Awards & Conferences

A Son’s Journey to Honor His Father

In 2006, I.F. Stone biographer Myra MacPherson waited with trepidation as Jeremy Stone read the galleys of her book “All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone.”

As executor of Stone’s estate, Jeremy could have interfered in the publication of a biography he deemed too critical: Jeremy, as independent as his famous father, was the only Stone family member who had refused a request to be interviewed for the book. But he ultimately approved, saying the work depicted his father as a human being, “warts and all,” and not as an icon.

Jeremy said the biography spurred him to create an award in his father’s name. In doing so, he invited a group of journalists to his home to interest them in the effort. Among them was Bill Kovach, former curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University, where the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence was established.

Izzy, as everyone from the corner grocer to Albert Einstein had called him, was a singular voice in American journalism, noted for courageous reporting on McCarthyism and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In his eponymous I.F. Stone’s Weekly, he immediately calling out the lie of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which had led to escalation of the Vietnam War.

In establishing the award, Jeremy planned every aspect of the I. F. Stone medal, including succinctly summing up what his father had stood for: independent spirit, integrity, courage and indefatigability.

Jeremy Stone himself was an independent, persistent and outspoken activist on arms control, human rights and international scientific cooperation. He was also a noted critic of Pentagon spending, earning him a spot on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. His ideas helped form the framework of the U.S.-Soviet ABM Treaty of 1972.

Jeremy turned down his father’s invitation to run the muckraking I.F. Stone’s Weekly, writing that he strongly preferred to “create my own identity.” Yet his own autobiography stressed a theme similar to his father’s – that one person can make a difference.

Jeremy helped create another tribute to Izzy: the Canadian documentary “All Governments Lie: Truth Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016, a few months before Jeremy died, on January 1, 2017.

The son who had worked hard to carve out his own identity ended up revering and lauding the same in his father.