Comments on I. F. Stone
Raymond Marcus,
July 1995
(From ADDENDUM B: Addendum to the HSCA, THE ZAPRUDER FILM, and the SINGLE BULLET
THEORY)
I.F. Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in 1907 in
Philadelphia to Jewish immigrant parents from Russia. Raised in New Jersey, he
started his journalistic career at age fourteen with a liberal neighborhood
monthly. While attending University of Pennsylvania he worked full-time for the
Philadelphia Inquirer editing and rewriting articles. He then write editorials
for the New York Post, was an associate and then Washington editor for The
Nation, and then worked for P.M., the New York Star, and the New York Daily
Compass. After the successive collapse of these three New York liberal dailies,
Stone launched his newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, with 5,300 subscribers in
1953, which he produced at his home in Washington, D. C. with the assistance of
his wife, Esther (circulation eventually reached 70.000).
Although Stone’s most important work was done in
Washington, he was not part of the political/journalistic establishment, and he
had no wish to be so. Instead of cozying up to important insiders, he based his
work primarily on the study of newspapers and documents, employing his
exceptionally keen and probing intellect to slice through the fog of official
positions on national and international affairs so as to expose the underlying
truth to his readers with characteristic brevity and clarity.
Stone was an independent leftist. Although it is probably
true that in the earlier years of the Cold War he sometimes tended to minimize
Moscow’s misdeeds while maximizing Washington’s, and that he was certainly
wrong in concluding his 1953 book The Hidden History of the Korean War
that South Korea and the U.S. were the aggressors, he was no friend of Communist
dictators. He bitterly denounced the Soviet bloc after his trip to the Soviet
Union in 1956, and wrote, “The worker is more exploited than in Western
welfare states. This is not a good society, and it is not led by honest men.”
I was a charter subscriber to the Weekly. Having earlier
subscribed to George Seldes’ “In Fact,” I found Stone’s newsletter a
worthy successor and looked forward to each issue. The Weekly undoubtedly
reached a readership for more influential than its small circulation would
indicate.
In the months following the assassination I eagerly awaited
Stone’s critical analysis. With his long demonstrated ability to demolish
official falsehoods, I had little reason to doubt he would make mincemeat of the
just released Warren Report; whose no-conspiracy conclusions had been leaked to
the press and public for many months, and whose questionable veracity in many
crucial instances had already been amply demonstrated.
Then came I. F. Stone’s Weekly of October 5, 1964, headed
“The Left and the Warren Report.” It was a paean of praise for the Warren
Commission and its conclusions. He chastised the Left on whose behalf, and for
sane policies, he said he had been fighting all his adult life, accusing it of
the same kind of slander, character assassination, guilt by association, an
demonology of which it had frequently been the victim in the past. He praised
the Report for criticizing the Secret Service and FBI by saying “There was
insufficient liaison…between the Secret Service and the other Federal
agencies…” He attempted to defuse the few items he mentioned questioning the
official version by highlighting them in boxes “refuted” by his quotes from
the “Speculation and Rumors” section of the Warren Report. He said,
“…the Commission has done a first-rate job, on the level that does our
country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event.” He regarded the case
against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer as “conclusive.”
Of the Commission members he indicated they were all
honorable men. Of Cong. Gerald Ford, “He denies any association with the FBI,
and there is no evidence of any such link” (later it was shown beyond question
that Ford was reporting regularly to the FBI about proceedings of secret
Commission meetings). He said Senator John Sherman Cooper had made a principled
speech against the Anti-Communist Act passed in 1954. He said he knew John J.
McCloy during the war as an unusually competent public servant. He said he had
“…criticized Allen W. Dulles constantly over the years. But I would not
impute to him or any other member of the Commission conduct so evil as to
conspire with the secret services to protect the killers of a President.” And
finally, of Warren himself. he said, “This is also to assume that Chief
Justice Earl Warren, whom the right hates for his decisions protecting the
Negroes and radicals, would be a party to a conspiracy to protect a cabal of
rightist assassins.” He said those who, by rejecting the official conclusions
could believe otherwise, “…belong in the booby hatch.”
What was totally lacking in I.F. Stone’s comments was any
evidence of the kind of critical analysis he normally employed in assessing
official statements. The Warren Report was made public just a few days prior to
his October 5th issue . It is extremely doubtful that Stone had time
to do more than glance through it. The Volumes were not even published until
almost two months later. It was obvious that I.F. Stone, for whatever reason and
completely contrary to his usual working methods, had accepted official handouts
and published them uncritically. I was shocked, dismayed, and angered. I wrote a
lengthy letter to Stone listing fifteen highly improbably separate sets of
circumstances surrounding the case, all of which would nevertheless have
to be true for the official conclusions to be true. I urged him to study the
questions and reconsider his position. I received no response to my letter.
In September 1966, I was planning a trip to the east coast
to meet in person with other critics with whom I had been corresponding. I also
planned to visit the National Archives in Washington to view the Zapruder film.
From L.A. I phoned Stone at his home in Washington. I told
him I had previously written to him about his position on the case, and
requested a meeting with him so that I could present to him some important
evidence, primarily photographic, during my trip. His answer was immediate, loud
(very loud), and clear: “I DON’T CARE ABOUT THAT ASSHOLE CASE!,” he
bellowed, and then hung up. The thought occurred to me that had he written in
his Weekly, instead of the actual contents of his October 5, ’64 issue, that
he didn’t care about the case (with or without the expletive deleted), it would
at least have had the virtue of being honest, and incapable of misleading his
readers; despite being an uncharacteristic position for I.F. Stone to take on so
vital a matter of national interest.
Three years later, in his March 24, ’69 issue, Stone
expressed his belief that the killing of Martin Luther King was the result of a
conspiracy. He said, “J. Edgar Hoover, who hated and once insulted King,
should be challenged to explain on what basis he announced within 24 hours of
the killing that there was no conspiracy. How could he possibly have known so
quickly?” He called for pressure on the White House for a complete
investigation “…independent of the FBI and its chief,” adding that “The
only virtue of the Memphis deal (Attorney Percy Foreman’s arrangement in which
he persuaded James Earl Ray to plead guilty, ostensibly in order to avoid the
death penalty) was that it keeps Ray alive someday to tell the full story.”
I again wrote to Stone, and suggested that Hoover (and
Attorney General Ramsey Clark) “knew” within 24 hours that there was no
conspiracy just as the federal establishment “knew” within 5 hours
following JFK’s murder that a number of prominent individuals, including
Walter Lippman and Harrison Salisbury, had changed their original views and were
now calling for a compete new investigation (although very little media
attention had been paid to their new position). Again Stone did not deign to
respond.
The public record of public individuals, for reason of
fairness and historical accuracy, should be judged in their entirely, weighing
both their positive and negative contributions.
I.F. Stone was typically a fearless tribune for truth; a
tireless fighter for civil rights and civil liberties; a consistent advocate for
racial justice; a strong and principled opponent of the McCarthyites and other
enemies of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms; a clear and constant voice
against our military involvement in Vietnam, first under Eisenhower and Kennedy,
and then during the escalating madness perpetrated by Lyndon Johnson. For all
this he deserves to be remembered with honor, for it is the major part of his
legacy.
But I.F. Stone, for whatever reason or reasons, willingly
chose to endorse uncritically the Warren Report, and to excoriate and denigrate
those of his fellow citizens, including those of his own readers, who chose
instead to subject the Warren Commission’s findings to critical analysis and
to draw reasonable conclusions, i.e., to treat this important official
pronouncement as I.F. Stone himself normally treated such pronouncement. Buy so
doing he lend his name, prestige, and considerable influence to the most
monumentally fraudulent document ever foisted on the American public by its
government. That also is and will remain a n important part of his legacy.
Back
to Split in the Left
Back
to Reactions to the WC Report
Back to the WC Period