I.F. Stone's (Bi) Weekly

For nearly twenty years, I.F. Stone has lived every journalist's dream. He was his own editor, publisher, and staff, and he printed the truth as he saw it. Unfettered by stockholders, managers, advertisers, or cautious deskmen, he has jousted with official Washington every week for nearly 1,000 weeks, and won far more often than he lost. This week he announced that he is closing down the paper because, at 64 "I can't be a five day bike racer any more."

It is no coincidence that Stone--of all the reporters who have idly imagined running their own papers--was the one reporter to carry out the dream. For he is one of the very few American journalists who have had the courage to cling to the truth when all the world denied it. And, because of this, he found himself marooned by the age of big business journalism, a man with something to say which no one would print but himself.

Stone had a long and distinguished career on the great liberal dailies of the '30's and '40's. He was an editorial writer with Walter Lippmann on The New York Post, a columnist for PM and The New York Daily Compass, and the author of a number of books, including one on the birth of Israel for which he entered the pipeline of illegal Jewish refugees seeking entrance to Palestine and was imprisoned in a British detention camp.

But Stone did not respond to the tuggings of the American cold war machine in the manner expected of a corporate journalist. He endorsed Henry Wallace in 1948, and during the Korean War he published a thoroughly documented book, The Hidden History of the Korean War, which exposed the lies and cynical maneuvers underlying American war policy. The book was considered unprintable by every major publisher in the United States and England, and was finally printed by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy as a Monthly Review book.

As a result of his defection, Stone found himself unprintable when The Compass folded in 1953. His colleagues had made their peace with the new American anti-communist line, compromised with McCarthyism and set about their job of ignoring the obvious and swallowing the spurious. There was no room in American journalism for a famous reporter who did not believe that truth changed with every committee hearing or State Department White Paper. Stone refused to be silenced: he took his $3500 severance pay and a Compass subscription list and set about creating a one-man weekly, with his wife, Esther, as his business staff.

The weekly never lost money. It began with 5000 subscribers. By 1968 there were 38,000, and the last issue (it is now a bi-weekly) later this month will be mailed to nearly 70,000 subscribers.

I.F. Stone's Weekly succeeded because it told the truth with irreverence and biting wit, because it never took its eye off the truth because of a new policy or a new leader, and most of all because it reflected Stone's own gentle, optimistic belief in the American Constitution and the American people. Throughout the repressive ness of the Fifties, the slick doublethink of the New Frontier, the genocidal madness in Indochina and the ghetto, Stone has never ceased to point out that the American spirit did not demand war and orthodoxy, and has never despaired that freedom and justice are possible.

It is difficult for a journalist to write about I.F. Stone with grace. The liberal dailies will praise the Weekly now for printing the truths they will refuse to see, while those reporters who have rebelled against the mind control of the corporate press see him as their father figure, perhaps the only American reporter who passed through the Fifties with his intelligence and honesty intact.

Stone will continue to write as a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books, and he has mentioned the possibility of writing another book of history. Honest reporters and lovers of truth can only do him honor and mourn his Weekly.