Bier de Stone (blanketsin.com) wrote,
Bier de Stone
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It's time for a novel update of...

The life and times of I.F. Stone

You know those web sites that impel the common web surfer to register to view stuff; and the way many of the web sites peeps register for ask for information that describes who you are? Some of them ask things like "favorite quote", and whenever I see that, I am at a lost of all the quotes I've heard or read. This book I'm reading is filled with so much good stuff I wish I could just vegitate on it without any worries of speeding my way thru the book.
True, Belfrage's case is more difficult; he neither confessed, recanted or informed. But the difference clarifies the real issue which must be found if freedom of the press is to be preserved. Congress, under the First Amendment, may make no law abridging freedom of the press... The crucial question is whether a Congressional committee can do by indirection under the guise of investigation what it clearly could not do directly.
       -I.F. Stone Weekly 9 May & 30 May 1953

So when Izzy turned up at a state department press conference to ask Hull whether President Roosevelt had personally approved the Peyrouton appointment, he was hardly an unknown quantity.
Yet when Izzy rose to speak, the secretary of state interrupted him. "What is your name?" asked Hull. "Stone," Izzy replied. Hull: "I thought it was. You have some other name, too, have you not? Izzy answered again: "That is my name, Mr. Secretary. "Unabashed, Hull said simply, "I thought so. Go ahead."
-PAGE 188

His efforts in support of the Spanish Republic were duly noted, as was an informant's description: "The Director [of FBI] will recall that Stone is not his correct name. He is of Jewish descent and [redacted] advises that he's very arrogant, very loud spoken, wears thick, heavy glasses and is most obnoxious personally."
-PAGE 189

... he spent the war years in Queens living on the generosity of his brother hanns, a composer working in Hollywood*, and on a meager stipend he [of Gerhart Eisler] received from the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee committee
* Hanns Eisler's score for Hangmen also Die was nominated for an Oscar. The film, dramatizing the 1942 assassination of the Nazi governor of Czechoslovakia, Reinhard Heydrich, was the only Hollywood screenplay written by Eisler Longtime friend and lyricist Bertolt Brecht. The fellow refugee Fritz Lang directed.
-PAGE 224

FBI director handwritten scrawl: "The them song of Eisler when he spoke in N.Y. Thurs. night. I wonder who writes whose material! H."
-PAGE 225

"Washington under Truman is a capital of confusion, incompetence, and reaction,"
-NATION 1947 I.F. Stone

"I cannot for the life of me, hard as I have tried, see what difference it makes at this stage whether the Democrats win or the Republicans."
-I.F. Stone

The choices facing anyone who still believed in the values of the New Deal in the fall of 1948 were neither simple nor attractive.
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