Word: stoning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...speech-making attire, a three-piece serge suit with wide stripes and wider lapels, I.F. Stone looks rather like an old Jewish tailer from the Bronx, uncomfortably slicked up for his grandson's Bar Mitzvah. But when he begins to talk, eyes twinkling with more than a little demonic mischief behind utterly round, steel-rimmed bifocals, the alte zeda image evaporates...
...thing, Stone talks dirty (not vulgar dirty, witty-engaging dirty). But mainly, as one shaggy-haired iconoclast admitted to me after his last Cambridge talk, "he comes on incredibly hip." Always advertised as something of a curiosity piece, a radical from the Twenties or Thirties now overripe on the bough, Izzy unabashedly foils his detractors five times out of six. Socialist platitudes or peacenik cliches simply aren't his style...
...Achhh. I've known Izzy for 30 years," a disenchanted fellow-traveler whispered to me while Stone was talking in Kirkland House, "The guy follows Moscow's party line right down to the commas." Phooey. Stone has as much disdain for Communists as he has for Democrats or Republicans. He's about as eager as a local ladies auxiliary for the violent overthrow of the government...
...fact is, Stone has had such a long, painful look at the bowels of democracy that he's really almost sympathetic to officials, caught in the snare of political power. He sees them imprisoned in their roles--whether in Washington or Moscow or Peking--and, participating in government by concealment, scared to death to talk. "A flaming radical couldn't be happy in government unless he planned to burn himself on the steps of the treasury...
...Stone's quick to tell you that he's been a self-styled radical since he read Jack London in 1922. Not too long thereafter he joined the Socialist Party; he became a member of the Socialist executive committee in New Jersey before he was old enough to vote (He'd have liked to come to Harvard, but graduated forty-ninth in a class of fifty...