Firing up the 4th estate

All Governments Lie!: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone
By Myra MacPherson
Scribner, 564 pp., illustrated, $35

The questioner, a member of the American Legion, was furious. How could the speaker defend a group named a ``Communist front" by the House Un -American Activities Committee? The Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought in the Spanish Civil War against Italian Fascists and German Nazis, I. F. Stone explained, then asked the questioner, ``What side were you on -- the Brigade's or the Nazis'?" The questioner persisted, but Stone shouted, ``I want an answer to my question!" The legionnaire withdrew, saying ``No comment."

That incident, recounted by Myra MacPherson in ``All Governments Lie!," her lively, refreshing biography of oh-that-we-could-clone-him Stone, was first reported in the Binghamton, N.Y. , Evening Press in 1961, an artifact from the prodigious clipping warehouse of the FBI. Every scrap about Stone fed the paranoia of its director, J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded dissenters, skeptics , and rebels as unpatriotic. Some of the book's funniest passages come from Stone's FBI file, in which agents apologize for the paucity of conspiratorial morsels in the uproariously open life of Izzy Stone.

A college dropout, he was one of the great scholars of his time, deciding to learn Greek while approaching his 80th birthday. As an investigative reporter, he had no peer. Among the few who approach his impact and diligence are Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward, both inspired by him . Stone was not a gadfly, because that job requires too little intelligence. Nor was he a contrarian, a pose demanding little passion or energy.

He was a demon documentarian, a one-man truth battalion, exposing official folly and mendacity by poring over thousands of documents from obscure hearings, long-ago white papers , and forgotten manifestos. His search engine was a pair of thick glasses. His Internet was a deep and rich self-education powered by a phenomenal memory. He found truth in the fine print, in testimony from a Cabinet officer, general , or bureaucrat who had blurted out an accurate assessment of a policy or program. For almost 20 years, he showcased these nuggets in I. F. Stone's Weekly, which he folded in 1971 when his eyesight deteriorated. The four-page Weekly, sold in the 1960s for 15 cents or $5 annually, was as influential as wealthy TV networks and magazines.

He was slow to denounce the Soviet Union and too indulgent toward Henry A. Wallace's third-party race in 1948, but his record on the Cold War and Vietnam holds up. Admiration for him was widespread in the Washington press corps because Izzy did it on his own without advertisers, giant presses , and corporate backing. Those toiling for Colonel McCormick's isolationist Chicago Tribune were fond of Stone, as were the sons of the late Confederacy on the congressional press gallery staff. ``We saved one for ya, Izzy," said one, as he handed over a thick book of testimony from a House Appropriations subcommittee. Until the 1970s, such committees met in secret and printed a transcript months later. Stone scooped gold out of its pages and scooped his colleagues often with undiscovered whoppers from Robert McNamara or Henry Kissinger.

In Haddonfield, N.J., Isador Feinstein Stone was an eager apprentice in news, publishing his own paper at 14. He hustled his way onto the Philadelphia Record, where he learned to find the ``significant trifle" in every story. MacPherson cites Murray Kempton, who said , ``He had a genius for reading documents, but he also had this great gift of historical imagination." Neither that genius nor that gift animates today's ``media personalities."

In this intensely partisan time, Stone's example is both useful and attainable. Much of today's leftist rhetoric suggests that America is what's wrong with the world. Stone, a brilliant critic, was intensely patriotic, telling a documentary television crew seeking views about American communists in the 1930s, ``They had no appreciation of Thomas Jefferson. This is the greatest country in the world, freedom of press, freedom of religion." As MacPherson points out, he referred to the United States as ``we." He also had a sense of humor and didn't find having fun in the news business unethical or unprofessional.

Within the last 20 years Robert Cottrell and Andrew Patner published biographies of Stone that were admirable and concise, but a new generation needs details about Eugene V. Debs, H. L. Mencken , and George Seldes, and a volume impressive enough to be required reading in American journalism classes. MacPherson succeeds with a breadth and depth of detail that would make her subject cackle with delight. My favorite is Nat Hentoff's interview in the Village Voice with the Weekly's printer. Pointing to a dent in the wall from years of Stone's banging into his shop door in `` haste to eradicate every last typo in his final copy," the printer said Stone was ``a kindly man," but added, ``He sure is serious about getting things right."

Izzy might have edited this title, canceling the exclamation point, which he seldom used. Stone told me in 1965, ``Some nice people live in Washington, but most are liars or gonifs," a Yiddish word for rascal I recalled from my youth. Stone trusted the Founding Fathers, but had his doubts about many of their successors. Of course, all governments lie. Stone didn't need an exclamation mark to document his doubts.

Martin F. Nolan is a former Washington bureau chief for the Globe.