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  The majority seems to have regarded these brash utterances with a sense of humor that has been lacking here for some time. Indeed Mr. Justice Black exhumes from the record and cites in a footnote, with an almost audible chuckle, an editorial in which Mr. Konigsberg in his machine-gun prose centered his fire on the Supreme Court for refusing to hear the Hollywood Ten and said this made “that high tribunal an integral part of the cold war machine directed against the American people.” Mr. Justice Black for the majority finds that these editorials “fairly interpreted only say that certain officials were performing their duty in a manner that, in the opinion of the writer, was injurious to the public. We do not believe that an inference of bad moral character can rationally be drawn from these editorials. . . . Courts are not, and should not be, immune to such criticism. Government censorship can no more be reconciled with our national constitutional standard of freedom of speech and press when done in the guise of determining ‘moral character’ than if it should be attempted directly.” It has been a long time since a majority of the Supreme Court regarded radical utterances with such Hyde Park calm.

  The majority, as if celebrating a kind of field day after the long winter of judicial evasion and abnegation, has no time for craftsmanlike legal conservatism. “The State argues,” Mr. Justice Black says, “that Konigsberg’s refusal to tell the examiners whether he was a member of the Communist party. . . tends to support an inference that he is a member of the Communist party and therefore a person of bad moral character. . . . Obviously the State could not draw unfavorable inferences as to his truthfulness, candor or his moral character in general if his refusal to answer was based on a belief that the United States Constitution prohibited the type of inquiries which the committee was making. On the record before us, it is our judgment that the inferences of bad moral character which the committee attempted to draw from Konigsberg’s refusal to answer questions about his political affiliations and opinions are unwarranted.” This gives new weight and dignity to claims of First Amendment privilege.

  It is always hazardous to draw straight lines from general propositions in current cases to the outcome of other future cases. But it is hard not to be hopeful about a court on which a majority of the members (the newest judge, Whittaker, took no part) regard so astringently views, facts and allegations which until recently would have been damning. The two appellants, Schware and Konigsberg, though men with honorable war and civilian records, would have been crucified by a McCarthy. Liberals, middle-of-the-roaders and conservatives alike on this Court seem prepared to take an adult view of past Communist party membership, and a respectful attitude toward First Amendment claims. They seem prepared at last here, as in other free societies, to untangle the real problems of communism from the hobgoblins of cold war demonology. Whatever that evil and unscrupulous adventurer McCarthy died of, a black sense of failure and public rejection hastened his sodden end. His punier successors are likely to contract similar ailments when they ponder on the Schware and Konigsberg decisions. It looks as if the witch hunt is drawing to its close.

  Boris Pasternak

  Boris Pasternak, the Russian poet best known in the West for his novel Doctor Zhivago, was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 25, 1958. Two days later, Pasternak sent the following telegram to the Swedish Academy: “Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” However, this was followed four days later by a second telegram: “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure.” It was clear that this second message was motivated by Pasternak’s fear that he would be stripped of citizenship and barried from the U.S.S.R. if he traveled to Stockholm to accept the prize. The resulting controversy turned a fine writer into a political football, which clearly disturbed I. F. Stone.

  . . .

  November 3, 1958

  I READ BORIS PASTERNAK’S Doctor Zhivago with joy and admiration. In its sensitive pages one is back in the wonderful world of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists. He is a fine writer, and a brave man; there are passages which, read against the background of Soviet realities, are of a sublime courage.

  But I find myself more and more annoyed by the chorus of Pasternak’s admirers in this country. I do not remember that Life magazine, which glorifies Pasternak, ever showed itself any different from the Pravda-Kommunist crowd in dealing with our own Pasternaks. I do not recall that Life defended Howard Fast for receiving the Stalin award or deplored the venomous political hostility which drove Charlie Chaplin and more recently Paul Robeson into exile.

  Only a few years ago Arthur Miller, an American writer much less critical of our society than Pasternak is of his, was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, submitted to humiliating interrogation, and threatened covertly with perjury charges unless he recanted his past political views. Even today the one movie house in Washington which has revived the old Chaplin classics runs an apologetic note in its advertising.

  It is easier for a critic of capitalism and the cold war to live in this country than for a critic of communism to live in Russia. But an unofficial blacklist still bars some of our best artists and actors and directors in Hollywood and from radio-TV work.

  The closest analogue to Pasternak is Howard Fast, and until he broke with the Communists he was forced to publish his own books. All of us who are more or less heretical in our society are forced to live on its margin, grateful that we are able to speak (at the cost of abnormal exertions) to a small audience.

  Pasternak has universal meaning, for he embodies the fight the artist and the seeker after truth must wage everywhere against official dogma and conformist pressures. Not a few of our intellectuals in Hollywood and elsewhere on their psychoanalysts’ couches may say the very words Pasternak puts into the mouth of Dr. Zhivago.

  “The great majority of us,” he protests, “are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.”

  In another passage Dr. Zhivago tells his beloved, “The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s throat.” This applies equally to present-day America.

  Unlike Ehrenburg’s pedestrian The Thaw and Dudinstev’s wooden Not by Bread Alone, the other protest novels of the post-Stalin period, Doctor Zhivago is a work of art. Giving it the Nobel prize was a political act in the best sense of the word, for it put world pressure behind the struggle of Russia’s writers for greater freedom. If the masters of the Kremlin were wise they would have let Pasternak go to Stockholm and they would publish his book in Russian; such magnanimity and the book’s complete negativism about the Revolution would have been a telling answer to its thesis and their critics. Bigness, obviously, is beyond them.

  Whatever their folly, let us examine the mote in our own eye and remember that an American Pasternak who accepted a Soviet prize would be hauled up before the Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue. And few, very few, of those who are now praising Pasternak would then say one word in defense of the right to a free conscience.

  In Defense of the Campus Rebels

  Here is a deeply personal essay. Its theme is the importance of dissent as a driving force for social and political improvement; the specific application, to the campus radicals of the Vietnam era; the point of view, that of “a
premature New Leftist” who came of age in the 1930s and ’40s and views the long-haired rebels of the ’60s with a bemused mixture of admiration and alarm. In the end, Stone supports the radicals—not because he agrees with all of their positions or tactics, which he clearly does not, but because he recognizes the value of “a little un-reason” in forcing change on a hidebound establishment, and has enough faith in human nature to take a few chances on behalf of freedom.

  . . .

  May 19, 1969

  I HATE TO WRITE ON SUBJECTS about which I know no more than the conventional wisdom of the moment. One of these subjects is the campus revolt. My credentials as an expert are slim. I always loved learning and hated school. I wanted to go to Harvard, but I couldn’t get in because I had graduated forty-ninth in a class of fifty-two from a small-town high school. I went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, which was obligated—this sounds like an echo of a familiar black demand today—to take graduates of high schools in neighboring communities no matter how ill-fitted. My boyhood idol was the saintly Anarchist Kropotkin. I looked down on college degrees and felt that a man should do only what was sincere and true and without thought of mundane advancement. This provided lofty reasons for not doing homework. I majored in philosophy with the vague thought of teaching it but though I revered two of my professors I disliked the smell of a college faculty. I dropped out in my third year to go back to newspaper work. Those were the twenties and I was a pre-depression radical. So I might be described I suppose as a premature New Leftist, though I never had the urge to burn anything down.

  In microcosm, the Weekly and I have become typical of our society. The war and the military have taken up so much of our energies that we have neglected the blacks, the poor and students. Seen from afar, the turmoil and the deepening division appear to be a familiar tragedy, like watching a friend drink himself to death. Everybody knows what needs to be done, but the will is lacking. We have to break the habit. There is no excuse for poverty in a society which can spend $80 billion a year on its war machine. If national security comes first, as the spokesmen for the Pentagon tell us, then we can only reply that the clearest danger to the national security lies in the rising revolt of our black population. Our own country is becoming a Vietnam. As if in retribution for the suffering we have imposed, we are confronted by the same choices: either to satisfy the aspirations of the oppressed or to try and crush them by force. The former would be costly, but the latter will be disastrous.

  This is what the campus rebels are trying to tell us, in the only way which seems to get attention. I do not like much of what they are saying and doing. I do not like to hear opponents shouted down, much less beaten up. I do not like to hear any one group or class, including policemen, called pigs. I do not think four-letter words are arguments. I hate hate, intolerance and violence. I see them as man’s most ancient and enduring enemies and I hate to see them welling up on my side. But I feel about the rebels as Erasmus did about Luther. Erasmus helped inspire the Reformation but was repelled by the man who brought it to fruition. He saw that Luther was as intolerant and as dogmatic as the Church. “From argument,” as Erasmus saw it, “there would be a quick resort to the sword, and the whole world would be full of fury and madness.” Two centuries of religious wars without parallel for blood-lust were soon to prove how right were his misgivings. But while Erasmus “could not join Luther, he dared not oppose him, lest haply, as he confessed ‘he might be fighting against the spirit of God.’”* I feel that the New Left and the black revolutionists, like Luther, are doing God’s work, too, in refusing any longer to submit to evil, and challenging society to reform or crush them.

  Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line. Those who set out nobly to be their brother’s keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie. But these perspectives, which seem so irrefutably clear from a pillar in the desert, are worthless to those enmeshed in the crowded struggle. They are no better than mystical nonsense to the humane student who has to face his draft board, the dissident soldier who is determined not to fight, the black who sees his people doomed by shackles stronger than slavery to racial humiliation and decay. The business of the moment is to end the war, to break the growing dominance of the military in our society, to liberate the blacks, the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican and the Indian from injustice. This is the business of our best youth. However confused and chaotic, their unwillingness to submit any longer is our one hope.

  There is a wonderful story of a delegation which came here to see Franklin D. Roosevelt on some reform or other. When they were finished the President said, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me.” Every thoughtful official knows how hard it is to get anything done if someone isn’t making it uncomfortable not to. Just imagine how helpless the better people in government would be if the rebels, black and white, suddenly fell silent. The war might smolder on forever, the ghettoes attract as little attention as a refuse dump. It is a painful business extricating ourselves from the stupidity of the Vietnamese war; we will only do so if it becomes more painful not to. It will be costly rebuilding the ghettoes, but if the black revolt goes on, it will be costlier not to. In the workings of a free society, the revolutionist provides the moderate with the clinching argument. And a little un-reason does wonders, like a condiment, in reinvigorating a discussion which has grown pointless and flat.

  We ought to welcome the revolt as the one way to prod us into a better America. To meet it with cries of “law and order” and “conspiracy” would be to relapse into the sterile monologue which precedes all revolutions. Rather than change old habits, those in power always prefer to fall back on the theory that all would be well but for a few malevolent conspirators. It is painful to see academia disrupted, but under the surface were shams and horrors that needed cleansing. The disruption is worth the price of awakening us. The student rebels are proving right in the daring idea that they could revolutionize American society by attacking the universities as its soft underbelly. But I would also remind the students that the three evils they fight—war, racism and bureaucracy—are universal. The Marxism-Leninism some of the rebels cling to has brought into power a bureaucracy more suffocating than any under capitalism; the students demonstrate everywhere on our side but are stifled on the other. War and imperialism have not been eliminated in the relations between Communist states. Black Africa, at least half-freed from the white man, is hardly a model of fraternity or freedom. Man’s one real enemy is within himself. Burning America down is no way to Utopia. If battle is joined and our country polarized, as both the revolutionists and the repressionists wish, it is the better and not the worse side of America which will be destroyed. Someone said a man’s character was his fate, and tragedy may be implicit in the character of our society and of its rebels. How make a whisper for patience heard amid the rising fury?

  * * *

  *Froudes Life and Letters of Erasmus.

  The Crisis Coming for a Free Press

  The Pentagon Papers were a 47-volume, 7,000-page history of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, secretly compiled by the Defense Department and leaked to the press in early 1971. The papers revealed, among other things, that the government had deliberately expanded its role in the war by conducting air strikes over Laos and raids along the coast of North Vietnam even as President Lyndon Johnson was promising not to escalate the war. Stone’s essay responds to a 6–3 decision by the Supreme Court (June 30, 1971) upholding the legality of the papers’ publication. It was a victory for the free press. But in the larger historical arc that led to the Pentagon Papers case, Stone detected a troubling trend away from openness and accountability and toward secrecy and deceit—a trend subsequent yea
rs have done little to alter.

  . . .

  July 9, 1971

  IN THE PENTAGON PAPERS, the government had a poor case on the facts. It had an even poorer case on the law. It is a pity that the upshot was not the kind of historic defence of a free press that the weak pleading and the grave circumstances called for. The press did its duty but the Supreme Court did not. Its splintered opinions left a bigger loophole than before for prior restraint—something English law abandoned in 1695 and the American press has never experienced. In addition five of the nine Justices encouraged the government to believe that they would give it wide latitude if it sought to punish editors for publishing official secrets after they did so instead of trying to enjoin them in advance. Two Justices indeed spent most of their opinions helpfully spelling out possibilities for successful criminal prosecution. It will be a miracle if this Administration, which is almost paranoid in its attitude towards the media, is not encouraged to include editors and reporters among the “all those who have violated Federal criminal laws” the Attorney General now says he will prosecute.