Rather than comment on it, I’ll just set up a link to the article which was introduced in a suprise move by a sunday Book Review editors:

Here is the introduction:

Up Front

By THE EDITORS

“For many years now Paul Berman, a self-described “literature-and-politics man,” has rigorously examined the contradictions of ideological commitment, most recently in his books “Terror and Liberalism” and “Power and the Idealists.” Berman’s own ideological path has taken some interesting turns. A participant in the Columbia University protests of the late 1960’s, he later wrote skeptically about leftist governments in Latin America.
This week Berman reviews “ ‘All Governments Lie’: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone,” by Myra MacPherson, and “The Best of I. F. Stone,” edited by Karl Weber. Berman did not meet Stone, but in an e-mail message said, “I revered Stone during my time in the Vietnam antiwar movement, and for many years later — even if I always knew that in the old-fashioned anti-Communist corners of the left, some people had their reservations. Today, when I look back on the whole of his career, the old complaints about him make more sense to me.”
Stone’s legacy, Berman notes, is seen today in the journalistic reflex “to focus so intently on the deeds and misdeeds of our own government as to blind ourselves sometimes to other ghastly goings-on around the world.” ”

Read it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/books/review/Upfront.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=review&pagewanted=print

and here is the article:

The Watchdog

By PAUL BERMAN

“Does the memory of the independent-minded, hearing-impaired, liberally leftist, reliably humorous, ever quizzical and wonderfully prolific journalist I. F. Stone have anything to offer to us today? Myra MacPherson has written a biography under the Stone-quoting title “ ‘All Governments Lie,’ ” in order to demonstrate that Stone and his journalistic achievements do have something to offer, and Karl Weber and the publisher Peter Osnos have brought out an anthology of 65 articles called “The Best of I. F. Stone” in order to demonstrate that MacPherson is right. And it is easy to see what the biographer and the anthologists have in mind.”

Read it all here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/books/review/Berman.t.html?ref=review

Dyer, he did a lot of harm to this country and he knew what he was doing.

“hindsight is 20/20.”

This is pretty stupid, Potter. Would you say the same of someone who was a cheerleader for the Nazis till 1946 and then changed his mind?

he may have been a political idiot, but he was of use mostly to people who already thought the way he did.

I agree with 1/14’s post which says:
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:37 pm

“His rather sympathetic biographer Robert Cottrell wrote that “there was something disingenuous in [Stone’s] willingness to suspend judgment or to refuse to criticize still more forcefully the terror that was being played out in Soviet Russia…. What could not be denied was that Stone, like many of his political and intellectual counterparts, continued to afford Russia and even Stalinist communism something of a double standard, fearing that to do otherwise would endanger … the very possibility of socialism”. ”

This has been my impression also after heaving read his newsletter for many years as well as a number of his books.

People interested in going beyond snippy poster’s comments should read:

Author Stone, I. F. (Isidor F.), 1907-

“The hidden history of the Korean War.” New York, Monthly Review Press, 1952.

Any good library should have the 1952 Ed.

The book is a revelation.

Dyer, you are being too generous. IF Stone was a useful idiot most of his life, either for old left or the new left. I also see no difference between him and Chumpsky.

( note: change “worship” to “appreciate” and we get closer to what is trying to happen here and on the show. This thread started off negative and a corrective was called for.)

from the above post: Don Solomon Says:

It’s easy to disprove the above comment from one of the sentences of his quoted in the web site linked above”

in other words: “proved it time and again” = “right about everything”

Sounds familiar.

Is this also then out of context and self-serving as well complaining about being out of context while using the same source?

However, if he was right then Chomsky who had argued that there was no difference between the press in the US and the Soviet Union must have been wrong.

People, you can’t have it both ways!

This was the first mention of Chomsky on this thread and I don’t recall anyone anywhere saying that Chomsky was always or that I F Stone was always right.

The above argument amounts to small army of straw men. And to use a tired phrase and echoe what has been said but not heard re looking at I F Stone from this vantage point : hindsight is 20/20.

First, any one can takes quotes out of context.

Second, people who worship Stone (pun intended) seem not to want to read his comments critically. They take it for granted that he was right about everything as one poster above said:

.

Don Solomon Says:

September 28th, 2006 at 4:28 pm

“Stone was right when everyone else was wrong, and he proved it time and again….”

It’s easy to disprove the above comment from one of the sentences of his quoted in the web site linked above”

Stone criticism of Stalinism came late in the game, it happened after Stalin’s death and after Khruschev denounced him at a party meeting. By that time tens of thousands of former Communsits world wide had already left the party having shown the kind of terror that was being inflicted in the Soviet State.

Even after attacking the Communinst terror in 1956 he still had to say that

“The more one studies Russian hisotry the more one sees how deep were the roots of Leninism in Russian radical thinking of the nineteenth century…. [S]ocialism in Russia is there to stay…. Russian industrialization, despite Russian solvenliness and that callous waste of men and manpower one feels in Russia, has advanced on giant boots, thanks to economic planning…. ”

In other words he is still arguing that there was a deep historical inevitebility to Russian Bolshevism. He also states that Soviet Communism (socialism) is “here to stay.”

Still, I do giving him credit for finally coming to his senses. What is troubling is that it took a speech by Bolshevik leader to dissilusion him.

The work of Orwell, of Arthur Koestler, and many others (and not just Trostkyites) wasn’t enough for him.

Even a Marxist inspired website said this about him:

“It has been claimed that Stone sought to sever his ties with the KGB after traveling to the Soviet Union in 1956 and hearing Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. According to Kalugin, It is true that Stone sought to sever ties in 1956, but the latter explanation appears to be apocryphal (Kalugin eventually persuaded Stone to maintain his ties).

A plausible alternate explanation for the break is that in 1956 the Soviets invaded Hungary. Stone apparently severed all ties to the Soviets after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent quelling of the revolt.”

http://dictionary.laborlawtalk.com/I._F._Stone

The guy wasn’t perfect by any means and people tend to want to excuse his failings because of his opposition to the Vietnam war.

Well, I too opposed the Vietnam war in the early 70’s, but after studying the subject closely for many years I have come the to conclusion that I was wrong. Had we supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968 there would not have been the sharp turn to the right.

One other point, Stone is quoted as saying that:

“Whatever the shortcomings of the Western press, there is no comparison between it and the Soviet press….”

For once he was right.

However, if he was right then Chomsky who had argued that there was no difference between the press in the US and the Soviet Union must have been wrong.

People, you can’t have it both ways!

I.F. Stone on the Soviet Union, in 1956:

I have to say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men.

To blame the evils of Stalinism on Stalin is obviously inadequate…. Stalinism was the natural fruit of the whole spirit of the Communist movement. The wanton executions, the frame-ups, the unjust convictions and exiles–these would not have been possible except in a movement whose members had been taught not only to obey unquestionably but to hate…. This was the spirit the Communist movement bred. Stalin embodied that spirit.

There is more here:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/09/if_stone_on_rus.html

Stone was not uncritical of Communism or Soviet Russia, not at all. But they were there and he was here, in Washington, a few blocks from the Government Printing Office, able to buy the government’s own reports for a buck or two. (You can’t do that as easily today — the Bushies have decimated and partially privatized the GPO — guess why!) I think if asked, Stone would have said, “I don’t speak Russian and don’t live in Moscow. Find someone in Moscow willing to do what I do, and let them print the truth, and I’ll be just fine with that.” And the samizdat printers did just that, perhaps copying Stone’s method of work. Stone had plenty to do right here, and he was particularly well equipped to do it.

Most of the posters haven’t the faintest notion how many people lived in quaking fear of their government in the early 1950s — teachers, union members, screenwriters, Jews, liberals, homosexuals, racial integrationists, even lowly cafeteria aides (as the recent Ed Murrow movie makes clear). Izzy Stone took his talents and put them to use “in a time of trouble.” That, plus his economical prose and rigorous fact checking, made him one of my heroes. I was proud to subscribe to the Weekly, lamented its demise, and still treasure my copies which are on the shelf not far from where I now sit.

Since I come from a union family I am a strong supporter of labor unions.
The people on the left I support are those like the writers at Dissent critical of the new left today as they were of the Leninism of yesteryear.

What troubled me about Stone was his uncritical view of Communism.

No, of course not. The I. F. Stone my parents revered played an intellectual and pragmatic role in the U.S. labor movement. Geopolitics was another arena altogether. That was my point. Whatever else emerged, Stone was and remains a mid-century American thinker and writer on American labor conditions.

A third cousin did extensive research and found that we came from Tarascha.

Interesting that wikipedia has an entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarascha

Is this “your” shtetl? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berdychiv#Jewish_history

in a different oblast than Tarascha apparently.

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berditchev_(Hasidic_dynasty)

Any relation to the Berdichev Rebbe?

I know that, babu.

However, are you saying though that those that endorsed the Hitler Stalin pact were correct in doing so because of their experience at the time?

I was simply trying to place Stone the journalist and his Weekly back into to cultral time in which they lived.

In 1987 I spent 6 weeks in Seattle’s sister city, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then still a Soviet Republic, building a peace park as a gift from the people of Seattle. The City was still run by transplanted ‘Russian nationals’, sent to Tashkent to be the government (and keep the far-flung “brown” Republics in line. Many of these Russian officials turned out to be (secretly, quietly) of Jewish descent, who had opted to transfer to the distant Republics to escape the latent anti-semitism of the Soviet elite in places like the Ukraine. One of these, the Tashkent Director of Public Works told me –at his dacha and with copious vodka on-board — that his family was also from near Berditchev, but that the town was gone; razed by the Germans, if I understood him correctly.

This was the Russia that Izzy Stone was trying to rehabilitate. You have to understand the terror, hope and complexity which attended the era.

September 27th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Let’s put a slightly longer focus on this Russia debate.

“My Jewish grandparents escaped Tsarist Russia 90 years ago, my grandmother with a Cossack bullet in her shoulder; from ’sport-shooting’ as it was then understood. The society which the Bolsheviks and then Commmunism replaced was a thousand years of repressive imperial feudalism laced with racism. THAT was the cultural norm from which that generation incubated the socialist idea, completely without precedent and spell-binding to millions, I. F. Stone among them.”

So you forgive the misguided “idealist” who signed on to the Nazi Soviet pact in the name of fighting an older repressive regime that was on longer in place?

Amazing.

Your post reminds me of the adage that a Communist is someone who forgets nothing and who never learn nothing.

“It’s completely human that thinking people of of the epoch would forgive or reserve judgement in order to gestate the socialist idea. Even faced with the onset of corruption in the first 20 years, it was a movement with the kind of social promise which salved the ills of a world beset by fascism, naziism as others have pointed out. That it fell into the hands of a thug like Stalin is all-too-predictable when you consider the previous experience of the available talent pool of its time and place. But people still had hope.”

Sorry, babu, but the problem was larger than Stalin who inherited the structure of repression from Lenin’s system of rule.

Lenin’s introduced something totally new to Russia and his system of repression can’t be compared to the primitive methods used by the Tsarists.

The same was true in Germany Nazism wasn’t just the rule by a few thugs but was an elaborate structure that used the bureaucratic methods already in place.

Your sentimentality for Russian communism is touching but absurd.

It reminds me of the misguided apology by the British MP George Galloway for the old Soviet State which he published in Al Ahram:

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/812/op2.htm

This beautifully parodied here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_xQRLDsoF8&eurl=

We come from similar backgrounds. My grandparents on one side came 100 years ago from Kiev, no south of Kiev because they were not allowed to live in Kiev. On the other side, from near MInsk.

I remember whisperings in my family that my great-aunt and then my aunt were “pink”!

My Jewish grandparents escaped Tsarist Russia 90 years ago, my grandmother with a Cossack bullet in her shoulder; from ’sport-shooting’ as it was then understood. The society which the Bolsheviks and then Commmunism replaced was a thousand years of repressive imperial feudalism laced with racism. THAT was the cultural norm from which that generation incubated the socialist idea, completely without precedent and spell-binding to millions, I. F. Stone among them.

Capitalism was also also an infant ideology. As it still is today. Immature, very out of balance with nature, etc, yet people of conscience are trying to correct it’s course. There are respectable voices of many stripes. Why not think of Stone this way?

It’s completely human that thinking people of of the epoch would forgive or reserve judgement in order to gestate the socialist idea. Even faced with the onset of corruption in the first 20 years, it was a movement with the kind of social promise which salved the ills of a world beset by fascism, naziism as others have pointed out. That it fell into the hands of a thug like Stalin is all-too-predictable when you consider the previous experience of the available talent pool of its time and place. But people still had hope.

The American post-WW II Socialist movement, springing as it did largely within the recent immigrant class, simultaneous with the first signs of American expansion, focussing on addressing the inequities of the ascending capitaist system, was a hothouse flower needing special care. I. F. Stone was one of the brave, intelligent voices which believed in it and understood the intrinsic misuse of (many but not all) human beings which capitalism requires.

September 26th, 2006 at 6:50 pm

“Read the proclamation he endorsed after the signing of the pact.”

http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1939/08/0814-openletter.pdf

thanks for the link to the pact. The language of the procalmation with its doubletalk is breathtaking. No wonder Orwell invented the concept of “newspeak” to highlight the abuse of “progressive” concepts.

There are people on the list whose work I know that I never would have suspected to be so naive: Newton Arvin a fine literary critic and Mark Blitzstein the composer are two such people.

btw: I didn’t see Stone’s name on the list. Can you point it out, please?

It seems like your saying. ”Its ok to be against your country if your a leftist or communist sympathizer, but if your right wing and dont support your country your in the wrong”.

People who support nations that we are at war with are traitors. People who support or aid another nation in its attempts to to damage ones own country should also be considered traitors. Or at the very least really terrible people

The reason many people didnt know the extent of the brutality and repression of communist Russia is in part due to left wing media people covering up the real and horrific truth about Russia. Does the N.Y. Times ring a bell.( 60 years later and they haven’t changed much)

Never the less with Stones connections and brilliance it seems hard to imagine he didn’t know what was really going on in Russia.
I dont know if Stone was a communist spy or sympathizer,I will have to do more research. I will have to look at what is said in the Venona book.
If he was a communist spy he was a traitor and a scumbag. If he was just a sympathizer he was no more than an anti- American jerk.

Either way he obviously seems to have been a very poor judge of character,and certainly not as brilliant as some would have us believe.Being a great writer does not make one a great human being.

Read the proclamation he endorsed after the signing of the pact.

http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1939/08/0814-openletter.pdf

Bela Abzug is one of them. Once I learned about her stance I could never take her views seriously again.

50-year old old memory and the two men actually line up.

When I was a child of five in 1951, my parents were lefty labor organizers and activists. There were sometimes meetings, discussion groups, etc at the house. One week there was an expectant fuss about a ‘great man coming from New york to lead a discussion’. My parents seemed in awe.

On the night, I was put to bed upstairs as folks arrived, and among them a sharp but resonant voice like no other. I couldn’t resist it. I waddled downstairs in my pj’s, crawled through the chairs to his feet in the center of the circle and put my hands out. He pulled me onto his lap and there I stayed for the duration, laying sleepily against his moist, tobacco-fragrant tweed coat, breathing when he did, the voice, whose words I understood not at all, echoing in my own chest for more than an hour.

To this day, the aroma of that combination of tobacco and wool takes me instantly back to I. F. Stone’s lap; his phrasing, staccato fast-slow delivery, deep respect for people, aura of a very smart good man communicating from a place of love for humankind…

Fast-forward to March, 2006, Seattle.

The ROS show is broadcasting from Seattle because Chris Lydon is in town for an alternative radio conference. Although I am a newbie to ROS, the subject is ‘Cities’, my professional interst and Brendan calls me at the last minute with a ticket to the live show. I hurry over to the KUOW studio and on the street outside the door (in the University district of the city) I brush against a professor type whose clothes give off the telltale wool and tobacco aroma. Instantly I am hearing that deep, kind voice in my head.

Call it coincidence or conditioning, but there I was in the small KUOW sound studio when Chris Lydon started broadcasting and I sat electrified by the similarity to my memory of Stone. The phrasing, sharp emphasis, quick, compound thoughts, rat-a-rat then pause, the obvious humanity and passion to do good. The actual voices themselves.

Stone was New york-inflected, which Chris Lydon is not. But does anyone else share this observation? Can anyone direct me to audio archives of Stone? I’d love to try do make the comparison in real-time and see if the