The truth of I.F. Stone

It's a familiar story: After a 25-year career in newspapers that takes him from cub reporter to editorial writer to star columnist, an aging journalist is out of work. Twice in the last five years he's jumped ship from big-city newspapers that just couldn't sell enough advertising to stay afloat; each time he's managed to find a new paper, a new owner eager to publish his column. And though thousands of readers have loyally followed him from paper to paper, this time he knows his luck has run out. The country is in crisis, and a man of his age and skills and beliefs is never going to get another newspaper job.

And so, on a winter afternoon in 1952, I.F. Stone sits at his old desk on the third floor of a building at the corner of Hudson and Duane streets -- the same building that housed, in succession: PM, the New York Star and the Daily Compass -- and considers his prospects. He begins to type: "I feel for the moment like a ghost."

Yet Stone did not disappear. Instead, he reemerged as editor and publisher of I.F. Stone's Weekly, the longest-lived one-man American periodical since Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. The first issue came out in January 1953 with fewer than 5,000 subscribers, and it closed 19 years later with a circulation above 60,000, after galvanizing support for the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War and helping turn Stone from a pariah into a national institution.

Stone died 20 years ago this month. In researching and writing his biography, I placed his political commitments at the very center of his story. A lifetime spent aiding and abetting radical causes ensured Stone's status as a hate figure to the far right. (Recent charges that he spied for the Soviet Union, though based on the flimsiest of evidence and entirely without corroboration, are only the latest in a continuing effort to discredit his legacy.) To those who remember his lonely stands against Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon in the 1950s -- or against the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s -- he remains a hero.

But Stone's career also has some important lessons for anyone interested in the future of journalism. How did a 44-year-old man, who was almost completely deaf, reinvent himself as what many contemporary observers call the "first blogger"? What solace can today's out-of-work newsmen and women derive from Stone's example? And why does Norman Pearlstine, who as the former editor in chief of Time Inc. and former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal can hardly be described as a wild-eyed radical, say that "Stone is an inspiration to anyone who worries about the collapse of big newspapers with big budgets"?