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From the May 14, 2009, Economist on "American Radical":

"THE prediction that Isador Feinstein Stone, America’s most celebrated investigative journalist, made to his wife proved right. “Honey”, he told her, “I’m going to graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if I live long enough I’ll be regarded as a national institution.” He lived long enough. By the time he died in 1989 at the age of 81, I.F. “Izzy” Stone was embraced by a political and media establishment that had shunned him in his prime as, in his words, “a Red Jew son-of-a-bitch”.

Stone missed his enemies. He thrived on their hatred and came into his own in the 1950s when he was deprived of his passport, blacklisted by editors and subjected to physical surveillance by the FBI as a suspected Russian spy. Undeterred, he founded I.F. Stone’s Weekly, a muck-raking journal that D.D. Guttenplan, his biographer, describes as the longest essay in single-handed journalism in American history. It came out for 19 years, ran to 3.5m words and hit a peak circulation of 70,000 that included just about everybody who mattered in Washington, DC."

"Stone’s muck-raking continued a rich American tradition. He was inspired by journalists such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell who exposed corruption in high places, and in turn inspired a younger generation. His influence can be seen in the Watergate scoops of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the revelation of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam by Seymour Hersh and the uncovering of multiple political and corporate misdeeds in the Village Voice by two of his fellow leftists, Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway."

From the Publisher:

"Popular Front columnist and New Deal propagandist. Fearless opponent of McCarthyism and feared scourge of official liars. Enterprising, independent reporter and avid amateur classicist. As D.D. Guttenplan puts it in his compelling book, I.F. Stone did what few in his profession could—he always thought for himself. America's most celebrated investigative journalist himself remains something of a mystery, however. Born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, raised in rural New Jersey, by the age of 25 this college drop-out was already an influential newsman, and enjoying extraordinary access to key figures in New Deal Washington and the friendship of important artists in New York.

It is Guttenplan’s wisdom to see that the key to Stone’s achievements throughout his singular career—and not just in his celebrated I.F. Stone’s Weekly—lay in the force and passion of his political commitments. Stone’s calm, forensic, yet devastating reports on American politics and institutions sprang from a radical faith in the long-term prospects for American democracy.

His testimony on the legacy of American politics from the New Deal and World War II to the era of the civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, and beyond amounts to as vivid a record of those times as we are likely to have. Guttenplan's lively, provocative book makes clear why so many of his pronouncements have acquired the force of prophecy."

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