American Radical

March 23, 2009
At his death, reporter and amateur classicist I.F. Stone was hailed as an “iconoclast of journalism,” “a dogged investigator and a concise and clever writer,” “an American institution” and “a journalist’s journalist.” At the same time, he was called wrongheaded and accused of being a KGB agent. In this sometimes workmanlike but often animated biography, Guttenplan (The Holocaust on Trial
) provides a lively portrait of a journalist who was as passionate about radical politics and getting a story right as he was about ballroom dancing. Drawing on interviews with Stone’s family and friends, the complete archive of Stone’s writings—including fragments of letters—and two previous biographies of Stone, Guttenplan traces his subject’s life and career from Stone’s early upbringing as Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia and his days as a college dropout to his birth as one of America’s premier journalists in the pages of the Nation
, PM
and eventually his own I.F. Stone’s Weekly
. A brilliant gadfly and independent thinker, Stone was at once cozy with New Deal politicians and union leaders. He reported undercover from Palestine as he accompanied Holocaust survivors through a British blockade and became a hero of America’s Jews. Guttenplan’s lively biography brings back to life a man whose work has often been forgotten but whose writing and life provide a model for the kind of freethinking journalism missing in society today.

Starred review from April 1, 2009
The astonishingly assiduous professional life of I.F. Stone (1907–89), who covered stories from the Sacco and Vanzetti trials to the Iran-Contra affair and became an icon to investigative journalists.

Born Isadore Feinstein in Philadelphia to a shopkeeper father,"Izzy" Stone came early to his profession, publishing a little newspaper as a youth. He never stopped writing. The Nation London correspondent Guttenplan (The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice, and the David Irving Libel Case, 2001) begins on Dec. 12, 1949, when Stone appeared on Meet the Press as the Red Scare was about to explode. After debating the merits of national health insurance with Dr. Morris Fishbein, he didn't appear on television again for decades. Stone's radical positions in the McCarthy era ended one phase of his career—working for established journals—and began another: self-publishing I.F. Stone's Weekly, which endured—and sometimes thrived, especially during Vietnam—for nearly 20 years. As much social and cultural history as biography—Guttenplan offers little about Stone's personal life—the narrative serves as a textbook for those not alive during the Stone ages. The Depression, American Communism, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the civil-rights movement, the Vietnam War, Israel and the Middle East, assassinations and political corruption and cultural characters of all sorts—these are all critical to an understanding of Stone's life and work. Guttenplan, who began the book in 1990, makes certain that readers know what and who they are before he proceeds. Though largely admiring of Stone—praise occasionally supersedes analysis—the author reveals that Stone was a tough man to work for; no employee, except his wife, lasted long. His loyalties to fact and the truth trumped just about everything else, friendship included.

Prodigious research and a grateful heart inform this essential biography of an irreplaceable journalist.

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