it is long run by liars but what's really dangerous is when they start believing that half their pedals they start smoking with as 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 prefer to power tell me about it i worked at the premier institution for exactly and then if you don't you become a management problem you 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 we should talk a little bit about we'll talk about that. the great investigative journalist i have stone remains the template for what journalism should be he was a fearless opponent of mccarthyism and the scourge of official liars as d.d. gotten plant puts it in his biography of stone he did what few in his 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.f. stone and his legacy is. gotten planned 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 in 1007 and sort of tenement neighborhood but importantly grew up in haddonfield new jersey so a rural town where like a lot of jewish immigrants his parents kept the shop all over america 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 like also journalist 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 arrests 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 a probably more front page by law. 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 of they were all men and a lot of them were irish because you wanted somebody whose brother in law might be the fireman right a 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 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 to very gregarious guy love 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 has 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 at 4 pm and we should talk a little bit about we'll talk about that he came back from being the only reporter recently which is just preface that by saying pm was one of the largest it was it was a great experiment in a newspaper that took no advertising and it was the most left wing paper but it got amazing writers and i was a stone dr seuss dot dot just 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 then 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 and 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 the 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 divorce 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 the after he was to have lockless afterward out as a basemen 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 it's hard to imagine now. into an organ for the new deal i mean that's why he bought it he bought a tab a sympathetic paper too 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 spots on television too well he was on he was on the radio radio radio remember gradients 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 that 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 on 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 just taking the oath all the alternative all content that turkey and q. because i say the stage shows the water pump air cold real choices i believe binary choice and only choices if you say you know about. are available and most binary thing is not a chunk of the states too small to provide a new architecture revive the call ted to start negotiations with. israel then don't invite you to negotiate then bites to think about what's being put on the table.

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 a not a communist not a member of the guy never a member of the congress party interesting only all of his siblings remember a lot of what he had worked for norman thomas in 1920 the great 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 although 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 where i'm wearing my red underwear today as you can see what a red eye well he has that great quote what is that i may be a red son of a bitch but i'm keeping thomas jefferson a lot of. so you know there there just. discourse 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 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 exit 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 you know this he was the chairman of the house un-american activities committee right 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. 4 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 is 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 instructor 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 p.m.s. 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 stones f.b.i. file with $6000.00 pages long so he's blacklisted he was silent 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 who are just an anti-fascist newsletter called in fact and sell these 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 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 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 well you know what is the power of it and read us i think that's what i saw 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 read forensics the right word but explain a little bit about. 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 at a thing and i've since weekly which he said i 1st when the war began i was cheering for israel because he was a jew who identified very strongly and because he'd remember he'd 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 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 perhaps remark at that time we can't. you know. underestimate the courage 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 well there's another thing which we haven't talked about which is he he also

started to go deaf in 1937 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 official 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 students 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 if it remain profitable when he finishes it a subsequent 626-0000 subscribers i talked 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 370 and 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 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 authorities they were american 90 percent of the right yeah but 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 as a great advantage is 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 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 the top or it's not an attack on sight that's right attack on 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 pariah 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 thanks so much that was author and editor of the nation d.d. gun plan about his prize winning book american radical the life and times of items .

i can't show you my face but i'm going to teach you must story in 9093 this man was sentenced to death. they get charged 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 which is the end of the 23 years. i've been out that had to be. confined within 4 gray

walls the front it's using. turn on to help him to leave this room. in his community there are people who believe that it's ok to suffer actual food on my table it's really hard there are no jobs and you see that i've got kids and ask and as a parent. i can come up with lots of arguments there's a lot of conflict in the game between the 2 most of the conflict i would say overall is around money and most of their money is made. close one on each other's cosimo each other is good business the state of california alone makes $6000000000.00 a year of the prison complex just to get some 20 a life where. you don't care and cares about your so your care might anything.

live from the world headquarters of the r.t. america in our nation's capital this is the news with rick sanchez. oh again everybody i'm rick sanchez it is tuesday here in washington d.c. and we want to welcome those of you watching us from warsaw to wellington and around the world whether you're tuning in by satellite on t.v. or on portable t.v. the app we thank you for joining our global conversation today we learned the united states has surpassed china in the number of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic and on this very day interestingly enough perhaps by no coincidence the united states and russia united states and russia.