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The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone
Scribner
September 2006
On Sale: August 29, 2006
Featuring: I.F. Stone
592 pages ISBN: 0684807130 EAN: 9780684807133 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Boasting equal parts scholarship and style, "All
Governments Lie" is a highly readable, groundbreaking,
and timely look at I. F. Stone -- one of America's most
independent and revered journalists, whose work carries the
same immediacy it did almost a half century ago,
highlighting the ever-present need for dissenting
voices. In the world of Washington political
journalism, notorious for trading independence for access,
I. F. "Izzy" Stone was so unique as to be a genuine wonder.
Always skeptical -- "All governments lie, but disaster lies
in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish
they give out," he memorably quipped -- Stone was ahead of
the pack on the most pivotal twentieth-century trends: the
rise of Hitler and Fascism, disastrous Cold War foreign
policies, covert actions of the FBI and CIA, the greatness
of the Civil Rights movement, the horror of Vietnam, the
strengths and weaknesses of the antiwar movement, the
disgrace of Iran-contra, and the class greed of Reaganomics.
His constant barrage against J. Edgar Hoover earned him
close monitoring by the FBI from the Great Depression
through the Vietnam War, and even an investigation for
espionage during the fifties. After making his mark on
feisty New York dailies and in The Nation -- scoring
such scoops as the discovery of American cartels doing
business with Nazi Germany -- Stone became unemployable
during the dark days of McCarthyism. Out of desperation he
started his four-page I. F. Stone's Weekly, which ran
from 1953 to 1971. The first journalist to label the Gulf of
Tonkin affair a sham excuse to escalate the Vietnam War,
Stone garnered worldwide fans, was read in the corridors of
power, and became wealthy. Later, the "world's oldest living
freshman" learned Greek to write his bestseller The Trial
of Socrates. Here, for the first time, acclaimed
journalist and author Myra MacPherson brings the legendary
Stone into sharp focus. Rooted in fifteen years of research,
this monumental biography includes information from newly
declassified international documents and Stone's unpublished
five-thousand-page FBI file, as well as personal interviews
with Stone and his wife, Esther; with famed modern thinkers;
and with the best of today's journalists. It illuminates the
vast sweep of turbulent twentieth-century history as well as
Stone's complex and colorful life. The result is more than a
masterful portrait of a remarkable character; it's a
far-reaching assessment of journalism and its role in our
culture.
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