D.D. Guttenplan’s nuanced biography of iconoclastic American reporter Isi­dor Feinstein Stone, commonly known as I.F. Stone, leaves few, if any, stones unturn­ed. A journalist himself, the author takes a reader on a journey of discovery from Stone’s birth in Philadelphia in 1907 to his death in Bos­ton in 1989.

Guttenplan, in American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone (Har­perCollins), admiringly calls his cantankerous and outspoken subject an independent thinker, a skep­tic and a troublemaker who fought for his causes and was always ready to de­fend them fear­­lessly.

In a long, sometimes rocky career, Stone dedicated himself to equality for African-Americans, government assistance for the poor, economic justice for farm labourers and factory workers, universal health care, a negotiated end to the Cold War, the abolition of nuclear weapons, a two-state solution to resolve Is­rael’s struggle with the Palestinians and, of course, the right to dissent.

A leftist who supported Franklin Roos­­evelt’s New Deal, railed against Mc­Carthyism and criticized  the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, he focused on what Gutten­plan describes as “inconvenient truths.”

Although he wrote for a variety of daily newspapers and magazines, from the New York Post to the Nation, Stone  is probably best known for founding  the  independent newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Blacklisted and unable to find gainful employment due to his views, Stone established the spunky newsletter in the win­ter of 1953, when McCarthyism was at its height.

At its peak in the 1960s, I.F. Stone’s Weekly had a circulation of about 70,000, and was read by Americans who wanted the real scoop on a current devel­op­ments.

Stone, a prodigious researcher who scour­ed government documents in the search for truth, was the only report­er to challenge Wash­ington’s official account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided the president, Lyn­­don B. Johnson, with the pretext to escalate the war in Vietnam.

Beyond journalism, Stone was a prolific writer of books, with 14 to his cre­d­it. His first book, The Court Disposes, published in 1937, was a critical analysis of the U.S. Su­preme Court. His last, Best of I.F. Stone, an anthology, was published posthumously in 2006.

By Guttenplan’s estimate, Stone’s reputation reached an all-time high in 1971, when his final collection of essays, Polemics and Prophecies, attracted unan­­­­imously admiring reviews and he re­ceived the George Polk Award, a glittering prize in mainstream journalism.

In his acceptance speech, Stone said he was “happy” to be the recipient of “my first establishment award.” Yet he remained true to his beliefs, later telling an interviewer that the American Dream “is becoming a nightmare of rott­ing ci­ties, growing race revolt and a de­cline of the once almighty dollar as we continue to squander on our overgrown military establishment abroad the bill­ions we need for reconstruction at home.”

One can only imagine how much ink he might have spilled had he lived to witness the outbreak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as 1971 was a golden year for Stone, so it was also a year of decline for him. Due to an illness that incapacitated him, he was forced to sell his subscription list to the New York Review of Books, which promptly and unceremoniously closed I.F. Stone’s Weekly.

“After… more than 3.5 million words, the longest essay in single-hand­ed journalism in American history was over,” Guttenplan observes. “I.F. Stone’s pilgrimage from outcast to institution was complete.”

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Stone gravitated to journalism in high school. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the staff of a staunch Republican daily, The Phil­adelphia Inquirer. He soon switch­­ed sides, joining its morning rival, the lib­eral Philadephia Record.

When the Record’s owner, David Stern, bought the New York Post, Stone became one of his earliest recruits, priz­ed for his skill as a penetrating anal­yst.

But after refusing to write a pandering editorial for his boss, he left the Post and morphed into a columnist for the Nation and PM, an upstart Manhattan-based daily.

By then, he had anglicized his name. As Guttenplan puts it, “This was the era, after all, that saw Julius Garfinkel be­come John Garfield [the Hollywood ac­tor] and Billy Chonofsky give way to the urbane Wil­liam Shawn [the editor of The New York­er].”

Despite his penchant for adopting generally unpopular causes, Stone was strangely quiet about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. As Guttenplan archly notes, Stone did not write a single word in pro­test about it. And though Stone abhorred racism, he sent his children to segregated schools in Washington, D.C., he adds.

A thoroughly secular Jew, Stone was outraged by Roosevelt’s inaction during the Holocaust. “The Jews of Eu­rope could do with a litttle less pity and a little more help,” he wrote in 1944.

Stone was introduced to the Zionist cause by, among others, Teddy Kollek, the Haganah’s representative in New York City and the future mayor of Jeru­salem, and Eliahu Elath, a Jewish Agen­cy emissary and a future president of the Hebrew University.

Dispatched to Palestine by PM in  1945, Stone filed vivid dispatches of his   impressions of the Yishuv. “It is the only place in the world where Jews seem com­pletely unafraid,” he wrote. “In Pa­les­tine, a Jew can be a Jew.”

Nonetheless, Stone was not initially an advocate of Jewish statehood. He preferred a binational state within a broad­er Arab federation, claiming it was “the only just solution.”

Upon his return to the United States, Stone wrote Underground to Palestine, which described the Haganah’s role in bringing displaced European Jewish refugees to the Jewish homeland. The book gave him a national audience for the first time.

On his second trip to Palestine, in 1948, Stone witnessed David Ben-Gur­ion, the incoming prime minister, proclaim the creation of Israel. Some days later, while covering the fighting in the Negev, he lay helplessly in a ditch as Egypt­ian planes bombed the area.

“Covering Israel’s War of Independence brought I.F. Stone closer to Zion­ism than to any of his life’s other cau­ses,” writes Guttenplan.

In collaboration with photographer Robert Capa, Stone produced This Is Israel, “an affectionate, intimate portrait” of the new state.

Till the end of his days, Stone was pro-Israel, but he reserved the right to chart his own course. He praised Israel’s victory in the Six Day War as “brilliant,” but called for a Palestinian state and warn­ed that “reconciliation with the Arabs” was more urgent than ever.

“For me,” he concluded, “the Arab-Jewish struggle is a tragedy… a struggle of right against right.”

Summing him up, Guttenplan says Stone was a great reporter, a literate, curious and conscientious man who was totally dedicated to his craft.

As Guttenplan writes, “His consciousness of history, and the sense of himself and his subjects as participants in a complex and long-unfolding drama, gave his best work a pace and solidity that will outlast any headline.”