The New Criterion has an interesting review by Ronald Radosh of Myra MacPherson’s new book on leftwing journalist Izzy Stone:

Even the reviewer in the October 23 issue of the Nation, the film critic John Powers, acknowledges that “Stone’s true failing was his tardiness in grasping the full monstrosity of actually existing Communism, especially Stalinism.” As he sarcastically points out, Stone’s “tiger eyes that could spot the threat to liberty in the footnotes of a Congressional report couldn’t clearly see the meaning of show trials, slave labor, and class-based mass murder.” Powers boldly writes for today’s “progressive” readers of the magazine, that Stone, “faced with one of the most tyrannical political regimes of his lifetime, got things so badly wrong that another man might have died questioning his own judgment.”

To borrow from something that Mark Steyn once wrote about Hollywood leftist Dalton Trumbo, Stone got one of the great moral questions of the 20th century wrong. But then, so did Stone's contemporaries and modern-day followers, as Radosh writes:

By the time he died in 1989, the once outcast and radical journalist I. F. Stone, fondly called “Izzy” by all who knew him, had become an icon. The blurbs on the back of Myra MacPherson’s new look at Stone’s life are from the likes of journalistic establishment dons like Craig Unger, Helen Thomas, Richard Reeves, and others—all of whom try to tell us that, were he alive, Stone could wake up today’s “lapdog” reporters.[1] He would, as Thomas writes, “lead our country to its greatest ideals again.”

That quote from Thomas and her identification with Stone speaks volumes about her, of course. Watching the twists and turns that Saddam Hussein has taken in the American media--from being properly condemned when President Clinton was in office, to being almost lionized as a way to score points against President Bush (and now back again on election eve) shows how fluid the truth is to today's journalists. That they learned such moral flexibility from an earlier generation of writers such as Stone and Walter Duranty illustrate just how shoddy "history's first draft" can be at times.