Guerrilla Journalist

Abstract

I. F. Stone took keen interest in discussion among United Nations correspondents at lunch August 7, 1964. The United States had just completed first unilateral American attack on Communist forces in history in retaliation for what it believed was an assault by North Vietnamese gunboats on its destroyers. Stone joined reporters covering United Nations Security Council debate on Gulf of Tonkin affair. The independent left-wing journalist listened as they reminded another that United States had condemned retaliation raids, wherever they occur and by whomever they are committed, only months before. But none mentioned this in their dispatches, he wrote in disgust days later.' Stone assailed press repeatedly in his own reports on Tonkin affair, accusing his colleagues of cynically hiding known facts from public. Media watchers years later would come to share his disappointment. Why should it have taken l.F. Stone to put lie to so much of propaganda from State, Pentagon, and White House? Ron Dorfman, editor of Chicago Journalism Review, complained of media's performance on Vietnam War.2 He cited Gulf of Tonkin affair in particular as case in which Stone, in his one-man newspaper, I.F. Stone's Weekly, out-reported grand institutions of press. The chimerical battle of August 4, 1964, on dark seas half world away from Washington, had given President Lyndon B. Johnson excuse he needed both to show his mettle as presidential election approached and to get Congress to cede to him unprecedented presidential war powers. In escalation that followed Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, fifty-eight thousand American troops would die and as many as three million Vietnamese. The sheer quantity of human blood spilled down through years would come to invest Tonkin incident with enormous significance. CBS's Fred Friendly called it the lost opportunity that must haunt print as well as broadcast journalists.3 The names Tonkin and Stone became linked for posterity thanks primarily to 1973 film by Jerry Bruck, I.F. Stone's Weekly, which used Stone's Tonkin coverage as its centerpiece.4 Its view of Stone and Tonkin would become standard. In memorial to Stone on his death in 1989, New York Times wrote, Mr. Stone came equipped with superb nose for fakery. He was thus able to challenge at outset all sorts of hokum-such as puffed-up battle used to justify famous Tonkin Gulf resolution.5 While Stone may mean little to young generation of journalists in 1990s, he remains venerated figure among many journalists who worked during Vietnam War years.6 No less journalistic icon than CBS anchor emeritus Walter Cronkite hailed Stone as a blue-print of honesty and integrity, and, at iconoclastic end of scale, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins proclaimed Stone one of my greatest heroes. 7 Stone practiced journalism with combination of political commitment and dedication to facts that impelled him to challenge his government's policy in Vietnam. Media analysts-including sociologists, historians, and self-critical journalists themselves-have traced American mass media's general abandonment of an independent, skeptical, watchdog role vis A vis federal government from World War II through much of cold war. The merits of skepticism and independent investigation did not powerfully reassert themselves in American journalism until late 1960s and early 1970s.8 Many have faulted kind of tunnel vision imposed by strictures of journalism, especially narrow interpretation of journalistic concept of objectivity that encouraged over-reliance on government authority and whatever official hokum it dished out.9 On matters of foreign policy, many, too, have identified patriotic bias among objective reporters that resulted during cold war in fundamental support for established anti-Communist order. …