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The Best of I.F. Stone
Izzy Stone was a reporter, a radical, an idealist, a scholar and, it is clear, a writer whose insights have more than stood the test of time. More than fifteen years after his death, this collection of his work from I.F. Stone's Weekly and elsewhere is astonishing in its relevance to our age, addressing the clash between national security and individual liberty, the protection of minorities, economic fairness, social justice, and the American military abroad. The core of Stone's genius was his newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly, published from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. His meticulous dissection of the news was unsurpassed, a direct descendent of the great pamphleteers like Thomas Paine, and a forerunner to the best of today's political blogs. Stone's brilliant, investigative reporting; his wonderful, impassioned style; and his commitment to his values all make this collection an inspiration, and a revelation.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 25, 1973
26 people are currently reading
235 people want to read
About the author
I.F. Stone
34 books53 followersIsidor Feinstein Stone (better known as I.F. Stone or Izzy Stone) was an American investigative journalist.
He is best remembered for his self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly, which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century."
He is best remembered for his self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly, which was ranked 16th in a poll of his fellow journalists of "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century."
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 14, 2014
Research for a paper in my "Hero in American History" course, spring semester 1990.
August 10, 2020
Stone, I. F. The Best of I. F. Stone. Edited by Karl Weber. Introduction by Peter Osnos. Public Affairs, 2006.
The recent death of Pete Hamill got me to thinking about some of my other twentieth-century journalism heroes. Izzy Stone is high on the list. From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam, from McCarthy to Nixon, he did the kind of open-source investigative journalism that few reporters these days have the time or energy to pursue. His small-circulation weekly newspaper was read by everyone on Capitol Hill because he attended the dull committee meetings, read the reports, and delved into the seldom-read pages of the Congressional Record. He was a leftist at a time when leftists were called before Congress for public pillorying. He was a Zionist who defended the right of Nazis to speak. He was a friend of Robert Kennedy who was not afraid to charge him with equivocation on Vietnam. Finally, when he closed I. F. Stone’s Weekly, he spent his retirement getting a doctorate in classical literature and writing scholarly books on Socrates and Athenian Democracy. This well-edited and introduced anthology of his journalism will give you some idea of the clarity of his mind. Recommended.
The recent death of Pete Hamill got me to thinking about some of my other twentieth-century journalism heroes. Izzy Stone is high on the list. From Pearl Harbor to Vietnam, from McCarthy to Nixon, he did the kind of open-source investigative journalism that few reporters these days have the time or energy to pursue. His small-circulation weekly newspaper was read by everyone on Capitol Hill because he attended the dull committee meetings, read the reports, and delved into the seldom-read pages of the Congressional Record. He was a leftist at a time when leftists were called before Congress for public pillorying. He was a Zionist who defended the right of Nazis to speak. He was a friend of Robert Kennedy who was not afraid to charge him with equivocation on Vietnam. Finally, when he closed I. F. Stone’s Weekly, he spent his retirement getting a doctorate in classical literature and writing scholarly books on Socrates and Athenian Democracy. This well-edited and introduced anthology of his journalism will give you some idea of the clarity of his mind. Recommended.
November 28, 2009
Anyone who wants to know about questioning authority in the political arena should read this book. The author selects Stone's writings from various historical periods including World War II, the McCarthy era and Vietnam. Stone was deaf most of his life and relied on meticulous research of original government documents to question the veracity of official government policy. Stone was never accepted by the mainstream media but his own publication provides an important legacy to this important radical.
November 13, 2024
THE BEST OF I. F. STONE delivers precisely what that title indicates: a selection of terse, highly individual essays that define and distinguish this icon of progressive journalism who edited and published the I. F. Stone Weekly, a four-page newsletter, from 1953 through 1971.
Here’s the opening of “The First Welts of Joe McCarthy,” (March 16, 1954): “Buds are beginning to appear on the forsythia, and welts on Joe McCarthy. The early arrival of spring and a series of humiliations for our would be Fuhrer have made this a most pleasant week in
the capital.“
In “The Shake-Up We Need” (December 27, 1941), written within three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and considering mobilization of American war production: “No official here will admit it, and few in private, but what this country needs is more interference with private enterprise.” Needless to say, Stone was never dependent upon advertisers and felt that the mainstream press was more or less at their mercy.
It was natural for someone as forthright as Stone to take issue with inflated Washington rhetoric, which was particularly annoying when coming from someone as essentially hayseed as Harry Truman. Here is Stone commenting on a speech Truman delivered at a United Nations conference in San Francisco in “The Same Old Codgers,” (May 5, 1945):
” ‘None of us doubt,’ Mr. Truman said, ‘that with divine guidance, friendly cooperation, and hard work, we shall find an adequate answer to the problem history has put before us.’ Mr. Truman would never talk that way to a visitor in private. Why does he in a speech? The statement is not true; some of the wisest of the delegates here certainly do doubt we shall find the ‘answer to the problem history has put before us.’ The rhetoric is false, the effect is hollow; it is hooey. In private Mr. Truman would say, ‘It’s a tough job. I’m not sure we can do it. But we’re going to try our best.’ Why not say that in public? That kind of plain talk inspires confidence. The tawdry and flatulent rhetoric which marked most of the speeches depressed me . The occasion was so momentous; the danger so grave; the utterance so mediocre.”
When the government would release new documents and hold press conferences or issue press releases to explain them, Stone was noted for setting the government feed aside and asking to see the original documents themselves, reading them carefully, and then breaking stories that escaped the mainstream press. He was also noted for asking why in a free and democratic society such an astonishing amount pf government information should be classified and secret. Why should it later be revealed that the U.S. was secretly militarily involved in Indochina as early as 1954? (Like most Americans of my generation, I became aware of Vietnam in the 1960s, although my country was already up to no good there when I was 12 and called upon to pledge allegiance to a flag at start of school each morning.)
Stone is trenchant and prescient in his observations about issues such as racial relations and nuclear proliferation. A section of essays tracking the formation of the Jewish state and the resultant Arab-Israeli conflict is particularly engaging and illuminating. In “Holy War” (August 3, 1967), Stone writes: “If God as some say is now dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.”
Stone was of course not favored by the powers that be. Imagine irascible President Johnson encountering even the title of Stone’s June 9, 1965 article: “Lyndon Johnson Lets the Office Boy Declare War.”
Later during the U. S. misadventure in Vietnam, Stone wrote in “The Mindless Momentum of a Runaway Military Machine” (June 2, 1969): “The central thesis of General Westmoreland’s debut on the home front is the oldest alibi of frustrated generals — they could have won the war if it hadn’t been for those unpatriotic civilians back home. This was how the kaiser’s ex-generals consoled themselves over their beers after World War I, and this was the soothing syrup the French generals spooned up after Dienbenphu. But the former lost the war despite all their monocled splendor because they invited exactly what they had always told themselves they ought to avoid — a war on two fronts, against France and Russia at the same time. The latter lost because their perpetual talk of how they were really winning, when year after year they were losing the finest cadres of the French officer class in the Indochina morass, finally made the French people realize their generals were first-class liars and their dirty little colonial war not worth the cost. Both cases provide obvious parallels to our own predicament, headed as we are for that major war on the Asian mainland we were always told to avoid, and led by generals who have claimed to be winning ever since 1961, and stil claim it, though, as Westmoreland also adds, they see no end in sight! We wonder what kind of logic they teach at West Point.”
Bill Moyers has said of Stone: “For years he was America’s premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I. F. Stone’s Weekly the government’s lies and contradictions culled from the government’s own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: ‘I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.’”
In addition to being equally fun for a reader, this book is an enlightening trip through a stretch of history. It is also, at this bleak moment in the story of our country, a reminder that follies and disasters come and go, that nothing is frozen or final, and that in the long run it remains true that our surest hope is in the questioning mind, the voice of reason, and the persistence of compassionate concern.
Here’s the opening of “The First Welts of Joe McCarthy,” (March 16, 1954): “Buds are beginning to appear on the forsythia, and welts on Joe McCarthy. The early arrival of spring and a series of humiliations for our would be Fuhrer have made this a most pleasant week in
the capital.“
In “The Shake-Up We Need” (December 27, 1941), written within three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and considering mobilization of American war production: “No official here will admit it, and few in private, but what this country needs is more interference with private enterprise.” Needless to say, Stone was never dependent upon advertisers and felt that the mainstream press was more or less at their mercy.
It was natural for someone as forthright as Stone to take issue with inflated Washington rhetoric, which was particularly annoying when coming from someone as essentially hayseed as Harry Truman. Here is Stone commenting on a speech Truman delivered at a United Nations conference in San Francisco in “The Same Old Codgers,” (May 5, 1945):
” ‘None of us doubt,’ Mr. Truman said, ‘that with divine guidance, friendly cooperation, and hard work, we shall find an adequate answer to the problem history has put before us.’ Mr. Truman would never talk that way to a visitor in private. Why does he in a speech? The statement is not true; some of the wisest of the delegates here certainly do doubt we shall find the ‘answer to the problem history has put before us.’ The rhetoric is false, the effect is hollow; it is hooey. In private Mr. Truman would say, ‘It’s a tough job. I’m not sure we can do it. But we’re going to try our best.’ Why not say that in public? That kind of plain talk inspires confidence. The tawdry and flatulent rhetoric which marked most of the speeches depressed me . The occasion was so momentous; the danger so grave; the utterance so mediocre.”
When the government would release new documents and hold press conferences or issue press releases to explain them, Stone was noted for setting the government feed aside and asking to see the original documents themselves, reading them carefully, and then breaking stories that escaped the mainstream press. He was also noted for asking why in a free and democratic society such an astonishing amount pf government information should be classified and secret. Why should it later be revealed that the U.S. was secretly militarily involved in Indochina as early as 1954? (Like most Americans of my generation, I became aware of Vietnam in the 1960s, although my country was already up to no good there when I was 12 and called upon to pledge allegiance to a flag at start of school each morning.)
Stone is trenchant and prescient in his observations about issues such as racial relations and nuclear proliferation. A section of essays tracking the formation of the Jewish state and the resultant Arab-Israeli conflict is particularly engaging and illuminating. In “Holy War” (August 3, 1967), Stone writes: “If God as some say is now dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem.”
Stone was of course not favored by the powers that be. Imagine irascible President Johnson encountering even the title of Stone’s June 9, 1965 article: “Lyndon Johnson Lets the Office Boy Declare War.”
Later during the U. S. misadventure in Vietnam, Stone wrote in “The Mindless Momentum of a Runaway Military Machine” (June 2, 1969): “The central thesis of General Westmoreland’s debut on the home front is the oldest alibi of frustrated generals — they could have won the war if it hadn’t been for those unpatriotic civilians back home. This was how the kaiser’s ex-generals consoled themselves over their beers after World War I, and this was the soothing syrup the French generals spooned up after Dienbenphu. But the former lost the war despite all their monocled splendor because they invited exactly what they had always told themselves they ought to avoid — a war on two fronts, against France and Russia at the same time. The latter lost because their perpetual talk of how they were really winning, when year after year they were losing the finest cadres of the French officer class in the Indochina morass, finally made the French people realize their generals were first-class liars and their dirty little colonial war not worth the cost. Both cases provide obvious parallels to our own predicament, headed as we are for that major war on the Asian mainland we were always told to avoid, and led by generals who have claimed to be winning ever since 1961, and stil claim it, though, as Westmoreland also adds, they see no end in sight! We wonder what kind of logic they teach at West Point.”
Bill Moyers has said of Stone: “For years he was America’s premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I. F. Stone’s Weekly the government’s lies and contradictions culled from the government’s own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: ‘I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.’”
In addition to being equally fun for a reader, this book is an enlightening trip through a stretch of history. It is also, at this bleak moment in the story of our country, a reminder that follies and disasters come and go, that nothing is frozen or final, and that in the long run it remains true that our surest hope is in the questioning mind, the voice of reason, and the persistence of compassionate concern.
August 12, 2019
This seems like a good way to get your feet wet with I. F. Stone, and then if you're interested in his coverage of a particular historical period, you could check out A Nonconformist History of Our Times. Not having more than a high-school background in American history, I had to look up a fair amount as I read, which I didn't mind. It's hard to come out on the other side of this not having enormous respect for Stone as a journalist. The read is worth it for his piece on Barry Goldwater alone ("Barry Goldwater and His Tribe," 1964). So many parallels with today's far right. Oh, and this book is available for free online via http://www.ifstone.org/index.php.
March 4, 2025
I read this text with the intention of learning more about “good journalism”, but definitely came away with a better understanding of how world events/U.S politics were perceived as they unfolded. I loved how Stone weaves history into breaking news and manages to contextualize big events. I also appreciate how many primary government documents he uses to come to his own conclusions. Such a good book that I will go back and reference again and again to consider how to frame news and tactics for seeing the bigger picture.
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May 11, 2023I definitely need more perspectives from this period of history. A lot of his criticisms are poignant and sharp! Especially the sections on anti semitism and Israeli politics. I really loved the frank and clear way he discussed issues of war, and how different institutions were failing!
March 25, 2023
I.F. Stone’s Weekly will be one of my important primary sources for my masters thesis, so it was nice to get this sort of overview of his style.
January 16, 2017
A collection of the works of I.F. Stone, a journalist who was influential, liberal and independent. We certainly could use more voices like his today. As much as anything else, I was struck in these pieces by how intelligent and learned Stone was, something that is sorely missing in our political dialogue today. For someone who had strong beliefs, he presented them without the shrillness, and with a commitment to fact, that is unfortunately hard to come by in our own era.
One insightful thought, from one of the collection's essays:
"Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line. Those who set out nobly to be their brother's keeper sometimes up becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie. But these perspectives, which seem so irrefutably clear from a pillar in the desert, are worthless to those enmeshed in the crowded struggle. They are no better than mystical nonsense to the humane student who has to face his draft board, the dissident soldier who is determined not to fight, the black who sees his people doomed by shackles stronger than slavery to racial humiliation and decay. The business of the moment is to end the war, to break the growing dominance of the military in our society, to liberate the blacks, the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican and the Indian from injustice. This is the business of our best youth. However confused and chaotic, their unwillingness to submit any longer is our one hope.
"There is a wonderful story of a delegation which came here to see Franklin D. Roosevelt on some reform or other. When they were finished, the President said, 'Okay, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me.' Every thoughtful official knows how hard it is to get anything done if someone isn't making it uncomfortable not to."
One insightful thought, from one of the collection's essays:
"Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line. Those who set out nobly to be their brother's keeper sometimes up becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie. But these perspectives, which seem so irrefutably clear from a pillar in the desert, are worthless to those enmeshed in the crowded struggle. They are no better than mystical nonsense to the humane student who has to face his draft board, the dissident soldier who is determined not to fight, the black who sees his people doomed by shackles stronger than slavery to racial humiliation and decay. The business of the moment is to end the war, to break the growing dominance of the military in our society, to liberate the blacks, the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican and the Indian from injustice. This is the business of our best youth. However confused and chaotic, their unwillingness to submit any longer is our one hope.
"There is a wonderful story of a delegation which came here to see Franklin D. Roosevelt on some reform or other. When they were finished, the President said, 'Okay, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me.' Every thoughtful official knows how hard it is to get anything done if someone isn't making it uncomfortable not to."
July 27, 2019
As an independent investigative journalist in the US, Izzy Stone was not held to political pressures of the day. Considering this collection of writings originated in the period 1946-1973, he shows considerable insight into the ongoing issues in the international politics of the day and shows fascinating insights into how these issues have continued into the new millennium.
March 26, 2016
"To be human is to be guilty."
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews