I.F. Stone

pp. 79-106

in: Chris Nash, What is journalism?, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

The chapter gives an overview of Stone's career leading to his isolation in the McCarthyist period of the 1950s and the launching of his independent newsletter I.F. Stone"s Weekly. It discusses in detail the relevant content of two books: The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950–1951 (1952) and The Trial of Socrates (1988). The arguments in both books are very precisely related to documented facts and events from highly reputable sources, the processes that are generating those facts on the ground, and the relationships that are driving the processes. In Korea, it identifies Stone's analysis that the USA in 1951 had demonstrably lost its secure capacity to deliver an atomic weapon using bomber aircraft as the argument and revelation that were profoundly threatening to US political and military elites, and which led to twenty-eight publishers rejecting the book before it was finally accepted by one small publisher. Stone continued a successful journalistic career as an independent publisher and public intellectual through the social unrest and anti-war agitation of the 1960s and 1970s. Socrates is presented as a valedictorian exploration by Stone of the philosophical arguments for freedom of speech, and it deploys the same journalistic method of document analysis that he used in Korea. It is a very detailed account of the philosophical issues in the trial and verdict, placed in their socio-political context. Stone is not sympathetic to Socrates' philosophy or actions in the trial, but condemns the verdict and death sentence. The chapter considers the evaluations by scholars of Stone's arguments in both books and notes that these books were condemned by political opponents of his views at the time they were published but endorsed by subsequent scholarship.