A missed anniversary

If you want to know something about where "Lotus" came from, you have to know of the man described in the December 7 Los Angeles Times.

In a year of headlines about a far-away American war of disputed justification and debates about the erosion of civil liberties, an important anniversary in journalism has slipped quietly by. Fifty years have passed since, defying the anticommunist fervor of the Cold War, a politically radical reporter started a weekly journal that he put out himself and to which he gave his name: I.F. Stone's Weekly.

By the time I became aware of him, age had caused him to slow down some and it had become I.F. Stone's BiWeekly. He quickly became a real hero to me, the inspiration for my notion of committed political journalism.

He was an outsider in that he didn't have the kind of "inside sources" so many reporters rely on and which bind them as much as, if not more than, they free them. Nor did he have "access," that option to get off-the-record quotes from "high government officials" provided you conceal who they are - and provided you stay on their good side for fear of losing that same "access."

No, what Stone did was pour over the public record - Congressional hearings, reports, news releases, press accounts - and thereby repeatedly revealed official duplicity while uncovering what was meant to be covered up but was there for anyone who looked hard enough to see.

I remember that some years ago I was invited to give a talk on "Nonviolence in 20th Century America" to a college history class. In his introduction, the instructor, a subscriber to the version of Lotus I had going at the time, called me "the next I. F. Stone." It was a prediction that didn't pan out - but it still thrills me that someone put me in that same company.