I had a strange journey through the wilds of the radical and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s yesterday morning that I had not anticipated taking. Here’s part 2 of that journey.
Radical journalist I.F. Stone was an investigative journalist who spoke truth to power during his entire professional life, but especially from 1953-1971 while he published his newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly. He was the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, and at times during his life was involved with communist leaning political groups.
Izzy Stone had a hearing problem, so he did much of his reporting based on written documents, which gave him time to dig into the background of stories that other people missed. He was the earliest journalist to realize that President Lyndon Johnson had been lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident tat led to escalation of the Vietnam War. He also documented that nuclear testing could be monitored fairly easily around the world by using geological siesmic sensing stations.
I was first introduced the work of I.F. Stone, oddly enough, through a musical setting for string quartet and the recorded voice of I.F. Stone that had been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. How It Happens (The Voice of I.F. Stone) was composed and assembled by composer Scott Johnson. When I heard the movement “It Raged” on the Kronos album Released/Unreleased, I was blown away by the expressive quality of Stone’s voice, the message that he had to say, and the wonderful way that his sampled voice fit in with Johnson’s music.
Here’s a short excerpt from the Cold War section of it:
And here is the It Raged movement:
I really got to know and understand Stone, however, when I was on the faculty at West Virginia University and I found an old black & white 16mm film in the library from 1973 called “I.F. Stone’s Weekly.” In it, the filmmaker presented a history of Stone’s career, much of it in Stone’s own words. Ever since then, I’ve been periodically trying to find a digital copy of the film. And while I could occasionally find information about the film online, there was never a VHS, DVD, or streaming release. (Here’s Roger Ebert’s review of the film from back in 1973 when it was released.)
Until…
Yesterday I was looking for a video of Lady Gaga singing an old Phil Ochs Vietnam War era song. And when I found it, the list of related videos on the side of my screen showed multiple streaming copies of the movie “I.F. Stone’s Weekly”!
So, thanks to Lady Gaga, here is a great film about a great journalist that has been unavailable for way too long. While I don’t anticipate anyone trying to take this film down from YouTube, I might suggest that if you are really interested in it, you might download a copy.
Set aside some time in the near future to watch and listen to this marvelous film.