As He Saw It

The Haunted Fifties
by I. F. Stone
Random House, 1963, $5.95

Events enter the world, Karl Kraus used to say, as journalistic cliches. Surely the dead hand of the word is not to be doubted in our day: these cliches set the limits of all but our most quixotic politics, and it is on their behalf that young men are sent off to die. Is this a new phenomenon, or even a fresh insight? Was it, a half century ago, when the satirist of Vienna first noticed “the connection between the maltreatment of words and the maltreatment of souls and bodies?” Perhaps not; but I think it something other than an illusion to say that the malaise is now worse, more widely diffused, and its costs greater.

It is for that reason and by contrast with so many of his colleagues—left and right, east and west—that I. F. Stone merits our esteem. I know of no one in American journalism, at least, whose writing...