remember Izzy stuffing those mailings himself, at the mailbox which must have been the one at the corner of Glenbrook Drive and Macomb Street, Northwest DC. Already in his mid-sixties at the time, with eyeglass lenses the width of hockey pucks, Stone seemed ready to say farewell to his public. But an undergrad got approving laughs in the hall when he asked, “What are your plans for the future?”
Stone charmed by saying, “Well you know, I never did get my B.A., so I was thinking of going to school and studying the classics.” The large crowd hooted at this coy bluff, but actually he meant it. His next febrile years would yield his last scoop, The Trial of Socrates, published in 1979. I don’t think he expected the question at B.U. that day. I know the audience didn’t expect his answer.
Stone had a voice dripping in irony, and sounded like W.C. Fields. After I moved to Washington some years later, I went on a warm spring afternoon to the MacArthur cinema before it became a CVS pharmacy. They were showing a grade B Soviet film, and I went because I’d never seen one. Once in the theater, I noticed there were no more than six or seven people in the audience. The film was pretty crappy, and had elements of science fiction, with dinosaurs and space ships. I can’t find any reference to it in lists of Soviet movies of the time.
Stepping into the blinding sun from the afternoon’s divertissement, I saw a member of the audience fumbling with a pay phone at the nearby gas station. He couldn’t see the coins in his hand, and had to feel around the edges to see if they were dimes or quarters.
“Mr. Stone, may I assist you in any way?” I asked. This sturdy little man was trying to call his wife for a ride home, but he took my offer and let me drive him to his house, a few blocks away. He invited me in for lemonade and an hour’s chat, and signed over a copy of his 1978 book Underground to Palestine. A few house moves later and a little discolored from mold, the book still stands on my shelf. The inscription says, “To Dan Whitman in gratitude, from I.F. Stone, Washington, DC, 5/7/83.” Stone probably didn’t expect to meet me again, but he did want me to know his views on Palestine.
A couple of years later I was working for something called Delphi Research Associates. Like Voltaire’s version of the Holy Roman Empire, it was neither Delphic, nor did much research go on there, but it was made up of associates. Walking to work one morning, I crossed Stone on the Connecticut Avenue sidewalk and stopped to say hello. He smiled affably when I reminded him of the drive home and the Soviet movie a couple of years before. “Yeees...” he said in his W.C. Field cadences, “That film about a dinosawwwr... and a boy who loved him.” Stone remembered the film as schlock. “What are you doing these days?” he asked, and I tried to describe. “Delphi!” he frowned. “The Oracle of Delphi. Sold secrets to the Persians.” He turned away in disgust, and I never saw him again.
All governments, all authority, were suspect in his eyes. Alone, he unmasked possible fraud in Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Having no “sources” in any government department, he used only the Library of Congress for his sleuthing, and went about matching contradictory statements on the record. He ambushed Walter Cronkite once at a cocktail party when he knew the video camera was running: “So, Walter, what do you think of this Gulf of Tonkin nonsense? Bunch of crap, wouldn’t you say, Arthur?” Cronkite tried to inch away, but Stone pursued him: “Surely crap, don’t you think, Walter? Yes? No?” It’s the only time I ever saw Cronkite lose his cool on camera and hide for cover.
If Stone had friends, he didn’t cultivate them. He went by a principle which more journalists and diplomats might adopt: “Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” His own near blindness probably worked to his advantage in perfecting skepticism.
Going backwards in time, I relive the lecture series Stone gave in 1979 after the publication of his book on Socrates. He despised Socrates for weakening the Athenian state just for a matter of fastidious self promotion. Gaston Hall was the place to be that fall for his series of three talks. Tickets were being scalped for steep prices. Like “l’Affaire” in the 1910s in Paris, the Stone lectures were merely referred to as “The Lectures – have you been?” And if you hadn’t at least made the effort to be there, you were dropped from friends’ lists. I did attend one.
I go in reverse chronological order for a reason: I.F. Stone worked that way. He took on a controversy from 399 BC, and invented a new genre which still goes without a title – “retrospective prophesy,” you might call it. Stone largely ignored the future, and expected little from it. He would surely have been appalled at the Truthism and special effects we live by today. Even the agile humorists who live by the hypocrisy of others.
“No friend but the Truth,” I think he would say. “And don’t take anyone’s word for it, even and especially not Mr. Truth, the odious Socrates.”
Truth seeks friends still, but lurks as a feral dog in the alley, living by tossed scraps from reluctant donors.
Amazing Grace and... a Touch of Vodou
May 9, 2011
February 29, 2004, Jean Bertrand Aristide fled Haiti as rebels advanced on Port-au-Prince. The same day in Washington, I came down with a nasty fever. A week later I was one hundred percent blind, with a fifteen percent chance of recovery in the right eye only. Coincidence, you might say.
Disclosure: early in 2001, as spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, I contradicted Aristide on Haitian radio as instructed and permitted by my bosses. It had to do with rectifying a point of fact. The night of March 5, Molotov cocktails came over the wall to my quarters in the Turgeot neighborhood of the capital. I guess it was meant as a lesson, but with these things I am a slow learner.
The day of Aristide’s departure in 2004, I watched with Haitian ex-pat friends in Washington as the drama unraveled leading to his ouster. That same night I knew something was off. Monday morning I made it to work, but took the rest of the day in bed. Wednesday things began to look cloudy, and by Friday I had no sight at all. The fever wouldn’t break. Doctors didn’t want to lower the temperature with meds, as that would introduce a variable and make it harder to get a real diagnosis. My eyes burned in their sockets, and something called angle collapse resulted. Imagine a romantic evening with chestnuts in the fire, but consider it from the point of view of the chestnut.
In the unlikely event this should ever happen to you, have a Princess phone in the room: after a week in bed I felt my way around the buttons on the phone, and dialed 411 for a taxi to the emergency ward. Imagine the thirst if you should ever, pardon the expression, burn in hell. And imagine Satan himself telling you, “No water, it might lead to a false thermometer reading.”
If the ophthalmologist ever looks in your eye and says, “Oh wow,” this is not likely to bring good news. If he calls all the residents on duty to come over and have a look, you can count yourself cooked. The docs all along K Street puzzled over the anomaly, and sent me to the parasitologist, the rheumatologist, the immunologist, the cardiologist, the oncologist. I think they had support group meetings to keep up their own morale in the case. CT scanners whirred and blood labs spun. Medical doctors become very disconcerted if they cannot even name the condition they’re dealing with.
I had out-of-range Westergren — whatever that is — and absolute Monocytes. The Neutrophils didn’t look proper, and iron, at 20, was perilously low. The good news was that my mediastinal structures appeared normal, and there was no pleural effusion. Hey, take gifts wherever you can find them. Three weeks later, I received a statement in the mail. I couldn’t read it at the time, but it said, “Blood culture positive for Alpha Hemolytic Strep,” something I was told could lead to, well, death. No hard feelings at this late date for the late delivery.
Months later, the rheumatologist admitted that after he’d seen me, he was creeped out and wanted to wash his hands many times. He had said to me at the time, “We think it’s a virus.” I countered, “We both know that you say ‘virus’ when you have no idea of what’s going on.” He admitted this and we had a good laugh.
You can learn from adversity,