Just about fifty years ago when I was becoming politicized around the war in Vietnam, I began searching desperately for information and analysis that could explain why this senseless war was taking place. After taking out a subscription to I.F. Stone’s Weekly that an old friend had recommended, the scales began to fall from my eyes. Isidor Feinstein Stone, who died at the age of 81 in 1989, began publishing his newsweekly in 1953 during the depths of the cold war and witch-hunt. Actually, the cold war had recently become hot in Korea and Stone had the courage to write antiwar articles that conceivably could have landed him in prison.
A year later, I let my subscription to Stone’s weekly lapse since I had joined the Trotskyist movement, whose newspaper The Militantbrooked no competition. When you joined a group like the Socialist Workers Party, you felt like you were a chorus member in “West Side Story”:
When you’re a Jet,
You’re a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dyin’ day.You’re never alone,
You’re never disconnected!
You’re home with your own:
When company’s expected,
You’re well protected!