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His Leftist Hope Sprang Eternal
| Article
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10784 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
3,787 Words |
| Author
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Reed Irvine
Reed Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in Media and is a
columnist for the Washington Times. He is the author of Media
Mischief and Misdeeds and coauthor of Profiles of Deception. |
IZZY
A Biography OF I.F. Stone
Robert C. Cottrell
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992
388 pp., $25.95
How do you write an adulatory biography about a man who, while professing to love liberty, allied himself with some of the world's worst totalitarian tyrants? How do you make an icon of a journalist who, while professing dedication to digging out and publishing the truth, served as a propagandist and disinformation agent for regimes and movements built on lies? How do you explain why a journalist who was wrong about so many of the great issues and events that he wrote about has been more honored by his colleagues than journalists who were consistently right?
You do what Prof. Robert C.Cottrell has done in Izzy, the biography of I.F. Stone. You explain that his errors of judgment were motivated by the best of intentions. You dwell on his "integrity" and "independence." You cite his defense of unfettered speech for the totalitarian Left to prove that he was a disciple of Thomas Jefferson. You claim as a virtue his refusal to abandon his faith in socialism despite his disappointment with certain socialist dictatorships. You acclaim his keen interest in exposing what he considered errors and lies by the U.S. government and downplay his willingness to accept and disseminate lies told by America's enemies. You show how his tarnished reputation prospered when the media boarded the anti-Vietnam War bandwagon and discovered that Izzy Stone had helped get it rolling. Stone became a hero to those in the media who, in the words of James Reston of the New York Times, "forced the withdrawal of American power from Vietnam.”
Stones was a journalistic apologist for Stalin when he was committing his worst crimes--his planned famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33 and the Great Terror that drenched the Soviet Union with blood and wracked it with the torture of millions dispatched to the Gulag's slave labor camps. While his faith in Stalin was shaken by the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, his devotion to communism remained firm. As Cottrell acknowledges, Stone, in 1949, "continued to believe that communism was a progressive force, lined up on the correct side of historical events despite the brutal collectivization campaign, the Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the latest quashing of the Czech democracy and the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe.”
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