Second, Guttenplan catalogs Stone’s ferocious and lifelong defense of civil liberties in opposition to efforts by the U.S. government to suppress free speech, especially the free speech and free press of those Americans on the Left or liberal-left.

Stone was a democratic socialist for most of his life, and, like many on the American left, his assessment of the Soviet Union and especially of Stalin and later the Cuban Revolution vacillated between early optimistic support and later full-scale critical condemnation. As Guttenplan extensively documents, Stone was right in the middle of key political conflicts and shifts among American leftists from the 1930’s until his death in 1989, and much of the persisting controversy about Stone’s career and legacy has swirled around his participation in a host of political activities in addition to his writing.

As American Radical makes clear, what is less debated and utterly consistent is Stone’s long advocacy for civil liberties. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, he resisted directly investigations launched by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the persecutions of leftist and left-leaning American citizens by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others, as well as ongoing efforts by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover to harass activists on the left and in the labor and Civil Rights movements. Even when Stone sharply criticized the Communist Party and dismissed American incarnations of Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism, he defended the First Amendment freedoms of communist activists and writers. In the wake of his lost confidence in the Soviet Union and the Cuban Revolution, Stone did not abandon his commitment to socialism in democratic forms. In fact, his life serves as a reminder of the long existence of a democratic left in the United States.

American Radical places Stone’s journalism squarely within these political crosscurrents related to free speech, political dissent, and democratic criticism of government. The biography charts the intellectual context and evolution of Stone’s writing, from his early years writing for smaller independent political papers to his work on the New York Post, PM, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and especially his own paper, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which Stone published from 1953 to 1971. Guttenplan extensively documents Stone’s well-known willingness to question official versions of events, to track down documents in obscure files, and to criticize openly players across the political spectrum. Guttenplan’s account of Stone’s seemingly indefatigable labors on behalf of democratic dissent creates an implicit argument for the continued importance of such work.

Indeed, a key strength (and occasional weakness) of American Radical is Guttenplan’s truly impressive detailing of historical context, events, people, and issues related to Stone’s life and work. There are moments in the book where detail derails the focus a bit too much, and readers may return from an extended digression a bit weary from too much tangential information. Most of the time, however, Guttenplan’s meticulous detail builds the book as an exemplary intellectual biography, with all the depth and historical illumination possible in the best of the genre. In many sections, readers are happily rewarded for their patient attention with glimpses of American historical events that are too often forgotten.

For example, Guttenplan links the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) with an account of activist educator Myles Horton being hauled out of Senator John Eastland’s anticommunist hearings in New Orleans in 1954. Horton, a Christian socialist who had studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was also a founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which also became a target of FBI harassment. The Highlander Folk School was started in 1932 as a community school for labor organizers, but it was also a place where Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists received training in nonviolent activism prior to their more public careers. Through a short narrative interlude drawing the links between these people, places, and events, Guttenplan also illuminates the links in American history between labor and civil rights organizing, while reminding readers of the twin perils of suppressed free speech and repressed civil liberties.

A second strength of American Radical is Guttenplan’s effective rhetorical engagement with contemporary American political life, which he accomplishes by framing particular episodes in Stone’s life in ways that are suggestive of persisting issues and problems facing citizens and journalists in twenty-first century democracies. This rhetorical use of Stone’s biography is especially evident as Guttenplan analyzes Stone’s journalistic work related to the Korean and Vietnam wars. In these sections, Guttenplan highlights Stone’s indictment of coopted journalism, his impatience with failed Democratic Party liberalism and political quietism among American citizens, and his repeated warnings about the potentially catastrophic consequences of these failures for American civil liberties at home and foreign policy abroad.

In his chapter “An American Tragedy,” Guttenplan foregrounds Stone’s persistent investigative dismantling of official deception related to American military intervention in Vietnam. He offers this account from I. F. Stone’s Weekly, written after Stone’s visit to Saigon in 1966: To watch the young Ivy Leaguers arriving briskly at the Embassy of a morning is to feel oneself on the eve of the Harvard-Yale game. The team spirit is bursting out all over; it demands optimism; patriotism is equated with euphoriaUnder the supposed benevolence of our policy one soon detects a deep animosity to the Vietnamese and a vast arrogance. We assume the right to remold them, whether they choose to be remolded or not. It is significant that those like Gen. Lansdale and Colonel John Paul Vann who would approach the Vietnamese as people soon find themselves sidetracked, suspect and frustrated. The machine instinctively reacts against the human, and what we are running, or what is running us, is a bureaucratic war machine.

Guttenplan introduces the quote with this phrasing: “[Stone] evoked, unforgettably, the tone of empire, American-style.” Readers of American Radical who have also read dissenting journalistic accounts of the 2003 U.S-led invasion and occupation of Iraq or who have read books such as Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007), will find themselves invited via Guttenplan’s prose to translate Stone’s language across time and place, to more recent wars and their tragic landscapes.

American Radical has been extensively reviewed and will continue to draw political interest as the legacy of Stone’s work is debated by new generations of readers and journalists. The lingering controversy over Stone’s alleged but unproven link to Soviet agents has distracted some reviewers from the sweep of Stone’s life. Guttenplan offers a fair and duly considered discussion of that controversy toward the end of American Radical and argues that it would matter very much to have final resolution to the question of Stone’s integrity and honesty. The attacks on Stone help to remind us not just of what he was, but of what he representedan independent radical who kept hold of his ideals, and kept faith with his comrades, without renouncing his freedom to speak his mind. Destroy that credibility, and you have destroyed more than a man, more than a reputation. But grant his credibilitygrant him the compatibility of his beloved Jefferson and his equally beloved Marxand I. F. Stone remains, even in death, a dangerous man.

It seems clear that after such a lengthy exploration of Stone’s life as that of an exemplary independent radicaland given that he ends American Radical with an explicit call for a revitalized, critically independent, and activist publicGuttenplan is himself convinced of Stone’s integrity. While not ignoring the contradictions and controversies of the past, American Radical is rhetorically pitched to the present and future, concluding with the suggestive argument that it would be wise to follow Stone into the better legacies of both Jefferson and Marx.