Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Christopher Hitchens on I.F. Stone

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I.F. Stone was one of the truly great American journalists of the 20th century. He was resolutely independent, admitted his biases, but went where the documents, his instincts for the truth and the interviews took him. He refused to spend time at press conferences where people would lie to him, and did not read press releases so he could lazily reprint them. He did what few working journalists do today – he dug into the research and thought about things. Then he wrote about them. Over the years he embarrassed leaders, politicians and other journalists and got labeled a fellow-traveler for his efforts. He was fearless, honest, sometimes wrong, but mostly right.

Christopher Hitchens may be the perfect reviewer of Stones’ work and biography and he does a wonderful job of it in the current Vanity Fair. I have to believe that the good “fit” here of reviewer and subject is not accidental. Both are independent thinkers, wonderful writers, ideologically committed, and Hitchens could be talking about himself when he writes that “Izzy could be as interesting when he was ‘wrong’ as when he was ‘right'”. Which is to say that it is possible to read Hitchens when disagreeing with him and still feel to have been forced to think.

But more important is the value of the independent voice, the willingness to take on the establishment, the absolute commitment to personal integrity, and the unwillingness to suck up to power that Stone personified. Stone is often vilified by what Hitchens refers to as the “crackpot Ann Coulterish right, of his having been on the K.B. G. payroll”.

Hitchens’ response to that kind of crackpot, on-the-sleeve stupidity is that he “…once had the honor of being the I.F. Stone fellow at Berkeley (where [Stone’s] old typewriter is enclosed in a glass case: probably the most hagiography he could have stood), and [he]
told [his] students to read him and reread him to get an idea of the relationship between clean and muscular prose and moral and intellectual honesty.”

Hitchens’ piece is available on the Vanity Fair website.