by Myra MacPherson
The contrasting legacies of two 20th-century American journalists, now long dead, remain fascinating. Walter Lippmann and I.F. Stone are dynamic examples of opposing approaches to journalism.
Lippmann the insider, fancied the fine life of being “inside” to a degree unthinkable for most journalists. He wrote speeches for U.S. presidents. When he visited Paris, his forwarding address was in care of Charles de Gaulle. He never saw the dichotomy.
I.F. Stone was the feisty outsider, blackballed by the National Press Club after inviting a black judge to lunch there—a premature gesture of civility in a Jim Crow era. He famously said, “All governments lie—but disaster lies in wait for a country whose leaders smoke the same hashish they give out.”
In their day, Lippmann was known as the august sage and Stone the scruffy leftist nag who fought against government secrecy and lies to keep the First Amendment alive. When no one would hire him during the McCarthy era, Stone was reduced to printing his own four-page mom and pop Weekly along with his wife, Esther.
Today, we see that in many instances, Stone—whose Weekly became a famous success—was the most prescient and certainly the bravest of the two men. Despite this fact, a vindictive collection of neocons persist to this day in the false denunciation that Stone was a KGB agent. Ironically, they never see Lippmann in that light, even though, if FBI files can be believed, he spoke often and revealingly during World War II—a time when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally—with the same KGB agent, acting as a press attaché, who tried unsuccessfully to engage Stone.
Everything about these two journalists was a study in contrast: Lippmann cultivated a disinterested, elevated and cool style. Stone was red-hot, passionate and spoke for the masses. If Stone erred on the side of ideological fervor, Lippmann was flawed by an absence of it. Lippmann was a celebrity journalist early in life, Stone’s glory came late in life. Friends never shortened “Walter” and no stranger had a nickname for Lippmann. Stone was known to everyone from the corner grocer to Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt to Marilyn Monroe, and hordes of strangers as “Izzy.” Stone felt that being an outsider was the only way to cover politics, that governments needed constant watching. Lippmann reveled in dealing with kings, presidents, financiers and titans. His early columns scorned the idea that Democracy should be left to the vote of the inferior average citizen.
The comparison between Lippmann and Stone also reveals a schism among Jews in the 1930s, when overt anti-Semitism ruled the world of politics and business, journalism and judgeships, universities and executive boards. Lippmann was the sort of Jew with whom WASP publishers felt comfortable; a Harvard man who favored Jewish quotas for admissions to his alma mater. As Lippmann biographer Ronald Steel noted, “He criticized the Jews for being ‘different’ rather than the Gentiles for emphasizing and punishing those differences.” Such thoughts were anathema to Stone. Despite his name change (from Feinstein to Stone), he proudly identified himself as a Jew. Stone empathized with European Jews and wrote passionately about their homeland in Palestine (only later to be excoriated by fellow Jews for criticizing Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.) Lippmann ignored them.
To the very end, Lippmann sought to hide his Jewish heritage. When a childhood friend, Carl Binger, was asked to write a biography of Lippmann for a book of essays honoring his 70th birthday, Binger faced a quandary. He “could not say that Walter was Jewish. Otherwise Walter would never forgive him, and would never speak to him again.” Binger snuck in a suggestion of Lippmann’s roots by mentioning that Lippmann had attended Dr. Sach’s School for Boys, where wealthy Jewish families sent their sons.
Lippmann was far from alone among the journalistic elite in concealing his ethnicity. The head of CBS, Bill Paley, was edgy about his Russian-Jewish heritage and associated with ultra WASPS. Paley turned down a chance to back Fiddler on the Roof with the comment, “It’s good, but don’t you think it’s too Jewish?” The Jewish owners of The New York Times held to an unspoken coda denying Jews high-level positions. (In later years, The Times was said to be owned by Jews, edited by Catholics and read by Protestants.) It was worse in the New York Herald Tribune, the guardian of mainstream Republicanism, where the presence of Jews was “not encouraged.”
Stone’s words about the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust stand in stark contrast to the silence of Lippmann, regarded as America’s most influential voice. As early as 1929, when Stone was but 21, he recognized a road map for annihilation and world conquest in what others dismissed as the lunatic ravings of Mein Kampf. In 1932, Stone predicted: “Today or tomorrow the shifty-eyed little Austrian paperhanger, Hitler, may step into the mighty shoes of Bismarck as Chancellor of the Reich.” At 24, Stone shaped prophetic editorials denouncing the dictator in the spring of 1933: “The danger to Europe and the world is that he may seek a way out in war.”
As an internationally-respected thinker, Lippmann’s lack of concern and relegation of Hitler to being “Europe’s problem” was all the more damaging. Not only his mass of readers, but other journalists and, Lippmann felt, world leaders took their cue from him. His influence was so strong that Time magazine, which dubbed him the “most statesmanly Jewish pundit,” cited him as an excuse for their do nothing policy.
Lippmann’s public abandonment of the Jews lasted for five years. In 1938, he broke his half-decade silence only to recommend that Europe’s “over population” problem (he did not mention Jews) could be solved by shipping the Jews to Africa. In 1942, when the death camps were known and some newspapers printed graphic descriptions, Lippmann wrote nothing. When others criticized the State Department for repressing knowledge of Hitler’s extermination plans, Lippmann wrote nothing. By contrast, Stone was frantically and vainly urging the United States government to relax immigration quotas in order to admit more European Jewish refugees. Lippmann argued against changing the quotas, a prevailing sentiment in Depression-weary America.
When Lippmann careened off the deep end, his international clout did not suffer much, largely because his errors in judgment were often mirror reflections of the status quo—his denigration of the New Deal, his myopia regarding Hitler’s rise, his neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, his isolationism. On the other hand, when Stone was wrong, he erred on the side of the left—which earned him a barrage of attacks, life-long surveillance by the FBI, scorn from establishment journalists and publishers.
Stone’s major flaw was his fervent belief in socialism. He did not break completely with the Soviet Union until the 1950s, although Stone was not blind to Stalin’s evils and was often denounced by the American Communist Party for his views. During the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 when FDR wanted to send aid to Britain, American isolationists on the left and the right joined in fiercely opposing the president. Stone was leading FDR’s cry to assist Britain, which only 12 percent of Americans thought was the right path.
Lippmann, however, was more prescient in gauging Stalin’s monstrous dictatorship than Stone. Lippmann saw Stalin’s show trials as horror shows that should free liberals from the “dominion that Russian communism has exercised over their minds in the past twenty years”…and “eventually lead to the realization that this is not a corruption of, but the inevitable consequences of, the ideals of communism.” Stone harbored doubts about the legitimacy of these trials but said that more facts were needed.
In 1952, Stone saved his most blistering attack for Walter Lippmann and other distinguished journalists in an outraged five-part expose under blazing headlines: “I.F. STONE EXPOSES POLK MURDER CASE WHITEWASH. ‘THE CRIME OF HUSH-UP.’” Four years earlier, a man’s body had been fished out of Salonika Bay in Greece. A bullet blew off the back of his head, his hands and feet were bound with rope, execution style. George Polk, a 35-year old CBS radio correspondent covering the battle between the U.S.-backed Greek government and communist rebels, had been thrown into the bay while still alive.
At first, the murder caused a sensation among journalists. Polk had been one of famed Edward R. Murrow’s “boys”, as his radio reporters were called. Fearing that the Greek government was involved, American reporters pushed for an independent inquiry. Walter Lippmann headed the committee and picked General William “Wild Bill” J. Donovan, recently of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, to run the investigation.
In 1947, the United States began pouring millions into the Greek regime, the first front in its global containment of communism. “A cardinal point” of the Truman Doctrine, wrote Stone, was its support of the rightist government against leftist rebels. What had been a Greek civil war became a vital forerunner in the domino theory of foreign affairs. Independent-minded journalists were the victims of a “kind of guerrilla war” campaign by the Greek rightist press and the State department, wrote Stone in 1952. They were “smeared as Communists” and letters of complaint were sent to their home offices.
The choice of Donovan should have been suspect, noted Stone; a man so closely linked to the State Department was “too easily reachable by government officials.” Donovan stonewalled and the report was finally made public in 1952. Stone was the only journalist at the time who pegged the belated report a “feeble bit of whitewash” which endorsed a “farcical” 1949 Greek government trial pinning the murder on Communists. Stone stingingly rebuked the Lippmann committee. A “cub reporter” could have done better; it was clear that both the Greek and American governments had prevented a real murder investigation. What is worse, Lippmann expressed private doubts but “accepted a verdict that seemed feasible and had the inestimable virtue of not upsetting cold war politics.”
Stone blasted Donovan for his part in a high stakes political murder cover up. Lippmann cloyingly praised Donovan “on behalf of men whose profession [journalism] it is to have few illusions.” Stone’s retort was: “For men with few illusions they certainly managed to be gulled by the Greek and American governments.”
The murder was pinned on Gregorios Staktopoulos, a Leftist journalist, and Lippmann declared that justice was done, while evidence led to the rightist regime. Typically, Stone found nuggets buried in the fine print staring at anyone who had cared to examine it. There was the skeptical Harvard criminal law professor, E.M. Morgan, who concluded that the “confessions of Staktopoulos,” were “so inherently weak as to be practically worthless…” The Morgan analysis which was “ignored in newspaper coverage of the Lippmann report, would have severely damaged the official theory” had it been published in a timely manner. Fifty years later Stone was singled out by newly-intrigued authors for his courage. They utilized documents unavailable to Stone to reinforce his argument that the Rightists committed the crime and that the truth was deliberately suppressed.
Stone never fooled himself about being the possessor of nonexistent power—that a Nixon or LBJ would read the Weekly and rush to say, “Izzy’s right, I am going to change my policy!” Still, by 1968, Stone was more influential than Lippmann. Stone did more than unveil the follies, deceptions, blunders and immoralities of the Vietnam War; he explained them historically and with vision. While Lippmann supported the war, Stone was the only journalist who—three weeks after LBJ used a non-existent Gulf of Tonkin attack as an excuse to escalate in 1964—called it a fraud.
In later life Stone was long vindicated for his early dissent. Lippmann quickly learned that his power was meaningless when he chose to finally break with LBJ over Vietnam. LBJ had researchers comb through Lippmann’s columns for errors to use against him. Old “friends” in power snubbed Lippmann. Too accustomed to being an insider Lippmann backed Nixon in 1968 and once again dined at the White House with Nixon’s slippery sidekick-in-war, Henry Kissinger.
In 1999, a list of 20th century’s best journalists, placed I.F. Stone and his one-man Weekly at number 16, behind the coverage of Hiroshima, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai and the exposes of early-century muckrakers.
Walter Lippmann placed far down the ladder at number 64.
Myra MacPherson is the author of All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone. This post includes excerpts from the book. MacPherson is a contributor to NiemanWatchdog.org, a project of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and is writing her fifth book.
