Books, Faith, World & More

An Alternative Point of View

Reviews of All Governments Lie and of An American in Persia

All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone, by Myra MacPherson. Scribners, 2008.

An American in Persia: A Pilgrimage to Iran, by Richard A. Kauffman. Cascadia Publishing House, 2010.

How do we know what is going on? Some things we see with our own eyes. On occasion these things are such that we can hardly believe our eyes. At other times we are informed by hearsay or gossip. We have learned to be cautious about such reports although there is a biblical reference which calls for taking seriously “two or three witnesses” (Deut. 19: 15).

Then, of course, there are the professional news purveyors: newspapers, radio, television, known collectively as “the media.” They inform us about what is going on throughout the world, generally focusing on the more sensational occurrences. That something has happened we seldom doubt, but we’re not always sure about the significance of what is reported.

I read daily and weekly newspapers for local news, I read Newsweek and follow NBC, a standard news source. Yet Newsweek was recently sold to a private party and NBC is owned by an organization which probably has an ax to grind. Indeed the Public Broadcasting System, which is supposed to be independent, accepts support from an oil company and the military industrial complex. 

I also read The Nation and other alternative publications. The Nation claims that “nobody owns The Nation” although I have seen it carry cigarette advertising on occasion. I also read several newsletters including The Washington Spectator, which records news I seldom if ever find in the general media.

All Governments Lie is a biography of I. F. Stone described as a “Rebel Journalist” who was not satisfied with public statements but dug out facts behind the statements which sometimes did not support them. This is a “womb to tomb” biography beginning with Stone’s birth to Jewish parents in 1907 and continuing to his death in 1989 at the age of 81.

At his birth he was named Isador Feinstein, but at the age of 30 he changed it to I. F. Stone, evidently in an effort to get away from racial profiling (115). Nevertheless throughout the book he is frequently referred to as “Izzy.” The development of the biography is essentially chronological. However, although the five parts are chronological, within the parts are topical chapters and we may need to refer back to the part to see where we are in Stone’s life.

Having once been an editor, I was interested in the publications Stone worked for, but this is evidently not the author’s primary interest. She is more concerned about Stone as a person and the development of his thinking so the publications serve only as vehicles of expression.

With help from the index, which is quite extensive, I was able to find a record of publications he served during his professional life. Actually, he began independently. At the age of 14 he published his own newspaper, The Progress, where he wrote, “To stay in power has become the fundamental purpose of the Democratic and Republican parties. . . . Parties are no longer the organ of a part of the people, they have simply become hereditary things like blue eyes and cancer” (30). This is an example of the point of view he was to represent throughout his years as a journalist.

The Feinsteins lived in Camden, New Jersey, and at 15 Izzy was hired by L. David Stern, publisher of the Camden Courier Post. After the Courier Post he would work for Stern on the Philadelphia Record and then the New York Post. Finally, in 1939, after more than 15 years, the two separated in conflict over Stone’s editorial position regarding the finances of the New York transit system. Stone was always pushing his point of view so there was tension between the journalist and the publisher from time to time and when Stern published his autobiography he did not mention Stone (61).

During his years on Stern’s publications, Izzy had followed various political, social, and economic issues, always coming out on the side of the oppressed. Soon after leaving the Post, Stone became employed by The Nation and moved his family to Washington D.C.. In 1929 he had married Esther Roisman. They were to have three children and she became a stabilizing factor for her husband who in his professional life was always involved in conflict.

Beginning in 1936, Stone editorialized against the FBI and so became a subject for surveillance at least until the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. “Stone kept the FBI busy throughout the ’40s; he was now speaking to every left-wing audience and writing for not one, but two ‘subversive publications’” (194).

The second subversive publication was PM, which began in 1940. This “was a tabloid that refused to pander: there were no racing sheets, no stockmarket reports, no pictures of stripteasers being hauled off to jail” (196). It “often scored in crusades that mainstream, corporate-friendly newspapers largely ignored. . . . PM attacked segregation and lynchings like no other newspaper catering to white audiences” (197). It was to last until 1948. 

After this Stone wrote for the Daily Compass, which went under in 1952. So in 1953 he began his own newsletter, the I. F. Stone’s Weekly. “When Stone started the Weekly in 1953, Hoover was apoplectic, going through tortured motions to subscribe without Stone knowing. . . . An FBI memo stated that ‘ extensive investigation has failed to establish any espionage activity, on part of subject and has established no C[ommunist] P[arty] activity on his part’“ (290). 

Stone’s Weekly would last until 1971, nearly 20 years, and would eventually become a profitable enterprise. Stone’s periodical publications were a major source of contact with the public, but he also would make speeches and write books.

At one point Stone “summarized what he was fighting for: civil liberty, free speech, peace in the world, truth in government, and a humane society” (246). With such a broad platform and an aggressive, personal style, Stone was bound to face opposition. In the ’40s he began to oppose the Truman administration, whose “executive order, signed on March twenty-first, 1947, went against all tenets of the American Constitution, leading to the persecution of thoughts, not deeds” (247). 

He opposed the Korean War and wrote a book, The Hidden History of the Korean War, for which he had trouble finding a publisher. But “Historians continue to cite Stone for correctly challenging the dominant view of Western scholars that China joined the Korean War as part of a well-ordered monolithic plot to rule the world” (269). 

In the meantime “The FBI, CIA, the Army, the State Department, and the U.S. Postal Service relentlessly tracked Stone across the United States and Europe” (287). Even after his death, right wing columnist Robert Novak charged that “Izzy Stone was a lifelong Soviet apologist ‘who received secret payments from the Kremlin.’ Both were old and patent lies, and Novak certainly had to know this” (311).

In 1956 Stone visited Russia and discontinued support of communism, which he had favored because of his concern for justice to the downtrodden, although he had never joined the party. “He wrote a strongly confessional column which cost the financially strapped journalist four hundred subscribers” (349). 

Stone weighed in on behalf of the civil rights struggle. He supported Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King Jr. in their opposition to the Vietnam War. When Lyndon Johnson became president, Stone was in favor of him until the escalation of the Vietnam War. “Stone dedicated himself to an all-out crusade for peace, saw Johnson as a duplicitous warmonger and Humphrey as a fallen hero and faithful lapdog to L. B. J.” (390).

Stone’s opposition to policies that the mainstream media were reluctant to oppose made him for a time a pariah with other reporters. But eventually they began to recognize what Victor Navasky has observed, that “Izzy saw what others missed, even though it was often in plain sight” (446).

The book goes beyond Stone’s life to comment on the role of the media regarding the war in Iraq. It quotes Daniel Ellsberg, who said, “Nobody has learned anything from the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam, Izzy or anything. . . . I am puzzled by the degree of servility and compliance from the press ‘“ (456).

And so I wonder what was accomplished by an iconoclast such as Stone. Did anything change for the better? A summary of Stone’s influence appears in The Nation (Oct. 4, 2010). Stone is included as No. 26 in a list of “The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century.” The list begins with Socialist Eugene Debs and ends with Michael Moore. Other “worthies” include Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger, and Martin Luther King Jr. Of Stone it says that he “was an investigative journalist whose persistent research uncovered government corruption and wrongdoing. . . . He inspired generations of muckraking reporters” (17).

So he has had an ongoing influence. And I keep reading The Washington Spectator and other alternative publications. They provide background information on subjects and issues I never find covered by NBC.

After I had written this review I came upon I. F. Stone’s Polemics and Prophecies 1969-1970 (Little. Brown and Company, 1970), a compilation of his writing from this period. I found a number of the essays responding to governmental obfuscation during the Vietnam War. Unless one is studying the politics of that period, these may not be of interest except as samples of Stone’s style. However, essays on the Democratic and Republican parties illustrate Stone’s contention that the parties are too similar to be of much help to the poor and downtrodden.

Another theme that seems unfortunately timeless is “The Need for Double Vision in the Middle East” where Stone wrote, “So long as a million Palestinians live in homeless misery there will be no peace for Israel, and there should be no peace of mind for world Jewry. This is a wrong we must right” (437). The essay was written in 1969, but the stalemate continues.

The book Polemics and Prophecies 1969-1970 is filled with pungent writing of this sort, but unless we are studying issues of this period we will find the biography more useful.

Richard A. Kauffman has gone to Iran and has written a book. He spent two weeks there as part of a Mennonite Central Committee study group. MCC has been active in Iran since an entry following an earthquake in 1990 (51). Based on wording by one of his speech writers, George W. Bush labeled Iran part of an “axis of evil.”

Kauffman found most of the people he met there friendly toward Americans and puzzled by Bush’s lumping them with Iraq and North Korea, neither of which is on Iran’s list of favorite countries.
Kauffman’s book is an “I was there” presentation based on a two-week experience, and we should not expect comprehensive coverage, although there is a three page list of “Further Resources” at the end of the book. So we assume that he has informed himself about the background issues involved, although the book is mainly a journalist’s account of people he met on a two-week tour and what they told him. 

His experiences in Iran were mainly positive, although they began negatively when he and James Cooper had trouble passing through immigration. Officials evidently perceived that Cooper’s beard and conservative dress along with Kauffman’s name may have indicated that they were Jewish. When it finally became clear that they were not Jewish, they were admitted.

In contrast to this chilly reception, most Iranians they met were friendly and “didn’t see any reason why Iranians and Americans could not be friends. But they sometimes asked us difficult questions.” Some of them “dared to ask why Americans hate Iranians, or why Christians hate Muslims” (34). A young woman said that “‘Iran is a complex country. And so are the people.’ Kauffman adds, “Indeed the country is a complex place, as complex as a Persian rug. It is also a place of contradictions” (37). This is in contrast to the one-note music we generally hear about Iran from the American media.

In a brief chapter (all the chapters are brief) Kauffman describes the work of Mennonite Central Committee in Iran. It has worked through the Iranian Red Crescent Society, and a picture with the chapter shows a hydrotherapy machine bought from France with money from MCC.

The next chapter tells of pressures the Iranians put on minority groups such as Jews and Christians. Kauffman also observes here as he does throughout the book, how the Americans criticized their own government but an Iranian professor they met would not criticize his. Perhaps he felt the need to be careful.

Chapter 13 reviews the sad story of U.S. and Iranian history: how a coup sponsored by the CIA in 1953 brought down a democratically elected government and put the Shah back in power. The question is how many Americans remember or even have heard about this unpleasant occurrence and how it contributed to the taking of U.S. hostages by the Iranians.

In an Afterword Kauffman reports on contacts made since his trip. “I’ve heard from several of my Iranian contacts. They are quite anxious about their future. They expressed deep longing for peace. And they request our prayers as sons and daughters of our common spiritual ancestor, Father Abraham” (109).

Kauffman is a senior editor on the staff of The Christian Century. In the issue of June 27, 2008, he published an article, “Inside Iran” which covers the gist of his book. This back issue of the magazine is not available to most of us and so the book serves as a useful summary of current issues in Iran. 

Like The Washington Spectator, An American in Persia does not try to cover the big picture. But it includes a series of little pictures which if taken seriously could soften relations between our two countries. I believe I will donate my copy to the Scottdale library.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, is an editor, writer, and chair of the elders, Scottdale Mennonite Church.