I.F. Stone

Abstract

The chapter gives an overview of Stone’s career leading to his isolation in the McCarthyist period of the 1950s and the launching of his independent newsletter I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It discusses in detail the relevant content of two books: The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950–1951 (1952) and The Trial of Socrates (1988). The arguments in both books are very precisely related to documented facts and events from highly reputable sources, the processes that are generating those facts on the ground, and the relationships that are driving the processes. In Korea, it identifies Stone’s analysis that the USA in 1951 had demonstrably lost its secure capacity to deliver an atomic weapon using bomber aircraft as the argument and revelation that were profoundly threatening to US political and military elites, and which led to twenty-eight publishers rejecting the book before it was finally accepted by one small publisher. Stone continued a successful journalistic career as an independent publisher and public intellectual through the social unrest and anti-war agitation of the 1960s and 1970s. Socrates is presented as a valedictorian exploration by Stone of the philosophical arguments for freedom of speech, and it deploys the same journalistic method of document analysis that he used in Korea. It is a very detailed account of the philosophical issues in the trial and verdict, placed in their socio-political context. Stone is not sympathetic to Socrates’ philosophy or actions in the trial, but condemns the verdict and death sentence. The chapter considers the evaluations by scholars of Stone’s arguments in both books and notes that these books were condemned by political opponents of his views at the time they were published but endorsed by subsequent scholarship.

I.F. Stone, born Isadore Feinstein in 1907 and known as Izzy, became one of North America’s most highly regarded journalists of the twentieth century. His death in 1989 was front-page news in the New York Times (which called him an “iconoclast of journalism”), the Washington Post (“a dogged investigator and a clever and precise writer”), the Philadelphia Inquirer (“Like Sunday doubleheaders and the five-cent cigar, I.F. Stone was an American institution”), the Los Angeles Times (“the conscience of investigative journalism”), and dozens of smaller newspapers. ¹

In 1999, New York University asked a panel of thirty-six eminent journalists, academics, and historians whose political views ranged across the spectrum to select the top one hundred feats of twentieth-century journalism. Stone was ranked number sixteen for his independent publication I.F. Stone’s Weekly (1953–1967). ²

Stone was raised mainly within the intensely Jewish community in and around Philadelphia by parents who were poor immigrants. ³ His father started as a peddler; the parents then became successful shopkeepers but lost everything in the 1930s Depression. His siblings became journalists and members of the Communist Party and, although from the 1930s he was an outspoken critic of Stalinism and the soviet system, he didn’t embrace anti-communism as most other left-liberals did. ⁴ Stone consistently identified the intellectual pillars of his life and work as Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx. ⁵ Locating himself within the broad non-sectarian left of US politics, in the 1930s he was well-connected to sources high up in the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a prominent political commentator on radio and in the press.

The advent in the late 1940s of the Cold War and, from the early 1950s, the McCarthyist persecution of leftists and liberals in the media, arts and government created a general climate of political fear and intimidation and was brutal in its impact on “blacklisted” individuals. Stone became increasingly isolated in Washington. This was also a period of corporate consolidation in the newspaper industry that led to the successive closures or change in political orientation of publications he had worked for. For several years after the war he travelled to and reported from Europe, India and Palestine/Israel, publishing Underground to Palestine in 1946 and This is Israel in 1948. From the northern fall of 1950 till mid-1951 he reported from Paris on the Korean War for L’Observateur (later called Le Nouvel Observateur), exciting “a greater stir in Paris diplomatic circles than anything else the magazine had ever carried.” ⁶ It was the book that flowed from this reporting – The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950–1951, first published in 1952 – that generated his “pariah” status in the USA, as he was widely accused of being “basically a Soviet apologist.” ⁷ Mainstream newspapers largely ignored the new book, in contrast to their positive reviews of his previous work. The exception was the New York Post, which labelled it “a piece of bland and heavily documented rubbish …. Stone’s contribution to American journalism today is that of a man who thinks up good arguments for poor Communist positions.” ⁸ That review by Richard Rovere – himself a former Communist turned avid anti-communist – was characterised by long-time Post columnist Murray Kempton as “a hit job”; the Post Editor James Wechsler wrote to Rovere to thank him for his “effort in a noble cause. Too many of our silly readers will be quoting Stone as gospel unless this job is done.” ⁹ The press response to the book – both the widespread silences and the isolated attacks – bore testament to the potentially wide readership for Stone’s reportage and the influence of his analyses.

At this point Stone was professionally isolated, unemployed, and effectively unemployable as a journalist:

“My father had a recurrent nightmare,” Jeremy Stone remembered. In the dream, some “they” – faceless and nameless – “just wouldn’t let him work.” One winter afternoon after the [Daily Compass] closed, Stone sat at his old desk off the now empty city room on the third floor of the Compass building, formerly the Star building and before that the PM building, watching the snow fall on the corner of Hudson and Duane streets. He had gone from the inner councils of the New Deal to the outer darkness of American politics. No daily newspaper in America would hire him. He was forty-four years old. He began to type: “I feel for the moment like a ghost.” ¹⁰

In 1953, to support himself and his family and continue working as a journalist, he and his wife Esther launched I.F. Stone’s Weekly with a subscription list of 5,300. ¹¹ They continued publishing for nineteen years until Izzy retired from regular reporting for health reasons in 1971, at which time the Weekly’s circulation was 70,000 and Stone had recovered his iconic status as an independent intellectual, writer and journalist. Denied access to government officials, the hallmark of his work became rigorous and extensive documentary research, incisive analysis and a strong editorial interpretation of the information he reported. For later generations of bloggers and non-mainstream journalists, he also embodies success for the entrepreneurial spirit of fighting and winning against the odds. Apart from his own books drawing on his Weekly writings, there are two anthologies of selected reports from the Weekly. ¹²

I want to consider in detail two books by Stone: The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950–1951 (1952) and The Trial of Socrates (1988). The former was rejected by twenty-eight publishers before being picked up by Monthly Review Press, ¹³ a small New York socialist publisher that also published a second edition in 1969, but it was mostly out of print and unavailable before getting a mainstream publisher in 1988. The Trial of Socrates, on the other hand, was a popular triumph: it went on sale in January 1988 and four months later entered the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, where it stayed for nine weeks with total sales of almost 100,000. ¹⁴ Hidden History exemplifies the methodological approach that made Stone’s journalism such a disciplined research and analytical exercise, while Socrates explores the philosophical foundation for that approach and for Stone’s perspective on intellectual accountabilities.

The Korean War (1950–1952), in a surprisingly short period of time, set in place the structure of the Cold War that officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but for some analysts continues as the basic template for US diplomatic and military policy regionally and globally. The 1953 armistice still awaits final resolution as either a full peace treaty between independent states or reunification of the two Korean states. Although the suffering, loss of life, and economic and physical destruction it caused were immense, at the same time it rapidly became “the forgotten war”. As Cumings put it:

The Korean War, more than any other war in modern times, is surrounded by residues and slippages of memory …. With Korea there is less a presence than an absence; thus the default reflexive American name: “the forgotten war”. ¹⁵

Stone’s analysis of the progress of the war has stood the test of time. Bruce Cumings, the leading US historian of the Korean War, wrote in his preface to the 1988 edition: “Hidden History is above all a truthful book, and it remains one of the best accounts of the American role in the Korean War.” ¹⁶ Cumings cited and praised Stone’s research and analysis in his own scholarship on Korea, war, and journalism. ¹⁷ Eisenhower’s biographer Stephen Ambrose in 1971 wrote: “It took guts to publish this book in the McCarthy era.” ¹⁸ Apart from such scholars, there were also contemporary journalists who endorsed Stone’s analysis. The New York Post’s Murray Kempton wrote: “The Korean War book is a very good book. His analysis of the progress of the war was impeccable. Izzy read the war better than any of the rest of us.” ¹⁹ Korean War correspondent for United Press Rutherford Poats described the book as “no blind-ideologue Communist crap but a very sophisticated analysis by a fellow who can see all sides. Stone presented a well-developed alternative view.” ²⁰

The book was reviewed in contemporary scholarly journals, where Cold War partisan alignments were sometimes evident. Ziff was contemptuous, finding the book “tiresome and tedious” but “tak[ing] little away from the argument that General MacArthur’s analysis was the correct one and that the war in eastern Asia could have been ended expeditiously [by waging air and naval war on China] while the overwhelming preponderance of attack power was still in our hands.” ²¹ By implication, Ziff is confirming Stone’s account that a major debate was underway in the USA over whether China should be attacked, but more importantly, that the USA lost its strategic military superiority over its Communist foes as a result of the Korean War. F.C. Jones in London penned a withering caricature of the book as a “dark conspiracy” not worth publishing, and opined that “[t]his book is not history, hidden or otherwise. Mr Stone is an American journalist …”. ²² However in Utah, Colonel Charles Sweeney wrote an extended and supportive appraisal, probing Stone’s main arguments and praising him as “a skilled reporter, endowed with initiative, resource, courage and, what is more rare, a capacity to see both sides of a question.” ²³

Twenty years after the war ended and during the final years of the Vietnam War, Park found it “appropriate” to go back and review the 1969 second printing because “some people, particularly anti-war groups, believe or suspect that there is a close parallel between the Vietnam war and the Korean war.” ²⁴ He accused Stone of unconvincing conspiracy theories about the commencement of hostilities and preferred to assess “the MacArthur propaganda machinery” as “unreliable and inefficient” rather than “extremely shrewd and rational.” Sang-Seek Park acknowledged that Stone’s “analysis of official statements and news reports is truly ingenious and intuitive” but nonetheless concluded that “the author’s journalistic intuition has done more harm than good to his painstaking effort to search the origins of the Korean war.” ²⁵ For both Jones and Park, the epithet “journalism” is sufficient to damn the quality of the analysis.

The best-known books by other journalists about the Korean War are This kind of war: a study in unpreparedness, ²⁶ The Korean War, ²⁷ and The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. ²⁸ Their main focus tends to be the unhappy experience of the infantry in bitter conflict and material hardship as the fighting waged up and down the Korean peninsula over the first eighteen months of the war before the stalemate set in. While variously critical of US military unpreparedness and strategy in the war, and with diverse views on General Macarthur’s role and the political conflicts in Washington, they shared a visceral anti-Communism and common belief in the righteousness of the US and UN engagement in the war. Clay Blair’s The Forgotten War; America in Korea, 1950–1953 ²⁹ similarly took the righteousness of anti-Communism for granted but was focused on and critical of the policy decisions and conflicts in Washington among the civilian and military leaderships.

Stone was not the only journalist who had difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the war. Reginald Thompson, author of Cry Korea (1951, 2009), was the Korean war reporter for the UK Daily Telegraph for four months in late 1950. Although “not entirely unsympathetic to American policy”, he couldn’t find a US publisher for his book that documented “the appalling suffering of soldiers, civilians and, indeed, journalists …. [c]ivilian men, women and children were being slaughtered as the US-led forces with their overwhelming firepower indulged in their ‘mad, senseless journey of wanton destruction’.” ³⁰ Reports and books by Western journalists also documented the experience of war from the perspective of the North Koreans and their allies, notably This Monstrous War by Wilfred Burchett ³¹ and I saw the Truth in Korea by Alan Winnington. ³² Burchett was a well-regarded war correspondent from World War II (reporting for the UK Daily Express, he was the first journalist into Hiroshima after the atomic bomb blast) and the Ce Soir correspondent in Korea, where he was regarded as a reliable and accurate source of reportage by UN officials and other journalists, ³³ but his and Winnington’s work had very limited English-language circulation beyond left-wing milieux.

Stone wrote Hidden History in Paris and New York and didn’t visit Korea himself. His sources were, firstly, the reports by journalists he respected in major US and UK newspapers, including the New York Times, The Times, and the Daily Telegraph, and secondly, official documents released by the various arms of the US military in Washington and Tokyo, and by US government departments and the White House. In other words, his sources were politically mainstream and/or official, and he himself described the book as “a study in war propaganda, in how to read newspapers and official documents in wartime [and] the facts to be found in the official accounts themselves if texts are carefully examined and reports collated.” ³⁴

The overall argument of the book is that General Macarthur in Tokyo, in concert with the defeated Nationalist Chinese forces under Chiang Kai-shek, Japanese collaborationist Koreans under Syngman Rhee in the south, and right-wing Republicans in Washington, were opposed to “appeasement” of Communist governments and forces in the Pacific. Specifically, it argues that these interests were seeking a war with the newly victorious Communist regime in China, in which nuclear weapons would probably need to be used in order to achieve victory against overwhelming battle-hardened infantry forces. Subsequently China, which had been “lost” to the Communists, would be regained by the Nationalist forces invading from their refuge in Taiwan (then Formosa), and the Soviet-supported North Korean regime would be destroyed, leading to a reunified Korea under US ally Syngman Rhee. This was an ambitious set of goals, to say the least, given that at the onset of the war neither South Korea nor Formosa were within the US Asian Defence Perimeter in the Pacific outlined by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in January 1950. ³⁵ The book presents evidence and argument that the Macarthur-aligned forces were devious in the extreme in pursuit of their goals against President Truman, who was viewed, at least initially, by Stone as “as honourable and decent a specimen of that excellent breed, the plain small-town American, as one could find anywhere in the USA.” ³⁶

For our purposes, there are three important analyses and arguments in Hidden History. The first is that the outbreak of war on 25 June 1950 was not the treacherous surprise to South Korea and the USA that it was purported to be, and that indeed the invasion by the North may have been a response to deliberate South Korean provocation. At the very least the prospect of war in Korea was being openly canvassed in US military and civilian leadership circles. The second is about inconsistent and misleading combat reports coming out of UN Tokyo headquarters in late 1950 about Macarthur’s advances and retreats in northern Korea in response to what Stone characterises as restrained, defensive Chinese engagement. Macarthur’s aim, according to Stone, was to manoeuvre President Truman into authorising the use of nuclear weapons against China to displace the new Communist government; the atom bomb was argued to be the only available instrument to avoid catastrophic military humiliation by irresistible “Chinese hordes.” The third is that a successful challenge to USAF air superiority in North Korea in late 1951 meant that the USA no longer had a secure delivery vehicle for a nuclear weapon. This had huge ramifications for broader US foreign policy in Europe and the Cold War because the atom bomb “was no longer a threat with which either side could hope to dictate terms” and “Western Europe’s possible fate was written out in advance in Korea’s blood.” ³⁷

Taken together, these arguments present the Korean War as an unsuccessful overreach by the USA that forged the template for a US foreign policy based on calculated destabilisation and a “fear of peace,” which needlessly sacrificed the lives of thousands of US soldiers and millions of Korean civilians. ³⁸ It’s not hard to see why this was a threatening analysis to US government and conservatives in its year of publication, while the war still raged and the USA was trying to persuade the Europeans to upgrade the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) from diplomatic to full-scale military collaboration. Cumings argues that this destabilisation strategy was played out repeatedly in subsequent Cold War proxy conflicts including Vietnam, ³⁹ and arguably since then against other opponents in Latin America, the Middle East, and West Asia.

Regarding the question of which side started the war, Stone opens the book with a discussion of detailed evidence that the USA at the very least anticipated the strong possibility of an attack across the border by North Korean forces. This undermined the Pearl Harbour analogy of an unprovoked, duplicitous attack being drawn by anti-Communist Republicans in Washington and Macarthur in Tokyo, who were critical of alleged “appeasement” in the Pacific. ⁴⁰ He places this evidence in the larger context of a concerted right-wing campaign to extend the announced US defence perimeter in Asia beyond Japan to include South Korea and Taiwan. ⁴¹ The anticipated result of such an extension would be firstly to bolster Chiang’s and Rhee’s positions, and secondly to draw the USA into direct confrontation with the Communist governments in Beijing and Pyongyang. In Korea for the previous twelve months there had been escalating, deadly skirmishes initiated by both sides along the border at the 38th parallel. There is conflicting evidence about whether there was a South Korean-initiated provocation on the day the North Korean invasion began that may have prompted it, ⁴² but regardless, the North Korean army was well-positioned and prepared to launch a full-scale invasion at dawn on 25 June, capturing Seoul within three days and, after a short delay, pushing through to just north of Pusan on the Sea of Japan by early August. The delay allowed the USA time to react and bring troops across to the “Pusan beachhead” from Japan, thus ensuring a direct conflict involving US soldiers.

Stone made the argument that it would have been impossible for the South Korean and US military intelligence not to have been aware of such a massive preparatory build-up along such a heavily monitored border. ⁴³ Following the Monthly Review account ⁴⁴ in October 1951 of information coming out of Senate hearings and US government actions, he also reported that there had been substantial manipulation of the soybean futures market in Chicago by individuals linked to Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese, who by the start of the war owned options on fully half of all soybean contracts due in July 1950. A large share of the international soybean trade was sourced from Manchuria, which if disrupted would impact on the supply and price. Upon commencement of the war, the price rose sharply, and the speculators netted a profit of some US$30 million. The market manipulation was investigated by a US Senate committee, which identified the leading speculators. ⁴⁵ Stone doesn’t draw a direct causal chain between the market manipulation and the initiation of hostilities, but the evidence is clear that Nationalist Chinese and Rhee-aligned Koreans had wagered a lot of money on war breaking out in Korea by June at the latest. Cumings, with the benefit of hindsight and access to the Soviet and US archives, argues that both North and South Korea wanted the conflict, and both had manoeuvred their reluctant superpower allies to provide the necessary support:

Thus the logic for both sides was to see who would be stupid enough to move first, with Kim itching to invade and hoping for a clear Southern provocation, and hotheads in the South hoping to provoke an “unprovoked” assault, thus to get American help – for that was the only way the South could hope to win. ⁴⁶

Within two days, the US government petitioned for United Nations sponsorship of a military response and committed to deploy US ground and air forces in Korea while interposing the Seventh Fleet between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, thus extending the Asian Defence Perimeter as Chiang and Rhee wanted, with long-lasting foreign policy consequences. The decision locked the USA into direct military conflict with North Korean and subsequently Chinese armed forces, with the potential for the use of nuclear weapons. It locked Truman and subsequent US administrations into the global Cold War and the associated arms race. In short order a global US military and diplomatic posture was consolidated, which was to last for many decades at a huge cost in money and lives. “The Truman administration identified its stake in Korea in the same ‘fifteen weeks’ in which the containment doctrine and the Marshall Plan were hammered out,” ⁴⁷ the consequence of which was that “the United States would now do something that was utterly unimagined at the end of World War II: it would prepare to intervene militarily against anticolonial movements in East Asia – first Korea, then Vietnam, with the Chinese revolution as the towering backdrop.” ⁴⁸

With difficulty the UN forces stabilised the Pusan perimeter in August 1950, and in mid-September Macarthur launched the brilliant landing at Inchon to recapture Seoul. From there the UN forces crossed into North Korea the following month and raced towards the Chinese border at the Yalu River, a move that Truman had authorised as early as August. ⁴⁹ They met little resistance but by the time the army reached the Yalu it was dangerously overextended, and then China sent its troops across the border to join the Korean People’s Army. The weather was bitterly cold, the terrain impossibly rugged, and the combat merciless. ⁵⁰ The US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered a withdrawal and the “combined Sino-Korean offensive cleared North Korea of enemy troops in little more than two weeks from its inception …. By the end of December, Seoul was about to fall once again, to a Sino-Korean offensive launched on New Year’s Eve.” ⁵¹

A major portion of Hidden History (Parts V, “Phantom warfare” and VI, “War as Politics”) ⁵² is given over to a very detailed analysis of the military, government and press reports about Macarthur’s December 1951 retreat from the Yalu River past Pyongyang and Seoul, both of which cities the retreating UN forces burnt to the ground in a scorched earth strategy. Stone compared the various reports and found glaring inconsistencies. In particular, he discovered that the retreat of UN forces was well in advance of enemy forces, with whom they were regularly out of contact. Both Pyongyang and Seoul were not defended by MacArthur but evacuated and destroyed without enemy engagement. At the same time Tokyo headquarters was issuing wildly inflated claims about the overwhelming size of the Chinese forces. Cumings concurs in Thompson’s reportage and Stone’s analysis of MacArthur’s statements:

Did he mean those famous “Chinese hordes”? There weren’t any, Reginald Thompson rightly said [at the time]; in late 1950 the total of enemy forces in the North never outnumbered those of the UN, even though MacArthur’s headquarters counted eighteen Chinese divisions. ⁵³

Stone’s analysis was biting:

MacArthur waged slow-motion war, stretching out a minimum of combat for a maximum of effect, hinting darkly every few days of enemy traps that were never sprung and enemy offensives that were never launched …. This farce no doubt turned stomachs at the White House, the State Department, and even the Pentagon [but they] went along with MacArthur. During the latter half of January, the United States was threatening to withdraw from the United Nations unless the General Assembly obediently condemned Peking as the aggressor, and MacArthur was trying unsuccessfully to find some substantial body of enemy troops which might oblige with a little aggression. ⁵⁴

Stone’s sources for this analysis included the mainstream press. For example, London’s Daily Express reported “this much can be said … There has been no sign of any Chinese Communist ‘hordes’ in the front-line fighting”, while in other British headlines “the Daily Mirror spoke of ‘FAIRY TALES FROM KOREA’, and the Sunday Pictorial asked in big red type, ‘IS THIS A PRIVATE WAR?’” Even in the US “in the New York Times, Hanson Baldwin wrote that the troops fighting around Wonju ‘said they knew nothing of the four Chinese Communist armies, but had been attacked by four reconstituted North Korean divisions.’” ⁵⁵

As the UN forces withdrew down the peninsula, Macarthur ordered an intensive bombing campaign over those parts of the Korean peninsula not held by UN forces. The USAF strategy was firebombing, on the World War II principle that “a city was easier to burn down than blow up.” ⁵⁶ Napalm was the incendiary device, and the destruction was wholesale and indiscriminate in cities, towns and villages. “In Korea over a three-year period the U.S./UN forces flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm …. The estimated toll of the dead, the majority civilian, is equally difficult to absorb: 2 to 3 million.” ⁵⁷ The bombing continued long after it became superfluous. “Within months few big targets remained in Korea … in late 1951 the air force judged that there were no remaining targets worthy of using the ‘Tarzon’, its largest conventional bomb at 12,000 pounds.” ⁵⁸ Tibor Meray, a Hungarian journalist reporting from the North, when interviewed on British television after leaving Budapest (having participated in the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion), observed:

Everything that moved in North Korea was a military target, peasants in the fields often were machine-gunned by pilots who, this was my impression, amused themselves to shoot the targets that moved …. Every city was a collection of chimneys. I don’t know why houses collapsed and chimneys did not, but I went through a city of 200,000 inhabitants and I saw thousands of chimneys and that – that was all. ⁵⁹

Stone quoted a New York Times report:

A napalm raid hit the village three or four days ago …. This correspondent came across one old woman, the only one who seemed to be left alive, dazedly hanging up some clothes in a blackened courtyard filled with the bodies of four members of her family. The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they had held when the napalm struck – a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 “bewitching bed jacket – coral”. There must be almost two hundred dead in the tiny hamlet. ⁶⁰

While this fiery destruction rained down from the air MacArthur’s forces retreated, citing the overwhelming impact of the elusive “hordes.” Stone’s argument is that MacArthur’s strategy, in concert with the “China lobby” in the US, the Nationalist Chinese in Formosa and Syngman Rhee in South Korea, was to position the US government so that the use of nuclear weapons against Chinese territory was the only option to avoid defeat and humiliation for the US and its UN allies.

As this strategy appeared to be faltering before the queries of sceptical journalists, MacArthur became more openly partisan in US civilian politics, until he publicly aligned with Republican members of Congress in conflict with President Truman, who dismissed MacArthur on 11 April. Stone attributed the dismissal to MacArthur’s insubordination, and argued that the only major point of difference in policy terms between the president and the general was whether the war should be taken directly to China using nuclear weapons. ⁶¹ Although he notes Truman’s threats made from time to time to use atomic weapons in Korea, Stone generally downplays this as diplomatic posturing in response to pressure from some military and Republican opponents. Cumings, using archival sources not available to Stone at the time, argues differently. “It is now clear that Truman did not remove MacArthur simply because of his repeated insubordination, but also because he wanted a reliable commander on the scene should Washington decide to use nuclear weapons: that is, Truman traded MacArthur for his atomic policies.” ⁶² Cumings and specialist historians of the air war in Korea confirm that US provision and plans for the use of atomic weapons in Korea were operational from July 1950 and were continually being updated. ⁶³

In any case, Stone’s third major argument was that the nuclear option disappeared in late 1951 when the USAF lost its capacity safely to deliver a nuclear weapon. ⁶⁴ The delivery vehicle deployed in Korea was the B-29 Superfortress bomber, and the risk that a plane carrying a nuclear weapon might be shot down before reaching its target could not be countenanced. As Stone pointed out, the loss of this capacity had strategic implications for Cold War geopolitics at a global level far beyond the regional conflict in Korea. The US had severely reduced its non-nuclear military capacity in the late 1940s in terms of enlisted personnel and equipment, ⁶⁵ and was dependent on the nuclear deterrent to achieve parity in an accelerating Cold War rivalry, particularly in the European theatre. The establishment and militarisation of NATO was a key foreign policy objective under Truman. The successful testing of a nuclear device by the Soviet Union in 1949 was a significant surprise to the USA, but then two years later to lose even the secure capacity to deliver a weapon from its own nuclear arsenal was a further serious setback.

The key events occurred in two related but separate activities by the USAF: first, (unknown to Stone but in retrospect reinforcing his analysis) a program of “dummy runs” in September and October 1951 against potential North Korean targets by lone B-29s simulated the World War II bombing runs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ⁶⁶ and secondly a series of air raids mounted by the USAF in October 1951 against three airfields being rapidly expanded in the northwestern zone of North Korea. The airfields had long runways capable of handling jet aircraft and were located at Saamcham, Taechon and Namsi, about one hundred and fifty kilometres south of the Chinese border at the Yalu River, all within thirty kilometres of each other and therefore capable of operating in unison both defensively and offensively in a major projection of force. The fear in US headquarters was that the North Korean forces could project airpower against UN ground and naval forces in both North and South Korea to impact strongly on the balance of power. Saamchan was bombed on 18 October without enemy interference, Taechon was attacked on 22 October with the loss of one B-29, and the following day all eight B-29 bombers attacking Namsi airfield were lost. The B-29s were escorted by about 100 US fighter planes, but were not able to withstand the attacking force of 150 MIGs flown by Chinese and North Korean pilots. As the New York Times reported on 9 December, “eight of eight was the score – three B-29s lost, the rest cracked up in landing or ditched or badly damaged.” ⁶⁷ The US Air Chief of Staff General Vandenberg made a hurried trip to the battlefront, and upon his return

he told the press at the Pentagon, on November 21, “as regards the air situation in Korea, a significant and, by some standards, even sinister change has occurred … Almost overnight China has become one of the major air powers of the world … the air supremacy upon which we have relied in the past is now faced with a serious challenge.” “Serious challenge” was an understatement. To examine the situation carefully was to see that the Battle of Namsi and its aftermath represented a military, technological, and strategic setback of the first magnitude. ⁶⁸

From this time, the B-29s were confined to flying at night but, by June the following year, even the darkness could no longer protect them and three of four B-29s on one mission were caught and destroyed by enemy fighters. As the official USAF history of the air war in Korea put it: “Over Kwaksan on the night of 10 June 1952, the Communists thus served notice that darkness would no longer shield the old B-29s against interception.” ⁶⁹ The significance of this development was that there were no other nuclear-capable bombers deployed by the USAF in Korea, and the two US-based alternatives – the B-36 and the B-50, both with piston-driven engines – had comparable vulnerabilities to the B-29 when attacked by jet fighters. Until the new generation of B-52 jet bombers could be developed and brought into service, the US now lacked a deliverable nuclear weapons capacity. This is not to say that the B-29, B-36 and B-50 in principle were not capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to its target, nor that the USAF didn’t continue to develop operational plans for nuclear attack, but that the context for doing so was now prohibitively risky because of the Soviet and Chinese capacity to destroy the bombers in flight.

Given the stalemate in the ground war, this turn of events meant an armistice or peace agreement to more or less maintain the original border along the 38th Parallel became the foregone conclusion of the Korean War. Stone was scathing in his prosecution of the argument: “An average of 4,666 American casualties was the price paid for every month’s delay in the truce negotiations – the price paid for American insistence on carrying on the fighting while the talks proceeded.” ⁷⁰ The USA quickly accelerated a massive development and expansion program for the Strategic Air Command, which from 1955 progressively brought the B-52 Stratofortress jet bombers into service. ⁷¹ Research and development for the urgent replacement of bomber aircraft by nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was accelerated in both the USSR and the USA, but it wasn’t until January and September of 1959, respectively, that the two sides started to deploy operational ICBMs, locked in the mutual parity that would underpin the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.

In sum, the global significance of the Korean War was that it closed the brief window of US nuclear supremacy. Stone understood this at the time and wrote the story, using only official and mainstream press sources. Isolated from all but documentary sources, working from Paris and then New York, it was a virtuoso performance in research and analysis. In the political climate of the early 1950s, with McCarthyism in full swing in the Congress and accusations being traded over who “lost China” to the Communists, the potential political ramifications at the national and international levels were huge. Little wonder Stone couldn’t find a mainstream publisher brave enough to handle the book. When eventually it was published, mainstream newspapers either ignored or denounced it, and reportedly agencies of the US government actively sought to remove it from bookshelves and circulation – arguably a vindication of its analysis. ⁷²

Taking his three related arguments together, what should we make of Stone’s journalism in Hidden History? The first point to make is that his empirical sources are all either reputable journalists reporting firsthand from the field or official documents and spokespeople, and there was no dispute about the credibility of the facts as such. While subsequent archival revelations have augmented and elaborated the details, particularly about Truman’s role and the Soviet actions and perspectives, this has involved refinement rather than contradiction, as confirmed by leading scholars and institutional sources. Secondly, there is little dispute about his account of the processes that produced the specific facts, such as the initial US decision to involve the UN and commit ground and air forces, the soybean market manipulation, the conduct of the ground and air wars, the diplomatic and political negotiations and decisions, the timing and sequence of press releases, and so on. Again the empirical evidence here is confirmed by the official and other scholarly sources cited above. Stone’s contribution is the forensic way he analyses the spatial and temporal detail and then reconciles the different dimensions of a complex and contradictory set of processes to derive a cogent analysis. In particular he looks for contradictions, absences, and inconsistencies among the documents and statements by official sources. Thirdly, the core of his analysis lies in his understanding and presentation of how the protagonists dynamically position themselves with respect to each other and in relation to the issues at stake. He deduces these positions from the way they “play the game,” or participate in the processes. The weakest component of his relational analysis is the failure to appreciate the commitment of Truman to the potential use of the nuclear weapon option, and instead to position Macarthur as the leading nuclear proponent trying to finesse resistance by Truman. The most powerful part of his analysis is the contemporaneous deduction of the collapse in US nuclear supremacy once the B-29 bombers could no longer be safely dispatched to their targets. He was accused of being a Communist apologist for making this analysis, but even if that were the case his personal sympathies one way or the other are not relevant to the accuracy and power of his argument. It was his analysis and argument about the shifting relations of power that was so politically threatening: to dismiss him as biased or treacherous is not to engage with this argument, and perhaps deliberately to avoid it.

Three decades later, when Stone set out to write his last and valedictory book The Trial of Socrates (1989), he deployed the same methodology that he had used in the Hidden History, and for similar reasons: he was not on location at the prescribed time, and therefore his sources had to be documents and evidence supplied by others. These in turn had to be located critically in the socio-political context of their production and their authors’ positions and perspectives, and then reconciled with each other through juxtaposition, a methodology that Stone embraced: “all knowledge may be reduced to comparison and contrast.” ⁷³ Another methodological tool common to both projects was the search for silences and absences in the accounts, to be analysed and interpreted for their meaning alongside the available evidence. The big difference between the two works is the timeframe of their research object; the Korean War was being fought at the same time that Stone was writing, while Socrates’ trial had taken place two and a half millennia earlier.

Stone himself was adamant that both were works of journalism. “The trial occurred in 399 B.C. How does a reporter cover a trial that was held almost twenty-four hundred years ago?” he asked himself in the Prelude of Socrates. ⁷⁴ Earlier, when discussing the research stage (when he taught himself Ancient Greek in order to read the sources in the original), he observed: “reporter that I still am, I am drawn by the hope of one last scoop.” ⁷⁵ Stone did not propose to write popular or secondary history, regurgitating the primary research of other scholars, but to produce an original analysis to sit alongside primary scholarship in other disciplines that he perceived to be “caught in the crossfire of often violent and ill-tempered controversy between equally-respected scholars.” ⁷⁶ Without explicitly saying so, he was presenting journalism as an intellectually rigorous research practice on a par with scholarship. Further, potential flaws that he saw in journalism as a research mode he also attributed to other disciplines; in discussing the differences among two classical scholars on the evidence that Socrates may have been a casualty of a witch hunt in ancient Athens, he commented that “Scholars, like journalists, hate to give up a good story as long as it can be attributed to some source, however shaky.” ⁷⁷

I will examine the issue of time past and present in a later chapter, but will just note here that Stone saw classical antiquity as “our yesterday, and we cannot understand ourselves without it.” ⁷⁸ In other words, the present – the realm of journalism – includes the historical process that produced that present, and therefore the concept of the present is a flexible one whose parameters can be fixed according to the requirements of causality and production. By his own account, Stone set out “to do a study in depth of what concerns me most – freedom of thought and expression, and how to preserve it against the new excuses for repression bound to arise in every generation,” and that research led him back through English and European history to “the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the first extended period of free thought and free speech known to us”: ⁷⁹

But the more I fell in love with the Greeks, the more agonizing grew the spectacle of Socrates before the judges. It horrified me as a civil libertarian. It shook my Jeffersonian faith in the common man. It was a black mark for Athens and the freedom it symbolized. How could the trial of Socrates have happened in so free a society? How could Athens have been so untrue to itself? …. I could not defend the verdict when I started and I cannot defend it now. But I wanted to find out what Plato does not tell us, to give the Athenian side of the story, to mitigate the city’s crime and thereby remove some of the stigma the trial left on democracy and on Athens. ⁸⁰

In Stone’s view, Plato was a master propagandist for an anti-democratic political philosophy, and Socrates’ story was the vehicle for it. “It is to Plato’s literary genius that Socrates owes his pre-eminent position as a secular saint of Western civilisation. And it is Socrates who keeps Plato on the best-seller lists. Plato is the only philosopher who turns metaphysics into drama.” ⁸¹ But in Stone’s opinion “[n]o one ever got away with so much unmitigated nonsense as Plato did out of sheer charm. The ‘Apology’ itself seems to me to be a masterpiece of evasion and obfuscation, but a masterpiece.” ⁸²

To summarise, Stone wants to re-examine in the present the evidence pertaining to the trial and execution of Socrates in the past in order to challenge the interpretation promoted by Plato, and his purpose in doing that is to draw conclusions not only about the historical events, but also their ramifications for contemporary understandings of freedom of expression and the press. His project offers an excellent case study for exploration of debates about temporality, about methodology in journalism, and about the relationship of journalism and history as two disciplines defined by their relationship to temporality.

The Trial of Socrates has two sections. The first examines the points of difference between Socrates’ teaching and philosophy as presented mainly by Plato and Xenophon on the one hand, and the democratic values of the Athenian polis as expounded by Aristotle and Aristophanes on the other. The second section examines the trial and execution. The social context was the Peloponnesian War 431–404 BCE that pitted Athens and Sparta with their respective allies against each other, with the gradual denouement being the decline of Athenian democracy and the end of the Golden Age of Ancient Greece. ⁸³ The conflict included the two brief but bloody periods of oligarchic rule of Athens called the Dictatorship of the Four Hundred (411 BCE) and the Tyranny of the Thirty (404 BCE), and another planned but thwarted coup by the oligarchs in 401 BCE. Stone describes these events as the “three earthquakes” that created the conditions for Socrates’ indictment in 399 BCE. ⁸⁴ The leaders of these brief periods of brutal and violent dictatorship included Socrates’ pupils Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides. ⁸⁵ Socrates himself, and his chronicler Plato, were philosophical opponents of democracy, preferring “rule by one who knows” ⁸⁶ and, while Socrates didn’t personally participate in the two bloody dictatorships, neither did he suffer under them nor did he feel the need to flee as did many who were opponents. Socrates’ students were drawn almost exclusively ⁸⁷ from among the affluent and idle youth of the Athenian aristocracy, whom Aristophanes described as “Socratified.” ⁸⁸

Socrates was prominent and popular in Athens, and figured as a character in contemporary drama including four plays by Aristophanes, notably Clouds and Birds, and a number of other authors’ works of which only fragments and secondary references survive. ⁸⁹ Stone’s view is that the “Athenian equivalent of a free press was the theatre. The comic poets were the ‘journalists’ as purveyors of malicious and spicy gossip and as castigators of misdeeds in public office.” ⁹⁰ Drawing on these dramatic references as well as the extensive accounts in Plato and Xenophon, Stone dissects the conflict between Socrates and the defenders of democratic Athens.

The first major difference with the Athenian democratic mainstream, according to Stone, was that Socrates viewed the people as an undifferentiated “herd” requiring an absolute leader, whereas the city conceived of itself as a polis where citizens were expected to be actively engaged in political and judicial activities and in the election of their leaders. ⁹¹ Socrates was a supporter of the Spartan system of oligarchy and absolute rule. The second difference was that Socrates conceived of virtue as knowledge that was innate and could not be taught or attained through personal effort, whereas the Athenians, particularly a rising middle class of traders and skilled artisans, valued education and debate as vehicles for upward class mobility and participation in democratic life and culture. ⁹² The corollary of Socrates’ argument was that democracy was government by the ignorant, which was a view that he advanced forthrightly and demonstrated by his use of the “negative dialectic” as a logical tool to belittle and humiliate his interlocutors. ⁹³ The third difference was that Socrates viewed the good or virtuous life as one of disengagement and cynicism about politics and government, ⁹⁴ even to the point of not condemning extreme instances of state-sanctioned violence such as the notorious Melos massacre by Athenian forces in 416 BCE. ⁹⁵ His silence about this event and the later killings under the dictatorships meant that although he was a very prominent citizen, it was “as though he wasn’t there in the city’s hours of greatest need.” ⁹⁶

Stone is not an apologist for the prosecution and execution of Socrates – indeed, he considers it a “tragic crime” ⁹⁷ – but he is seeking to understand both the case for the prosecution and Socrates’ response to the charges and verdict; in other words, what were the stakes in the conflict as perceived by the protagonists, how did they “play the game” to resolve the conflict, and what could Socrates have done to escape conviction and/or the death penalty, which admittedly would have affirmed the democratic principles to which he was opposed?

Socrates was in his early seventies at the time of the trial. Indictments under the Athenian system were brought not by a public prosecutor but by ordinary citizens, and the judge/jury comprised the citizenry who chose to attend, in Socrates’ case five hundred of them. There were three names on the indictment: Lycon representing the orators, Meletus the poets, and Anytus the craftsmen and political leaders, together covering the leading groups of citizens. ⁹⁸ Stone identifies the leading prosecutor as Anytus, a well-regarded former general and wealthy tanner who had been a leader in the armed resistance against the 404 BCE Tyranny of the Thirty. Anytus had personally suffered a heavy loss of property under the dictatorship and had “won respect because he did not use his political influence to sue for recovery of these lost properties” under the terms of an amnesty implemented at the end of the war. ⁹⁹ Taken together, these citizen-prosecutors represented a formidable constituency in the city of Athens at that time.

The recorded terms of the indictment are vague: “that Socrates is a wrongdoer because he corrupts the youth and does not believe in the gods the state believes in, but in other new spiritual beings.” ¹⁰⁰ Stone expends considerable effort analysing the original Greek language of the indictment, the arguments that the prosecutors and Socrates advanced, and the absences and silences in their arguments. “Corrupting the youth” he translates to mean not moral corruption but political subversion: that three consecutive attempts at installing bloody dictatorship using “storm troopers and bully-boys” ¹⁰¹ from among Socrates’ pupils had seriously stretched the Athenian citizenry’s tolerance. “Lack of belief in the state’s gods” is translated to mean not atheism or theological heresy but a refusal of the state’s socio-political values of open democracy, as personified in their city deities: Athena, goddess of wisdom; Peitho, goddess of persuasion; and Zeus Agoraios, god of the assembly. In other words, Socrates is accused of political crimes, and this is a political trial. ¹⁰²

According to Xenophon, rather than attempt to win over the judge/jury of his fellow citizens, “Socrates wanted to be convicted and did his best to antagonise the jury” by being boastful and arrogant. ¹⁰³ The ostensible reason for this, as Xenophon reports Socrates telling his friend and disciple Hermogenes, was that his “inner voice advised him it was better to die now before the ills of old age overtook him.” ¹⁰⁴ Stone also believes it was a political strategy by Socrates to embrace martyrdom and so condemn his democratic opponents of hypocrisy; an acquittal would have vindicated the integrity of Athens’ democratic values. According to the accounts in both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates didn’t try to win over the jury but instead belittled and humiliated everyone in comparison to himself. ¹⁰⁵ In particular, he didn’t advance any argument based on free-speech principles that might have appealed to the political sensibilities of the jury. ¹⁰⁶

When it came to the guilty verdict, it was far from unanimous, with a majority of only thirty out of five hundred, or 280–220. The jury then had to decide upon the penalty. Under Athenian law, the jury could not decide a penalty for itself, but had to choose between the alternative penalties proposed by the prosecution and the defence. The prosecution demanded the death penalty, and Stone suggests that, given the close vote on the guilty verdict, a proposal for a substantial fine or period of banishment would have been acceptable to the jury. However, according to Xenophon, Socrates declined to propose any penalty, and Plato says that Socrates suggested he be feted as a civic hero for the rest of his life, before making a series of other suggestions easily interpreted as mocking the court. Any of these suggestions were a provocation to the assembled jury, and according to Diogenes by a larger margin of 360–140 they accepted and imposed the death penalty. Xenophon reports that it was only at this point, after and not before the penalty was imposed, that Socrates argued against the death penalty. ¹⁰⁷ This is far too late in the proceedings to affect the outcome, and can readily be interpreted as trumpeting the political success of Socrates’ strategy. Plato reports that Socrates’ friends and disciples subsequently made arrangements and tried to persuade him to escape prison and flee into exile, but he declined to do so. ¹⁰⁸

Stone is arguing that Socrates’ death was effectively suicide, using the Athenian judicial system that he so vigorously despised to achieve his objective and score the politico-philosophical point at the same time. But he is not suggesting that Athens should therefore be exonerated:

When Athens prosecuted Socrates it was untrue to itself. The paradox and shame in the trial of Socrates is that a city famous for free speech prosecuted a philosopher guilty of no other crime than exercising it …. The trial of Socrates was a prosecution of ideas. He was the first martyr of free speech and free thought …. Unfortunately Socrates never invoked the principle of free speech. Perhaps one reason he held back from that line of defense was because his victory would also have been a victory for the democratic principles he scorned. An acquittal would have vindicated Athens. ¹⁰⁹

Stone was not alone in this analysis of the trial, its rationale from the different protagonists’ points of view, and the larger context. The nineteenth-century scholars George Grote in Britain and Fustel de Coulanges in France had argued similar perspectives, and contemporaries Richard Crossman and Karl Popper had made related though distinct arguments. ¹¹⁰ Popper argued that Socrates was badly served by Plato’s account, and was therefore more sympathetic to him than Stone was; indeed, Guttenplan suggests that “Popper’s Socrates bears a striking resemblance to I.F. Stone.” ¹¹¹ In 1989 the response by press reviewers was mixed, tending to divide along conservative vs liberal lines, and some classicist scholars, evidently irritated by Stone’s claims to have “scooped” them on their own turf, dismissed it as “journalism.” ¹¹² Journalism scholar Douglas Birkhead analysed Stone’s argument sympathetically and canvassed the political perspectives of the various press reviewers. ¹¹³ In 2005, historian Paul Millett suggested that Stone had adopted Hegel’s “notion of the trial of Socrates as Tragedy” and that “there is much to agree with in Stone’s presentation.” ¹¹⁴ The popular response at the time was enthusiastic, and the book became a national bestseller.

If we take both books together, The Hidden History and Socrates, as examples of the best work that Stone produced, can they be considered scholarly in the sense of intellectually rigorous, original contributions to human knowledge? Stone himself once said that he “wanted to apply the tools of scholarship to journalism,” ¹¹⁵ so that is the standard he set for himself. The answer to the question is both a matter of peer review by scholars in the relevant disciplines and also of methodological depth and rigour. Both books were subject to critical evaluation and review in scholarly journals and in books by leading scholars. Some reviews were supportive to a greater or lesser degree of the scholarship, as is usual in academic reviews, even when they might not be agreeing with Stone’s interpretation, and some were dismissive. A close reading of the dismissive ones indicates that firstly, they were arguing by definition – journalism and history are mutually exclusive – and secondly, they caricatured Stone’s interpretation as crude – either conspiratorial in Hidden History or myopic and reductionist in Socrates – and ignored the nuance and detail in his argument. In both cases there were distinguished scholars who supported similar or related interpretations of the evidence: e.g., Cumings on Korea and Grote, Popper, and Millett on Socrates. In the case of Korea, there were official US Air Force histories that registered the key facts in Stone’s argument without drawing attention to the implications of those facts. In the case of Socrates, Stone engages in detail with the secondary literature on specific questions and agrees with some scholars and disagrees with others. In any event, both friend and foe to his arguments paid him the respect of arguing their case in scholarly venues, with the direct implication that the work merited that level of engagement. That amounts to a prima facie case for acceptance of scholarly status, which only raises the much more interesting question of methodology: i.e., how did Stone conduct his research and draw his conclusions so as to earn that status?

The hallmarks of Stone’s approach are clearly presented in both books. Firstly, he works with reputable primary sources to compare and contrast the veracity and reliability of their empirical evidence, the facts. No critic ever disputed the quality of Stone’s empirical evidence as available to him at the time, although subsequent access to official archives has shed a different light on some aspects of his Korean analysis. Secondly, he locates that evidence in its context, both physical and social, with particular reference to its specific spatial location and temporal sequence for both verification and analytical purposes. Thirdly, he identifies and analyses the processes that produced those facts in order to understand the interests of the participants that were driving them – for example, the soybean market manipulation or the role of Socrates’ students in the two Athenian dictatorships. This is often a matter of deduction or induction, but he cites the available evidence and details the argument. Fourthly, he tries to identify and understand the forces that are driving the processes – for example, the democratic versus authoritarian values, class politics, and experience of brutality by Athenians under the dictatorships or the conflicting attitudes and stratagems vis-à-vis the newly communist China by Washington politicians. Fifthly, in identifying these necessarily invisible or unverifiable values and relationships, he deploys what all observers described as a formidable intuition borne of long experience as a Washington correspondent, which he applied retrospectively to the machinations in ancient Athens. Sixth, in identifying these values and social relations, for example, among Socrates and his aristocratic students or among the Republican right wing, the Chinese Nationalists, and the Syngman Rhee Korean forces, he locates them in their generative context – what interests spawned and supported them – and how they manifested themselves in specific points of a process or conflict. Seventh, he explores the relationship between what people said and what they did, or between the representation and the material reality of their interests and activities. Eighth, he investigates how the protagonists thought about and explained what they were doing. Ninth, he investigates the protagonists’ lived experience of their context, the consequences of their own and others’ actions and aspirations as they engaged in their struggles and conflicts. Tenth, he assiduously searches for silences and absences in the documentary record in the belief that they are equally valid evidence of how the protagonists were playing the game to achieve their goals.

To what extent can these methods used by Stone, and similar ones used by Haacke in his research, be integrated into theoretical frameworks that could constitute methodology, that is, a theoretical approach linking what is known and how it is known to epistemological frameworks? That is what is required if journalism is to be accorded disciplinary status, which is to be recognised as having a singular and intellectually valid role to play in producing new knowledge or in the evaluation and reinterpretation of existing knowledge. It is clear from the detailed discussion of Haacke’s and Stone’s work that space and time are crucial factors in both their own practice and in the events and situations that they are researching, analysing and presenting in their respective modes of artworks and books. In the next chapter I will consider some relevant theoretical frameworks for spatiality, and in the following chapter do the same for temporality. It is also clear that both Haacke and Stone had very finely tuned antennae for social contradictions with challenging ramifications – what journalists call “news sense.” In Chap. 6 I will examine Bourdieu’s theorisation of intuition (habitus), which he argues is a manifestation of capital (personal resources and capacities accrued through education and experience) that is produced within and characteristic of fields of social relations. Fields are spatiotemporal phenomena – they exist in space and emerge, develop and disappear in time – and so Bourdieu’s field theory with its associated concepts of capital and habitus combines the three key components of Tuchman’s account of news production: the web of facticity cast in space and time as determined by news sense. Together, these three chapters present a meta-theoretical framework within which journalism research practice can be assessed for its epistemological validity, using Haacke’s and Stone’s work as illustrative case studies.

Notes

• 1. Guttenplan (2009: 464).

• 2. Guttenplan (2009: 474), MacPherson (2006: xii).

• 3. MacPherson (2006) and Guttenplan (2009) have published detailed accounts of Stone’s life in its professional, social, and political context.

• 4. Stone (1978: 54).

• 5. Stone (1978: SM4).

• 6. Huberman and Sweezy (1952: viii).

• 7. MacPherson (2006: 270).

• 8. Guttenplan (2009: 266).

• 9. Guttenplan (2009: 266).

• 10. Guttenplan (2009: 283).

• 11. Gitlin (1989: 77).

• 12. Middleton (1973), Weber (2006).

• 13. Knightley (2004: 379).

• 14. Guttenplan (2009: 459).

• 15. Cumings (2011: 72).

• 16. Cumings (1988: xiii).

• 17. Cumings (1981, 1990, 1992).

• 18. Guttenplan (2009: 269).

• 19. Guttenplan (2009: 267).

• 20. MacPherson (2006: 268).

• 21. Ziff (1952: 188).

• 22. Jones (1953: 124).

• 23. Sweeney (1952: 155).

• 24. Park (1973: 1456).

• 25. Park (1973: 1457).

• 26. Fehrenbach (1963).

• 27. Hastings (1987).

• 28. Halberstam (2007).

• 29. Blair (1987).

• 30. Keeble (2009: 9ff).

• 31. Burchett (1953).

• 32. Winnington (1950).

• 33. Stone (1988: 316–7).

• 34. Stone (1988: xxii).

• 35. Huberman and Sweezy (1951: 122ff), Cumings (2011: 11–13).

• 36. Quoted by Cumings (2011: xiii).

• 37. Stone (1988: 344).

• 38. Stone (1988: 355ff).

• 39. Cumings (2011: 205ff).

• 40. Stone (1988: 2).

• 41. Huberman and Sweezy (1951).

• 42. Cumings (2011: 9–10).

• 43. Stone (1988: 4).

• 44. Huberman and Sweezy (1951: 171–174).

• 45. Stone (1988: 349).

• 46. Cumings (2011: 144).

• 47. Cumings (2011: 208).

• 48. Cumings (2011: 214).

• 49. Cumings (2011: 22).

• 50. Fehrenbach (1963), Hastings (1987), Halberstam (2007), Thompson (2009).

• 51. Cumings (2011: 29).

• 52. Stone (1988: 208–273).

• 53. Cumings (2011: 29).

• 54. Stone (1988: 249).

• 55. Stone (1988: 240).

• 56. Cumings (2011: 149).

• 57. Young (2009: 157).

• 58. Cumings (2011: 154).

• 59. Quoted in Cumings (2011: 258).

• 60. Stone (1988: 258).

• 61. Stone (1988: 274–279).

• 62. Cumings (2011: 156).

• 63. Futrell (1983), Crane (2000), de Groot (2006: 186–188), Cumings (2011: 156–8).

• 64. Stone (1988: 335–344).

• 65. Fehrenbach (1963), Hastings (1987).

• 66. Cumings (2011: 157).

• 67. Baldwin (1951), quoted in Stone (1988: 339).

• 68. Stone (1988: 339).

• 69. Futrell (1983: 425).

• 70. Stone (1988: 335).

• 71. Futrell (1983: 710).

• 72. Guttenplan (2009: 347).

• 73. Stone (1989: 6).

• 74. Stone (1989: 4).

• 75. Stone (1978: SM4).

• 76. Stone (1978: SM4).

• 77. Stone (1989: 239).

• 78. Stone (1989: 6).

• 79. Stone (1978: SM4).

• 80. Stone (1989: xi).

• 81. Stone (1989: 4).

• 82. Stone (1978: SM4).

• 83. Stone (1989: 244ff).

• 84. Stone (1989: 140ff).

• 85. Stone (1989: 111).

• 86. Stone (1989: 11).

• 87. Stone (1989: 152).

• 88. Stone (1989: 111).

• 89. Stone (1989: 134).

• 90. Stone (1989: 134).

• 91. Stone (1989: 9–38).

• 92. Stone (1989: 39–97).

• 93. Stone (1989: 68ff).

• 94. Stone (1989: 98–139).

• 95. Stone (1989: 104).

• 96. Stone (1989: 110).

• 97. Stone (1989: 230).

• 98. Stone (1989: 174ff).

• 99. Stone (1989: 175).

• 100. Stone (1988: 198).

• 101. Stone (1988: 111).

• 102. Stone (1988: 201ff).

• 103. Stone (1988: 181).

• 104. Stone (1988: 183).

• 105. Stone (1988: 185–6).

• 106. Stone (1988: 210ff).

• 107. Stone (1988: 186–7).

• 108. Stone (1988: 193ff).

• 109. Stone (1988: 197–8) italics in original.

• 110. Guttenplan (2009: 454).

• 111. Guttenplan (2009: 456).

• 112. Guttenplan (2009: 458–461), MacPherson (2006: 472–4).

• 113. Birkhead (1989).

• 114. Millett (2005: 30–31).

• 115. Cumings (1992: 38).