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Jewish Values Drove
Journalist I.F. Stone

JAMES D. BESSER

Washington Correspondent

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I F. Stone died last week
at the age of 81, and
Washington will never be
the same.
Stone, whose idiosyncratic
I.F. Stone's Weekly set the
standard for hard-hitting in-
vestigative journalism for
almost two decades, was a
throwback to a day when jour-
nalists had a tough-minded
disregard for the opinions of
the high and mighty, a time
before the slick public rela-
tions specialists, ferocious
pressure groups and hyperac-
tive lawyers produced a strain
of timidity and deference in
the working press.
And Stone was a Jewish
journalist — not in an overt-
ly religious sense, and cer-
tainly not in any sense that
implied a blind devotion to
the policies of Israel's leaders.
"I've been a pious Jewish
atheist since my bar mitz-
vah," he told a writer for The
Progressive a few years ago.
"But I am pious, and at my
age, every day is a gift from
God."
His bedrock values as a
journalist — his distrust of
the glib promises and easy
answers of national leaders,
his dependence on the lessons
of history as tools for
understanding the present,
his disdain for intellectual
sloth — were thoroughly
Jewish. In interview after in-
terview, Stone referred to the
Jewish values that were the
foundation of his crusading
spirit, to the Jewish sen-
sibilities that gave him such
a visceral dislike of in-
tolerance and greed.
He was born Isador Feins-
tein Stone, the child of a Rus-
sian immigrant who settled
in Philadelphia; to the end of
his life, his friends and ad-
mirers called him Izzy. By the
late 1930s, he had become
editor and commentator at
The Nation, one of the
beacons of the progressive
movement. In the last few
years of his life, he continued
to produce incisive articles for
that publication.
He founded I.F. Stone's
Weekly in 1953, in the dark
days of Joe McCarthy's reign
of terror. At a time when
courageous journalism was at
ebb tide in Washington, Stone
provided an aggressive,
sometimes outrageous
counterpoint to the frighten-
ed conformity of the era.
He was an early Zionist, but
over the years, his instinctive

sympathy for the underdog
transformed that Zionism in-
to a more complex relation-
ship to the state of Israel
Just after World War II„
while working for a New York
newspaper, he spent time in
Palestine reporting on the
heroic efforts of the Jewish
Underground to carve out a
state. And he ran the British
blockade with refugees from
Hitler's Germany; the
resulting book, Underground
to Palestine, was once used by
the IDF in classes for Israeli
troops.
But with the establishment
of Israel and its successful ef-
forts at self-defense, Stone
became a persistent critic of
the Jerusalem government,
and especially of its treat-
ment of its Arab citizens and
Palestinian refugees. In his
later years, Stone advocated a
kind of bi-national state.
Stone regularly took stands
that ran contrary to the en-
thusiasms of the American
public. In 1963, he was one of

In interview after
interview, Stone
referred to the
Jewish values that
were the
foundation of his
crusading spirit, to
the Jewish
sensibilities

very few commentators to
take issue with President
Kennedy's handling of the
Cuban Missile Crisis — a
skepticism that seems more
and more justified, in light of
recent revelations.
He blasted liberal hero
Hubert Humphrey for accep-
ting the vice presidential
nomination under Lyndon
Johnson with this memorable
line: "Only an ebullient
idealist like Humphrey could
show such extremism in pur-
suit of moderation."
In the 1960s, Stone became
a kind of ideological father
figure to the New Left. He
participated in the 1965
teach-ins on the Vietnam war,
and throughout that
tumultuous period, he provid-
ed a kind of intellectual
backbone to a movement that
sometimes put passion ahead
of intellectual rigor.
His humor was always ex-
traordinarily biting, and clear
enough for even the densest
reader to understand. When
President Nixon caved-in to