Biography of United States journalist I. F. Stone

This video from the USA is called The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone.

By Phil Shannon in Australia:

A serious writer of the left

12 July 2008

All Governments Lie! The Life & Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone
By Myra Macpherson
Scribner, 2008
564 pp, $29 (pb)

Why was the prominent left-wing journalist, I. F. Stone, never called before senator Joe McCarthy’s rabid red-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the Cold War 1950s? “What was McCarthy going to do to me? Expose me?? It would be like exposing Gypsy Rose Lee. I was exposing myself every week anyway.”

Stone’s response may have been jocular from a journalist who had never hidden his disgust with the manufactured Cold War “red scare”, but the battle waged by Stone against dissent-stifling witch-hunts was serious and courageous as Myra MacPherson’s biography of Stone, All Governments Lie!, shows.

Born in 1907 in Philadelphia to Jewish exiles from czarist Russia, the teenage Isador Feinstein dumped the life of a petit-bourgeois shopkeeper in the family business for the world of left-wing flavoured books and ideas. He found a home in the handful of liberal newspapers that questioned the depression-era status quo, where he supported, but criticised from the left, president Franklin Roosevelt’s reformist New Deal.