profession could he always thought for himself good and plain argues that the key to stone's achievements throughout his singular career not just in the celebrated eye of stone's weekly lay in the force and passion of his political commitments he would become one of the best known journalists in the country and then because of the ferocity of his integrity and refusal to be cowed by the hysteria and witch hunts over communism a pariah he was placed under daily surveillance his passport was not renewed and he was blacklisted even the nation magazine would not give him a job at the age of $44.00 he wrote that is total marginalisation made him feel like a ghost his career is a poignant reminder that moral autonomy and independence traits stone had in abundance comes with a price that is a primer on what constitutes great reporting in an age when celebrity gossip and trivia are passed off as news joining me in the studio to discuss i have stone and

his legacy is d.d. gotten plan author of american radical the life and times of stone 1st of all this is a brilliant biography you produced a masterpiece and if people haven't read it they need to buy it it's a stunning and it's a little tough now it's so much more than the life of stone well it says something about the culture the important about the culture about journalism about the moral life and it's it's beautifully written but set us up who was i have stuff so i have stone was the son of jewish immigrants hill adelphia he was born in philadelphia a 97 in sort of tenement neighborhood but importantly grew up in haddonfield their jersey so a rural town where like a lot of jewish immigrants his parents kept the shop all over him. there are all

towns where there's one jewish family and they kept the shop and his parents were that family in haddonfield new jersey so that meant that he didn't grow up you know in an urban setting he didn't grow up in the lower east side he grew up with a kind of perhaps romantic view of american life because he always felt he was part of it. and you know and then he he went to the university of pennsylvania but dropped out let me just interject there because i love this ad he goes to the university of pens we have a racist reader i mean and the other thing about stone is that it was an age when a journalist was an intellectual imagine but he reads voraciously but most of the books were assigned. journalists a journalist was intellectual but a particular kind of intellectual you know a self-taught intellectual i mean the fact that he had been to college was held against him when he went to work at the philadelphia inquirer you know because it was a working class trade you know wasn't considered a profession it was something most journalists 1st of all you have to really

remember that at the time journalism was a working class trade and it was divided so you had it was called an inside man who would sit at the desk take the news over the phone and write it out and then you had the lead man who would go out to the fire to the arrest you know to the murder so you know when i worked for the new york times we still had that system they would call rewrite work there you go the green river who never left the papers had probably more front page by law then we'd be calling in from you know patterson or islam what are exactly right but you know when they had the advantage if you were the leg man most of them or irish were 1st if they were all men and a lot of them were irish because you wanted somebody whose brother in law might be the fireman rather drop want to be who who's going to give you some information so here comes this jewish kid who dropped out of the university of pennsylvania and he had to prove himself but the thing is that as i say in the book he'd been a newspaper man from when he was 14 he founded is own newspaper in his town and

started selling it on train platforms with his brother so he he always knew he wanted to be a newspaper man he felt after a summer working at the camden courier he felt he was learning more at the courier than he was learning upin so he dropped out what is it that attracted him to journalism well i think part of it is freedom and part of it is curiosity you know . no i mean i'm sure you appreciate this for me too one of the greatest things about being a journalist is it gives you the license to talk to anybody knows he is exactly right and you know if you're somebody like stone who loves very gregarious guy loves to talk to people then it's the ideal profession he writes this is stone if you're going to be a newspaper man or woman you are either going to be honest or consistent if you are really doing your job as an observer it's more important to say what you see than to worry about inconsistency if you're worried about that then you stop looking and if you stop looking you're not a real reporter anymore i have no inhibitions about changing my mind i think that

quote should be on every news country actually because i think 1st of all to be a journalist successfully you need to be a great noticer i always ask kids who come to intern at the nation are you a good noticer and you know i think that's primary but also are you prepared to change your mind are you prepared to change your mind when the facts change his apparently keane's never said. he also said that for him. you redstone remained a real reporter all his life i love i've certainly in the end think of myself as a newspaper reporter even though i'm not a newspaper anymore for him that meant a deeply ingrained skepticism about the claims of power as in his famous quip repeated through many variations that every government is run by liars yes or no office also said all presidents lie and he also said every government is run by liars but what's really dangerous is when they start believing the half they're peddling they start smoking the hash they're peddling you know and i think that's

true and i think there's a there's always been a difference look it's always been a way to advance up the career ladder to become is to not refer to power tell me about it i worked at the premier institution for the exactly and if you don't you become a management problem that's right and stone was a management problem now i'm now the editor of the nation and in 1947 stone who was working for pm and we should talk a little bit about we'll talk about that he came back from being the only reporter who said we should just preface that by saying pm was one of the largest it was it was a great experiment in a newspaper that took no advertiser you know and it was the most left wing paper but it got amazing writers and i was a stone dr seuss dot dot just i bought. 3 g. the photography right there pork why did you know it was like the it was the nursery and of course it collapsed financially lasted 3 years so you know. and this is something that haunts me as a somebody who's involved in

a magazine when it when it collapsed they found 150000 subscription blanks that had been filled out for people who wanted to subscribe at the bottom of a of a closet that nobody ever dealt with so you know it's so important to pay attend attention to the business side of your publication that's what i learned from that but anyway when he he went to palestine yeah it was that at that was at 47 or 48 at 47. well 46 actually with forty's with holocaust survivors who were leaving the d.p. camps and he went on the ship and he went on this journey and he wrote about it for pm every day front page stories for 2 weeks the paper circulation spiked it became profitable for only the 1st time its existence but he had to he had 2 jobs throughout the forty's one was writing for as a columnist for pm and the other was being the washington editor of the nation and he hadn't told frieda kirsch way who was the nation editor that he was going to palestine and so when these when these series started running she fired him so she

even the nation found it would be a management problem. i think from the beginning he understood that the problem was power. and also as i said in the introduction he did not to force his journalism from his political and moral positions which i think is important what i think what stone understood and what i think what i think. far too few journalists do is that there is no such thing as neutral objective journalism you're either an opponent of power or a servant of power and he knew which side he was on you know he writes the search for meaning is very satisfying it's very pleasant but it can be very far from the truth. you have to have the courage to call attention to what doesn't fit even though the readers are going to say well 2 weeks ago you said this so you did and maybe you were wrong then are partly wrong but anyway you've just seen something that doesn't fit and it's your job to report it otherwise you're just

a prisoner of your own preconceptions one of the reasons i report all my books is that i always go out with preconceptions or assumptions that almost always get shattered even when i did my book on the christian right come out of harvard divinity school liberal left wing presbyterian with a kind of atomised or even prejudice towards the christian right that old god shattered and that's what he understood that there was a constant. import the importance of constantly walking out into that reality and testing and test testing your preconceptions and being open to change your mind absolutely let's talk about his rise because he became a very famous figure before the red scare that's right talk about that well and then that's when his integrity really really showed itself well it's interesting because people a little older than us who know stone know him because of stone's weekly which was a one man paper he published in that after he was to have lockless after we got out as

a basement the sixty's and it was the most important voice in america we're talking about that for opposing the vietnam war but well also korea yeah i mean well sort of stuff but the point is they think of him as a rebel and always as a rebel but the fact is he wasn't a he was someone who had enormous success in the establishment in the thirty's and forty's through through the new york post where he worked in the thirty's and through pm but at the post the new york post to have been bought by j. david stern who owned the paper in his hometown haddonfield and also the camden courier and who turned the new york post hard to imagine now. into an organ for the new deal i mean that's why he bought it he boarded to have a sympathetic paper to to roosevelt it in new. york because there were no other papers that were sympathetic to the new deal and stone was there at lead editorial writer and that meant that he could go down to washington he could walk into any federal bureau he could put his feet up on the desk he could ask to use the phone

and expect to be given the right to use the phone he could walk into thomas corcoran who was roosevelt's main fixer he could walk into tommy the corporate office and say you know what's happening tell me what's going on they would look at me because i thought he was totally in some sense on television too well he was on he was on the radio radio radio remember a great deal last week medium that and he was on this he was on this program called meet the press and he right that's right and he and he was on it as a regular he was as familiar as i don't know anybody who you see on you know anderson cooper or chris matthews today he was on all the time maybe david axelrod he was the david axelrod of his day was a pundit yeah except you have something to say. well and what's interesting is he was he was on meet the press all through the late thirty's and he was and when meet the press started on television as a fledgling t.v. program he was a regular guest for the 1st 2 years of the broadcast and then in the mid forty's he

just disappeared when we come back we'll continue our conversation about the investigative journalist stone with d.d. . 'd the world is driven by dream shaped. blueberry thinks. we dared to ask.

when i was told some seemed wrong all right old old just don't know all. the world to get to shape out this day and you can stick out to it and engage with equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart. just to look for common ground. welcome back to on contact we continue our conversation about eye of stone with d.d. so we before the break we spoke about how he was one of the best known journalists

in the country and then what happened well what happened is he became a pariah because of the cold war i mean he he had he had been in new york and then in washington he was the washington bureau chief for the nation and he was he was not and is not a communist not a member of the guy never a member of the congress party interesting only all of his siblings remember. what he had worked for norman thomas in 1928 socialist and presbyterian minister and they go to. princeton graduate resident resident and after. he'd worked on his presidential campaign and i guess partly because he'd done that and partly because he hadn't grown up in new york and had been in city college he was somehow immune to the blandishments of american communism oh though he was sympathetic you know and he and he also was immune to the paranoia of the red scare i mean he would go on stage in new york in the fifty's and he would he would make a joke he'd say he would open his shirt and show red underwear he said i'm where

i'm wearing my red underwear today as you can see what a red eye well he has the great quote which is that i may be a red son of a bitch but i'm keeping thomas jefferson a lot of it yeah exactly so you know they're they're just. discourse in america became shut down and stone was very clear about who he blamed for this because he was he was a pariah before mccarthy ever gave a single speech that's right and let's be clear that this is really the the damage of the red scare wasn't just that it purged. communist within labor unions but it went after anyone with deep integrity and a conscience well it certainly went after anyone anyone with deep integrity and a conscience who was on the left. there weren't many on the right 70 hook was a kind of example of how to survive the red squad that's true that's true but i know i i'm not going to deny that there are people on who have a conscience whose political political views are different from mine but but stone

was he was a pariah because he was on the left and because truman exhibit issued this executive order a sensually trying to outflank the republicans i mean the republicans in 48 started to make an issue of the new deal you know they started to talk about there were the dice hearings or the hollywood 10 you know they were all this stuff happened before mccarthy ever said a word so stone a little interrupt the dies here and with the precursor of the mccarthy yes he was the chairman of the house un-american activities committee right and and he started examining federal employees basically because. if they were for racial integration or against racism or if they were privy to pro-labor that would that would get you in dices sights or you know one of the chapters in the book stone wrote a series for the nation where they talked about this federal loyalty questionnaire and one of the questions was do they have negro friends and that was considered

a mark against you know do do do they have jews who come to their house that was another mark against you so you know that was the atmosphere and and truman issued this executive order which which allowed for loyalty hearings and the interesting thing about that and i don't say this in this book but i do say it in my latest book is that there's no publicly never know how many people withdrew from politics because of the truman loyalty hearings because all of those records were destroyed so we don't know how many people were investigated we don't know how many people had had federal agents show up at their houses. and then decided politics just wasn't worth the risk but it was a shoot chilling effect on our intrepid writes about this yesterday as well and she writes about the f.b.i. just showing up at high schools with a list no evidence no and those teachers not only are instantly removed but they're never hired that's for us that's right and so. so. sorry i'm

just there are so many pieces of this i mean there you know the there's a neo conservative judge whose mother was a new york city teacher who lost her job i mean there's you know there's just this thing goes down through generations and what happened to stone is he was living in paris he was overseas for pm and he came back to american 1951 and. they let him back into the country although i found out from him and from his daughter that he was prepared to essentially for the whole family to go to israel if he couldn't get into the u.s. . but then his passport they wouldn't new his passport so we couldn't leave the country and pm he went broke and then its successor paper went broke in the paper that seceded that went broke and so he was out of a job and also and he didn't know this at the time the f.b.i. opened invent an espionage as an investigation on him and was following him everywhere he went for years for 2 or 3 years they were going through his mail

they're going through his garbage he was under constant surveillance i applied for i have still ins f.b.i. file in 1989 when he died and to give you an idea al capone's f.b.i. file is about 2000 pages long stone's f.b.i. file with 6000 pages long. so he's blacklisted he was silently listed and then what does he do well he decides to go out on his own and he he he talks to another great journalist from the 1920 s. and thirty's george sell these 2 ideas to manage a fascist newsletter called in fact and sell the said you know initials and a great autobiography yes and sell the said you should strike out on your own and so he did and sell these agreed to give him his mailing list and stone had the mailing list from his publisher of the people who bought underground to palestine which was issued in book form and was a bestseller. unlike his next book which was the hidden history of the korean war

which was completely blacklisted renewed well but if you don't know where every important book because he uncovered all sorts of stuff he did he did but it was it was interesting lee the new york post his own paper james wexler who was the editor of the post and who became a friendly witness to mccarthy. he's he was hostile in the sense that he was personally hostile but he made names including the names of people on his own staff and wexler arranged for richard reeves who was later the you know new yorker longtime washington correspondent to write a hit job review of stones will talk a little bit about that book because this is became characteristic of his journalism he had a great line which you quoted here about how you know establishment journalist government figures talk to they know more than i do but a lot of what i know isn't the real it isn't round us i think that's what i so that's my favorite of his was so which is exactly right the washington bureau of the new york times was my nemesis for 20 years so. so he was so

he's locked out if the people in power won't talk to him but in fact he would he argues that's advantageous and what is he he becomes this amazing he studies the dust is this forensic rehab forensics the right word but explain a little bit about. that you know what he uncovered the korean war vietnam he and he does report from israel in i think 48 with and and he's quite critical of the ethnic cleansing i mean imagine in one night as a jew well he noticed it in 1948 but he i think he was pretty quiet about 948 but 956 he was critical of it because he went back to cover the cover the suez war and in the suez war he was here out of the thing and i have tons weekly which he said at 1st when the war began i was cheering for israel because he was a jew who defied very strongly and because he'd remember he. been with holocaust survivors and israel was the only country that would take them in so you know he

was very in that sense very sentimentally attached to israel but what he saw in $56.00 was israel lining itself up with french and british imperialism and eventually i mean not like years later i mean like weeks later he decided he couldn't keep quiet about it and that made him another kind of her that's remarkable at that time we can't. you know. underestimate the courage that to know it took enormous courage and he paid for it he paid for it his whole life so i have stones we would explain that forensic journalism with sure it was so what he meant is there's another thing which we haven't talked about which is he he also started to go deaf in 1970 and you know if you're deaf that's a handicap for journalists is used to going out and talking to people so what he would do is he would go to senate hearings which he would cover but he'd go the next day and say i need can i get the transcript and then because he hadn't been there taking notes he'd read the transcript with incredible care and he could see things that didn't fit as you said in that quote earlier so he would get

a lot of stories just by noticing what nobody else was noticing but also he knew as he said. no government is efficient enough to keep the truth completely hidden so he knew that if you know where to look you can always find things out and he started his own newsletter i have stones weekly in his basement in his basement with his wife as his only. his only help she handled the business side he did the writing it was 4 pages long they started with 4000 subscribers by the time he got to 6000 he was breaking even by the time he got to $10000.00 which only took about 4 years he was profitable. and you know it remain profit when he finishes the out of 700-626-0000 subscribers i talk about some of the stories he broke because he was alone i mean korea viet nam i'm an old well he was in stuff yeah no i think well in korea what he noticed were a couple of things one is he noticed that america kept refusing to end the war. you

know that that he he he noticed from hindsight this looks obvious which is that the terms that are that eisenhower accepted had been offered you know years earlier. america had said no you know they armistice on the 37th of heroin all that so he noticed that america refused to end the war he noticed that he noticed that korean south korean government had lost an election and was incredibly unpopular he'd noticed you know that there were there were economic interests at stake he never pretended that north korea was you know the cooperative commonwealth or you know socialist paradise he thought they were dictators but he also thought that in terms of the he a den of fire this is a as a proxy war before we had that didn't it also wasn't uncover the chemical weapons or something wasn't there no no no ok so so he was he's he's sometimes accused of having said that the u.s. used germ warfare or chemical weapons he never said that he didn't believe it it

was a communist party line at the time which stone disavowed and didn't look just talk quickly about vietnam because we're running out of time so he's probably his most important feat of journalism i mean he he supported the civil rights movement he was he wrote a beautiful. you know kind of tribute to malcolm x. yeah but let's talk about vietnam so the state department in 106465 issues a white paper justifying the escalation and saying this is how we're going to win in vietnam and and stone wrote a whole issue of the weekly tearing it to pieces and essentially he did it by he said you always read a government document from the back to front and in the back. in the appendix were the series of were all the weapons that they'd seized from the viet cong right and he noticed that all these references they'd seize from the mekong none of them were russian or brownies they were american 90 percent of the right yeah if there were so he realized that was happening in the south vietnamese troops were going there were meeting the con they were surrendering and giving up their weapons and and he

thought you know we're we're backing a side that won't fight against the scythe it's extremely committed the other thing he had is a great advantage as he'd been in france during g.m.b. and through so he knew you know he knew that the french had tried this in a way to defeat exactly just close he retires he goes to harvard and he writes a book on socrates yes the trial of socrates which is a very fine which is which is an attack on on plato etc it's not like i'm on top or it's not an attack on the sidelines or attacking plato as as an elitist and as an anti democrat it's not run as a sexist. but it's also it's a great example he taught himself greek exactly to do it it's a great example of a 3rd act you know fitzgerald said american lives have no 2nd acts stone was an establishment journalist he was an independent girl agitator and then he was a bestselling classicists so that's not bad for an old man there you go well there's the model of the moral life right there as far as and the model for what it means to be a journalist thank you so much and so thanks very much for having the great book i

know you spent 10 years on it 20 years 20 years at that level it shows it's a really really fine biography thanks so much that was author and editor of the nation d.d. gun plan about his prize winning book american radical 8 the life and times of items. the world is driven by dreamers shaped by and personal those with.

no dares thinks. we dare to ask. i can't show you my face but i'm going to teach you my story in 9093 this man was sentenced to death. they could charge kenny with capital murder even though he didn't have the gun didn't pull the trigger didn't intend to kill anybody imagine living in your bathroom for that week with his son of a $23.00. i doubt that had to serve to be. confined within the 4 gray walls he fights using. all to help him to leave

death row. your government and our government and all the other major governments of the world know what's going to happen and when it's going to. but they haven't told you and they haven't told me they haven't announced. imagine something as big as the earth . it's going to cause tidal waves or earthquakes volcanoes erupt and it's going to tell. so very well right. my great grandfather's quote. nobody would care about the law or prison so you'd have wallace the shoot of. a

terrible life between the and the. live from the world headquarters of r t america in our nation's capital this is the news with rick sanchez. hello again everybody i'm rick sanchez among the stories that we're going to cover for you on this day greed greed has a lot to do with many countries including the united states is not prepared for the coronavirus and we're going to drill down on this for you even if it means that we have to ruffle a few feathers it's tuesday 5 pm here in washington d.c. we want to welcome those of you watching whether you're in johannesburg or jakarta or around the world whether you're tuning in by satellite or by portable t.v. we thank you for joining our global conversation.