opportunity in the fifties to make inside government contacts, Stone turned to published sources and speeches to find the rope which government liars obligingly provided for their own hangings.

Bruck's film portrays the attitudes and devotion Stone brought to bear on his enterprise. "Every government is run by liars," Stone says. "Establishment reporters know a lot of things I don't know, but a lot of what they know isn't true." The film shows Stone in his small office, interrupting a piece to take a telephone subscription order, and shows Esther Stone, his wife and the Weekly's circulation manager, sorting bills on their living room table. Unfortunately, one thing the film never shows is a printed edition of the Weekly. Bruck missed an obvious opportunity to convey the flavor of Stone's publication.

Stone's discipline drove his occasional coworkers crazy. One assistant, who lasted a record ten months on the job, tells how he lived in fear of 7:30 a.m. phone calls from Stone who would want to know the assistant's reaction to some small item he had already caught in the back pages of the third newspaper he had read that morning.

The film also captures the establishment press's ambivalent attitude towards Stone. Though Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post says, "You can't help but be influenced by Izzy," Walter Cronkite looks obviously uncomfortable talking to Stone at a party. Invited to receive a journalism award at a formal dinner, Stone first has to endure a speech by the Associated Press's president who declares that the country has "had enough of activist journalism."

Perhaps the film's most admirable aspect is its relatively evenhanded portrayal of Stone's politics. At one point, Stone, a former communist anarchist, ridicules Nixon's pose as peacemaker: "He thinks he's Mahatma Nixon, a man in a loin cloth." But later, Stone, the self-proclaimed "counterrevolutionary," wonders aloud before a student audience whether youthful revolutionary fervor might not be the product of unresolved adolescent crises. Without criticizing Stone's published work in depth, Bruck at least does justice to his subject's conflicting impulses.

Bruck's Stone emerges a hero, but not the idol of any one party. Heroic for his honesty, independence, and moral strength, he is cheered by demonstrators, applauded at an academic convocation. The film seems to show that however people interpret Stone's political goals, he is finally respected universally for his drive and integrity. It is impossible to deny the justice of the portrait; Stone is a militantly honest man.

The intellectual impulses behind Stone's writing, however, emerge clearly only in print. Fortunately, English journalist Neil Middleton has compiled an anthology of Weekly pieces which was published last year in the United States. The collection includes essays on McCarthy and the Cold War, civil rights, the arms race, the presidency, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

In a brief, perceptive introduction, Middleton places Stone in the tradition of 18th century English pamphleteer William Cobbett. Like Cobbett, Stone combines a trenchant critique of existing conditions with a nostalgic vision of his country in which the nation was true to its ideals. Middleton writes, "Few people contrive to remain faithful to the vision proffered by the very forces which are busy betraying it," and Stone is most remarkable because his "devotion to the liberal vision and to America has never allowed him to pull his punches."

Stone's version of that liberal vision is woven of three ideals: justice, libertarianism, and pacifism. He values social order as a guarantee against violence and deplores the "urge to reach for the dagger" on both the right and left. In his essay on Kennedy's death "We All Had a Finger on That Trigger," Stone writes: "It is not just the ease in obtaining guns, it is the ease in obtaining excuses, that fosters assassination."

When Stone praises "the campus rebels" who protested the Vietnam war, his judgment springs from a painful conclusion that the violence they may have provoked is trivial compared to the violence that provoked them: The war and the military have taken up so much of our energy that we have neglected the blacks, the poor and students... I feel that the New Left and the black revolutionists...are doing God's work...in refusing any longer to submit to evil, and challenging society to reform or crush them.

In 1965, Stone ridiculed Mississippi's Senators Eastland and Stennis for blaming civil rights agitation on outside interference and communist conspiracy. He compared their attitude towards blacks to Secretary of State Dean Rusk's attitude towards Hanoi: "The theory in both cases is that all would be well if only the North let its neighbors alone." His incisive prose defuses the force of their paranoia: One almost expects to hear Eastland and Stennis ask how Washington can claim to be for peaceful coexistence and yet insist on supporting "wars of liberation" in the South, or accuse old Ho Chi Johnson of persisting in his dastardly ambition to reunify the country.

Stone's sense of justice is internationalist. Though proudly Jewish and hopeful for Israel, Stone wrote in 1956, "The Arab refugees weigh upon my conscience, and I believe it the moral duty of Jews everywhere to contribute when peace is made towards their resettlement." In 1970, still deploring Israel's failure to deal justly with the Palestinians, Stone wrote that Golda Meir's "coldness was unworthy of a Jewish leader. . . Leadership like hers, in forty years of siege and war, will purge the Jews of the compassion acquired in exile."

The elements of Stone's vision are held together less by theory or unified strategy than by the simple force of his eloquence and his persistent search for the truth. For example, in each of his pieces on the missile race, Stone shows how government figures contradict each other, how published reports give the lie to government statements or at least to their apparent meanings.

Stone is equally forceful in outrage or ridicule. About Nixon, Stone writes: In a realm of discourse in which words have lost all normal meaning, it is not surprising to hear that Nixon also told [C.L.] Sulzberger [of The New York Times], "I rate myself a deeply committed pacifist." Many men have been "committed" for less obvious lapses from reality.

What completes Stone's contribution, what makes his indignation and determination so refreshing, is that they are combined with an iconoclasm directed even at himself. Stone makes no claim to be the suffering crusader; his greatest joy has been the freedom to live true to his faith--a fairly pessimistic view of humanity's worst impulses mixed with a continuing optimism that the social order may hold them in check: To give a little comfort to the oppressed, to write the truth exactly as I saw it, to make no compromises other than those of quality imposed by own inadequacies, to be free to follow no master other than my own compulsions, to live up to my idealized image of what a true newspaperman should be, and still be able to make a living for my family--what more could a man ask?

Indeed, one could hardly ask more of Stone. It is true that his vision of politics springs from often contradictory roots, that he is, as Middleton says, seeking a marriage of Marx and Milton. It is even true now that the left has come out of hiding, extending a supportive hand to Stone, that the criticism Stone provides has become "respectable." But Stone's steadfast insistence on keeping both eyes open with regard to his country, the world, and himself represents the finest impulse of critical thought, the most important prerequisite to serious political writing in journalism or philosophy.

Stone's record even belies somewhat his self-appelation as "counterrevolutionary," probably in the eyes of both radicals and bureaucrats. It can be no comfort to Nixon that Stone is an idealist, not a soldier; and in an age of ubiquitous deception, Stone has proven that truth is radical.