'American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone' by D.D. Guttenplan

He loved burlesque, ballroom dancing and "a good brawl." So confessed modern America's loneliest and best maverick investigative reporter, I.F. ("Izzy") Stone. For several decades, especially during the McCarthy nightmare, Stone was almost alone in taking on the Washington establishment. From the loyalty purges to Vietnam and beyond, he revered "the power of a fact," even when it sometimes contradicted his own long-cherished beliefs. (On Castro's Cuba and Stalin's Russia, he reserved the right to modify his early enthusiasm.)

According to his latest biographer, D.D. Guttenplan, Stone -- who would rather be accused of inconsistency than pussyfooting as a reporter -- was an egoistic prima donna, hell to work for (one assistant had to seek therapy), sometime party liner, hard-bitten newsman, fellow traveler, libertarian socialist, passionate New Dealer, traumatized anti-fascist and ambivalent Zionist. He was a mass of contradictions and all the better for it.

Indeed, he was a most unlikely hero to young journalists like myself during the "Haunted Fifties" (the title of one of his books) when most journalists -- and most mainstream liberals -- chickened out. He was short, chubby, stared out from Coke-bottle glasses and was so deaf he had to use a primitive two-piece microphone-and-battery hearing aid, which sometimes he furtively clamped against the door of a congressional hearing from which he'd been (typically) excluded for asking snooping questions. He had the soul of a dogged police reporter.

Stone's glory days coincided with, and were triggered by, the 1945 death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Suddenly liberal New Dealers like Stone found themselves out of favor and under suspicion. In swift succession, left-wing unions, the more outspoken liberal organizations, Communists and their allies and the "caring" professionals like teachers and social workers came under the hammer.

None of the Red-hunting governmental committees could have functioned without the able assistance and scurrilous files of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. While Stone called the Truman years "the era of the moocher," he hated only the top G-man for whom he had a fear that "ran through him like an electric current. Because Izzy knew what Hoover could do." After Stone publicly expressed his contempt, an enraged Hoover repaid the compliment with a "massive undercover operation," tapping his phone, sifting his garbage, opening his mail, shadowing his every footstep -- targeting Stone not only as a noisy and nosy troublemaker but also as a Russian spy code-named "BLIN." Even today Stone remains "a hate figure for the American right," which periodically resurrects the fairy tale that he was a Soviet agent. Usually this smear is based on a purported KGB agent's report to Moscow of his wartime lunch, or lunches, with Stone, sometimes at Harvey's restaurant in Washington, D.C. -- a curious choice since it was also frequented by Hoover.