Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009
The True Story of Izzy
By Jonathan Mirsky
American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone
by D.D. Guttenplan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 570 pp., $35.00
In the dark McCarthy years I.F. Stone said, 'Well, I may be just a Red Jew son-of-a-bitch to them, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive.' Stone remains one of the most famous, effective, and witty American muckrakers, a label he considered both a compliment and a restraint. He obtained scoops any one of which would secure the reputation of an ordinary reporter for life. In his early days as a reporter in New York he revealed that the police regarded Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia as a Red. The police commissioner soon resigned. Decades later, when he became a nationally admired and feared adversary of the Washington establishment, he proved, for example, that the government was lying when it claimed underground nuclear tests could not be sensed from far away. Later, he established that the alleged attacks on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, which allowed Lyndon Johnson to bomb North Vietnam, were either insignificant or nonexistent, and in any event seemed to be a response to American provocation.
Review, 3934 words
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