Some Tributes Are Worth Repeating

Originally published in the New York Times on June 20, 1989.

I.F. Stone, a Journalist’s Journalist

Sad as it is, the passing of I. F. Stone is a welcome reminder of how much impact a single irrepressible journalist can have, and it’s especially relevant now, with the future of Time Inc.’s magazines in the grip of Wall Street money churners.

In fact, Time Inc.’s founder Henry Luce and Izzy Stone shared one major accomplishment: They were both successful journalistic entrepreneurs. While they differed sharply in political perspectives, they each chose to pursue journalism in a forum of his own making.

It was in the early 50’s that Izzy, out of work and scorned by Red-baiters, started I. F. Stone’s Weekly, making use of a small nest egg and second-class mailing privileges. He regarded cheap postage as Jeffersonian principle that not even Joe McCarthy could undermine.

Overhead was low. Izzy’s wife Esther was in charge of circulation. Her long-term confidence in the venture was expressed in the motto she posted over her desk on the porch where she worked: ‘’Good news is on the way.’’ The weekly cost $5 a year and had a few thousand subscribers, fans of Izzy’s from his years as Washington correspondent for The Nation and defunct New York newspapers like P.M. and The Compass.

From the beginning, subscribers were a devoted and distinguished group: Albert Einstein’s $5 check was framed instead of cashed; there was a wonderful photograph of U.N. Secretary General U Thant poring over the weekly on a plane somewhere. Marilyn Monroe bought subscriptions for every member of Congress.

After a decade or so, circulation had risen to about 30,000, but because so many of the readers were political activists, journalists and academics, its influence was greater than its numbers suggest. Then came the civil rights revolution and Vietnam. Izzy’s particular passion for the rights of black people and against the war found a responsive chord among America’s young.

By the late 60’s, the circulation was over 70,000. The price was still $5 a year, but revenues were now sufficient for Izzy to claim proudly that he had become a small businessman of consequence, an irony he savored as a life-long socialist. He and Esther took to crossing the Atlantic each summer on the Queen Elizabeth II.

Izzy was at the height of his powers, as a writer, as a speaker, as an inspirer of the antiwar and civil rights movement. At about the same time, he had an innovative operation on his ears that restored his hearing after years of being virtually deaf. With his bottle-thick glasses and a set of old fashioned hearing aids-cum-antennas, Izzy looked a little like an extraterrestrial visitor as he worked the halls of Washington.

By 1972, his health made it hard to put out the weekly and he looked for a successor. But it was clear that no one else could combine his rhetorical style with his investigative and intellectual tenacity, and so the weekly ceased.

But Izzy continued writing: an outpouring of articles for The New York Review of Books, The Nation and newspapers. Perhaps the greatest satisfaction of his later years was his triumph as a best-selling author.

Izzy began studying ancient Greek and talking about a book on Socrates, but his eyesight was failing because of cataracts. Finally, he bought a Macintosh computer. Esther pasted big letters on the keyboard and Izzy dashed off the draft of the ‘’Trials of Socrates’’ in about nine months. The book spent many weeks on the best seller lists and was a best seller again this spring in paperback.

Izzy was thrilled on many levels. He was proud of his work of scholarship. He was delighted to be feted (Izzy always loved a good party) and, ever the entrepreneur, he was pleased once again to be doing well by doing good.

A few months ago, Izzy had an operation to remove the cataracts, which, like the hearing operation, renewed his vigor. Characteristically, his last major articles, in The New York Review of Books, were critical of Mikhail Gorbachev for his hypocrisy on human rights. Izzy was never one to go with the crowd.

Twenty-four years ago, when I worked for him, Izzy told me cheerfully how he expected his career to unfold. He had started as an outcast, he said, had gone on long enough to be tolerated and, if he lasted to old age, he thought he might become an institution.

Izzy did better than that. He became a symbol of what the First Amendment is all about.

Peter Osnos was I. F. Stone’s editorial assistant from 1965 to 1966.