Paul Berman analyses the strange career of muck-raking journalist I.F. Stone:
He was especially shrewd at explaining how the government, by playing to the vanity of individual journalists, was able to manipulate the news.... "Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk..."
And yet, as Berman points out, Stone was quite happy to have regular lunch dates with a KGB officer. Even his admiring biographer admits that, while "Izzy" may not have been a Soviet agent, he was a fellow-traveller. Berman again:
It’s not easy to explain a political personality like I. F. Stone’s. The 20th century produced a brilliant literature of fanaticism — a literature by and about hard-line Communists who became maniacs of their own dogmas and then turned the other way, in some cases to become authentic liberals, in other cases to become maniacs of anti-Communism. But a literature that adequately accounts for the people who never did become fanatics, a literature about the non-maniacs, about the people who remained liberals at heart yet, even so, kept applauding one left-wing tyranny after another — a convincing and thorough literature about these people is harder to find...
I can think of only one genuinely great biography of a fellow traveler written in our own anti-totalitarian age...
Which book does he have in mind? Bernard-Henri Lévy’s study of Sartre.
More on BHL below....
UPDATE: Richard John Neuhaus, who knew Stone, adds some thoughts of his own [via RWB]:
Sartre and Stone were lovers of freedom only in the sense that they adamantly insisted upon their own right to do what they wanted, while being indifferent to or even, as was often the case, celebrating the powers that enslaved and killed millions of others. This is not a "paradox." This is a deep corruption of intellect and soul.
