_______________ SLEAZE, SMEARS AND SPLEEN BY ERIC ALTERMAN (01/08/98)

Eric Alterman is too kind to his mentor, Izzy Stone. Although Stone probably was not a paid agent of the KGB, as Robert Novak continues to allege, he was a die-hard Stalinist. While most respectable American comsymps abandoned the party after the Hitler-Stalin pact, excepting Lillian Hellmann et al., Stone did not break with the Soviet Paradise until 1956, until AFTER Kruschev's anti-Stalin speech. Herewith Stone's belated and disingenuous confession from the "I.F. Stone Weekly" (5/28/56): "I feel like a swimmer under water who must rise to the surface or his lungs will burst. Whatever the consequences, I must say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society, and it is not led by honest men." Hello, Izzy. Did he miss the show trials, the gulags, the political murders, the genocide? No wonder Stone was distrusted by his peers. "I don't think he's an honest controversialist," Richard Rovere told me for my book, "Intellectual Skywriting." "We had to check him every inch of the way when I was at New Masses (in the '30s), and just because of the Soviet-Nazi pact. He was more indignant about that pact than anybody I knew. His indignation didn't last long. He was a Stalinist -- a loose and nasty term -- but by my lights he was. It's not so much being a Stalinist as using their polemical techniques." Stone admitted as much to me when he said that he believed in the pas d'ennemis à gauche style of political writing. Alterman might have been more candid about his hero's history. Despite Stone's virtues, intellectual honesty was high not among them. Maybe he was not on the KGB's payroll, but he was no Albert Camus. -- Philip Nobile Eric Alterman's piece about Robert Novak was good. I initially wondered what the fuss was all about until I got to the end and found Eric was fresh from a television encounter with Novak. I'm glad he was able to get it off his chest. Robert Novak is one of the reasons I haven't owned a television in 10 years. When he was a regular on CNN's "Crossfire," his line of BS would get me so infuriated that I decided not to torture myself with windbag pundits by going without television. Haven't had a problem since. Robert Novak is a creep and it was nice to hear that someone else thinks so. Thanks. -- Miles Escherich SALON | Jan. 12, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| THE ARMY OF THE RIGHT BY JONATHAN BRODER

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