A nice article on one of my favorite people: I.F. Stone

[LittleClarkie]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&s=navasky

I was looking for something else on the Nation site, but when I found this article, I thought I'd share it esp. with those of you who may not know who this is.

Posted July 2, 2003
I.F. Stone
by Victor Navasky

"When Izzy founded the weekly, with the help of a $3,000 loan from a friend and a 5,300-name subscription list inherited from the defunct PM and its successor progressive papers, also defunct, he was unemployed and some thought unemployable, including by The Nation. (Freda Kirchwey, The Nation's editor, who had fired him as Washington editor when he didn't notify her that he had signed on with PM to become the first journalist to travel with the Jewish underground to the Holy Land, was reluctant to re-employ him.)

But in short order, although he never attended presidential press conferences, cultivated no highly placed inside sources and declined to attend off-the-record briefings, time and again he scooped the most powerful press corps in the world.

His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?

And as he gleefully explained to a group of Swarthmore students in 1954 (I know, because I was one of them), if you didn't attend background briefings you weren't bound by the ground rules; you could debrief correspondents who did, check out what they had been told, and as often as not reveal the lies for what they were."

Before this quote, they innumerate all the things Izzy predicted, from the fall of the Soviet Union to being among the first to recognize how bogus the Tonkin Incident at the beginning of the Vietnam War.

This is my journalistic ideal. Someone who can document the hell out of what he's saying. Wish we had someone like this now to get at the truth.