I. F. Stone and the Assassination of JFK

Operation Mockingbird

Carl Bernstein: CIA and the Media

Watergate

(1) I. F. Stone, A Word About Myself (July 1963)

I have been a newspaperman all my life. In the small town where I grew up, I published a paper at fourteen, worked for a country weekly and then as correspondent for a nearby city daily. I did this from my sophomore year in high school through college, until I quit in my junior year. I was a philosophy major and at one time thought of teaching philosophy, but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me. While going to college l was working ten hours afternoon and night doing combination rewrite and copy desk on the Philadelphia Inquirer, so I was already an experienced newspaperman making $40 a week—big pay in 1928 I have done everything on a newspaper except run a linotype machine.

I had become a radical in the ‘20s while in my teens, mostly through reading Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Kropotkin and Marx. I became a member of the Socialist Party and was elected to the New Jersey State Committee of the Socialist Party before I was old enough to vote. I did publicity for Norman Thomas in the 1928 campaign while a reporter on a small city daily, but soon drifted away from left-wing politics because of the sectarianism of the left. Moreover, I felt that party affiliation was incompatible with independent journalism, and I wanted to be free to help the unjustly treated, to defend everyone's civil liberty and to work for social reform without concern for leftist infighting.

(2) I. F. Stone, McCarthy and the Witch-Hunt, I. F. Stone's Weekly (4th April, 1953)

The most subversive force in America today is Joe McCarthy. No one is so effectively importing alien conceptions into American government. No one is doing so much to damage the country's prestige abroad and its power to act effectively at home. If "subversion" is to be met by deportation, then it is time to deport McCarthy back to Wisconsin. Families are being broken up, long-time residents driven into exile, men face permanent detention, on charges which are far more tenuous than those made against McCarthy by the Senate inquiry.

(3) I. F. Stone, It's Not Just Joe McCarthy, I. F. Stone's Weekly (15th March, 1954)

Great issues are rarely resolved by frontal assault; for every abolitionist prepared to challenge slavery as a moral wrong, there were dozens of compromising politicians (including Lincoln) who talked as if the real issue were states' rights or the criminal jurisdiction of the Federal courts or the right of the people in a new territory to determine their own future.

In the fight against the witch mania in this country and in Europe, there were few enough to defend individual victims but fewer still who were willing to assert publicly that belief in witchcraft was groundless. So today in the fight against McCarthyism. To doubt the power of the devil, to question the existence of witches, is again to read oneself out of respectable society, to brand oneself a heretic, to incur suspicion of being oneself in league with the powers of evil.

There can be no real peace without a readiness for live-and-let-live, i.e. for coexistence with Communism. The world is going socialist in one form or another everywhere; Communism is merely the extreme form the movement takes when and where blind and backward rulers seek by terror and force to hold back the tide.

There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not be thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

(4) I. F. Stone, Little Rock, I. F. Stone's Weekly (7th October, 1957)

Amid the hand-wringing over Little Rock by the so-called Southern moderates, and the conferences in the White House to negotiate withdrawal of troops, and to let Faubus save face, it is forgotten that for the Negro the law never looked more truly majestic than it does today in Little Rock where for once the bullies of the South have been put on notice that they cannot take out their venom on the Negro and his children.

Quite different is the scene through white Southern eyes. The white South feels like an oppressed minority because the white North has interfered to prevent it from oppressing its Negro minority. The white South feels a victim of injustice, misunderstanding and brute force. That these are exactly what it visits on the helpless Negro who steps out of line merely illustrates the capacity of human beings to go on doing to others what they violently object to when done to themselves.

(5) I. F. Stone, J. Edgar Hoover, I. F. Stone's Weekly (1st June, 1959)

Why is J. Edgar Hoover so venomous and suspicious about anyone who seeks to help the Negro? Why does he, so vocal on the dangers of Communism, never raise his voice on the dangers of racism, though a sense of rankling injustice on the part of a newer Negro generation may some day tear our great cities apart? Year after year his testimony chimes in with Southern racist' attempts to picture the Negro's struggle for justice and equality as a Red Plot.

(6) I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone's Weekly (9th October, 1961)

The C.I.A. is an intelligence organization run from the rather stuffy conventional wealthy businessman's point of view. It is staffed, from the top down, by Wall Streeters, Ivy League dilettantes, superannuated colonels from the armed forces and scholars, whose loyalty can be kept certified only by a fanatical anti-Communism. The main lesson of the Cuban fiasco is that an organization of this kind cannot be relied upon to know what ordinary people are thinking. But President Kennedy does not seem to have learned that lesson at all. In replacing Allen W. Dulles by John A. McCone, he picked a man who is if anything considerably less literate and less knowledgeable than Dulles, and fully as incapable of understanding the resentments and the aspirations that are the dynamic factors in today's world.

Mr McCone's rising fortunes, financial and political, have been associated with the war and the arms race. In 1937 he helped to form the Bechtel-McCone-Parsons Corporation, a construction and engineering firm. In January 1941 he organized and became the president of the California Shipbuilding Company; the Bechtel concern was then given a management contract to run the shipbuilding company. After the war the General Accounting Office told a House Merchant Marine Committee investigation that the company had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000. The same committee a few months later complained that Mr McCone's company was paid $2,500,000 by the government to take over a shipyard costing $25,000,000 and containing surplus material costing $14,000,000.

Mr McCone did not confine his interests to shipbuilding. Bechtel-McCone-Parsons also built a huge installation at Birmingham, Alabama, during the war for the air force and became a leading construction firm for the A.E.C. Mr McCone also organized a private shipping company which did a big transport business for some of the largest A.E.C. contractors, firms like Union Carbide and Dow Chemical. These diverse enterprises had a common stake in armament expenditure, and Mr McCone made his debut in public service as a member of Truman's Air Policy Commission which in 1948 advocated a stepped-up indefinitely prolonged arms race. The report became the bible of the aviation lobby. His views recommended him to the alarmist Secretary of Defence Forrestal who made Mr McCone his deputy. In 1950-51 he was Under-Secretary of the Air Force.

With the Democrats out, Mr McCone returned to California and Republican politics. There his principal associations, political and religious, were of the right. He became a major money raiser for former Senator Knowland, often referred to as the Senator from Formosa, and he was close to Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles, not one of the more liberal members of the American hierarchy. In 1958, Admiral Strauss picked Mr McCone to succeed him as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; they shared the same hostility to public power and to cessation of nuclear testing. At his nomination hearing, one of the exhibits was an angry letter Mr McCone had sent in 1956, as a Caltech trustee, to ten Caltech faculty members (including Harrison Brown and a Nobel laureate in physics) for releasing a statement supporting Adlai Stevenson's proposal for a ban on H-bomb testing. Mr McCone, a friend and admirer of Edward Teller, accused the ten professors of echoing Soviet propaganda in what he called an attempt `to create fear in the minds of the uninformed that radioactive fallout from H-bomb tests endangers life'.

To control the nation's intelligence is to be in a position to shape decisions of war and peace. The C.I.A. is an enormous bureaucracy, with millions at its disposal to corrupt men abroad and perhaps at home; a rival, shadow State Department with a foreign policy even less enlightened. Its network of cloak-and-dagger operatives abroad move in a murky realm where provocations can make peace untenable. The U-2 was one sample. The Joint Intelligence Board over which Mr McCone will also preside coordinates all the multifarious snooper organizations of our government - there must be half a dozen beside the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. - and also our growing para-military agencies which can engage secretly in war. Mr Kennedy could not have made a more appalling choice for so crucial a post.

(7) I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone's Weekly (4th June, 1962)

Norman Thomas, spoke if them as "secular saints" - this handful of young Negroes in their teens and early twenties. They and a few white sympathizers as youthful and devoted as themselves have begun a social revolution in the South with their sit-ins and their Freedom Rides. Never has a tinier minority done more for the liberation of a whole people than these few youngsters of C.O.R.E. (Congress for Racial Equality) and S.N.C.C. (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee).

(8) I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone's Weekly (9th December, 1963)

There was a fairytale quality about the inaugural and there was a fairytale quality about the funeral rites. One half expected that when the lovely princess knelt to kiss the casket for the last time, some winged godmother would wave her wand and restore the hero whole again in a final triumph over the dark forces which had slain him. There never was such a shining pageant of a presidency before. We watched it as children do, raptly determined to believe but knowing all the time that it wasn't really true.

Of all the Presidents, this was the first to be a Prince Charming. To watch the President at press conference or at a private press briefing was to be delighted by his wit, his intelligence, his capacity and his youth. These made the terrible flash from Dallas incredible and painful. But perhaps the truth is that in some ways John Fitzgerald Kennedy died just in time. He died in time to be remembered as he would like to be remembered, as ever-young, still victorious, struck down undefeated, with almost all the potentates and rulers of mankind, friend and foe, come to mourn at his bier.

For somehow one has the feeling that in the tangled dramaturgy of events, this sudden assassination was for the author the only satisfactory way out. The Kennedy Administration was approaching an impasse, certainly at home, quite possibly abroad, from which there seemed no escape. In Congress the President was faced with something- worse than a filibuster. He was confronted with a shrewdly conceived and quietly staged sitdown strike by Southern committee chairmen determined to block civil rights even if it meant stopping the wheels of government altogether.

The measure of their success is that we entered this final month of 1963 with nine of the thirteen basic appropriation bills as yet unpassed, though the fiscal year for which they were written began last 1 July and most of the government has been forced to live hand-to-mouth since. Never before in our history has the Senate so dragged its heels as this year; never before has the Southern oligarchy dared go so far in demonstrating its power in Washington. The President was caught between these old men, their faces set stubbornly towards their white supremacist past, and the advancing Negro masses, explosively demanding `freedom now'. Mr Kennedy's death, like those of the Birmingham children and of Medgar Evers, may some day seem the first drops portending a new storm which it was beyond his power to stay.

In foreign policy, the outlook was as un