Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [93]
Stone gathered up a few stalwarts from his old magazine and newspaper audience—although not enough to cover expenses—and launched a newsletter in 1953 called I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Stone did what the muckrakers did before the war, but rather than write for huge mass weeklies, he self-published his work in his basement. Stone’s work exposed the damage done to journalism by mass culture. The stories that Stone broke were ignored by most organizations. It was Stone who punctured the Johnson administration’s assertion that U.S. ships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. He pointed out that “one bullet embedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the . . . attacks took place.”17 In an appendix of a State Department white paper meant to justify an expansion of the war, he found that in the months between June 1962 and January 1964 only 179 of approximately 7,500 weapons captured from the Vietcong had come from the Soviet bloc. The remainder, ninety-five percent, came from U.S. arms provided to the South Vietnamese.
He did this reporting while shut out of the big news conferences and confidential background briefings given to well-placed Washington reporters. The establishment reporters, he conceded, knew things he did not, but “a lot of what they know isn’t true.”18 What those journalists called objectivity “usually is seeing things the way everybody else sees them,”19 Stone said. By the time he closed the weekly nearly two decades later, it had seventy thousand subscribers, and he had become a journalistic icon.
Stone was that curious hybrid of intellectual and journalist. He was as conversant in theater, art, literature, poetry, and the classics—he knew Latin and mastered Greek at the end of his life to write a book on the trial of Socrates—as he was in the intricacies of the New Deal, the permanent war economy, and the labor movement. His fierce independence and razor-sharp intellect, like George Orwell’s, often made him a scourge to the liberal class as well as the right. He detested orthodoxy. He consistently stood on the side of those who would have remained unheard without him. He may have been a supporter of Israel, but he had the courage to write in 1949 that Deir Yassin, an Arab village attacked in 1948 by Zionist paramilitary, who killed more than one hundred residents, was a village “whose Arabs were massacred by Irgunists with biblical ferocity, a shameful page in the history of the Jewish war of liberation.”20 American Jewish organizations offered to promote his book on the war for Israeli independence if he deleted one sentence calling for a binational Arab-Jewish state made up of Palestine and Trans-Jordan. He refused. The book languished in obscurity.
Stone would not sell out. He never forgot, as he famously quipped, that “every government is run by liars.”21 He was expelled from the National Press Club after he and a black former federal judge were refused luncheon service. He promptly joined the black newspapermen’s club. He declared Malcolm X “savagely uncompromising” after his assassination, seeing perhaps a bit of himself in the brilliant leader who read Paradise Lost and Herodotus in prison. Malcolm X, Stone stated, “drove home the real truth about the Negro’s position in America. It may not be pleasant, but it must be faced . . . No man has better expressed his people’s trapped anguish.”22 Yet as the New Left became anarchic and its fringes began to embrace violence in the 1960s, he was as withering in his critique of the 1960s radicals as he was of the government it defied. “Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat,” Stone wrote:It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party lines. Those who set out nobly to be their brother’s keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation