I.F. STONE (Hitchens)

Now here is a pair. As the journalists now conflate around the bones of GWB, Hitchens provides an interesting view of a great iconclast.

VANITY FAIR:

"Myra MacPherson's lovely biography of the man, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone, is ideally timed for the moment when reporters in Washington are once again rightly (and too late) flailing themselves, either for being spoon-fed information by the White House and the Defense Department or for swallowing the alternative pabulum put out by the C.I.A. When I moved to Washington, in 1982, to do the job he'd once done for The Nation, Mr. Stone helped give a reception for me—I'm no pack rat or hero-worshipper, but I still keep the spare invitation cards—and gave me some terse advice: Don't go to briefings. Don't have lunch with people in power. Go and read the original transcripts and papers, because the government doesn't always lie to itself. And take a few minutes to read The Washington Post, because 'it's a great paper. You never know on what page you will find a page-one story.' Despising journalistic sycophancy, he noted of Theodore White's moist 'Camelot' prose that 'a man who can be so universally admiring need never lunch alone.'"