American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone | By D. D. Guttenplan | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 224 pages, $24.95

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, millions of Americans succumbed to a shared sense of despair, but not I. F. Stone. The only radical commentator with a wide audience in the United States, Stone was then proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Bi-Weekly, a newsletter he and one assistant produced for about twenty thousand subscribers, each of whom paid $5 a year to get it in the mail.

Most of Stone’s subscribers were more liberal than radical, and it seems a fair presumption that most were devastated by Kennedy’s death. Soon after the weekend of national mourning that put JFK in his Arlington grave, Stone wrote: “Perhaps the truth is that in some ways John Fitzgerald Kennedy died just in time.” He saw Kennedy trapped on two fronts: by a Congress dominated by racist southerners (true enough), and by a foreign policy in thrall to cold war reflexes that were leading the county astray (Vietnam was just beginning). Assassination, in Stone’s view, was “the only satisfactory way out” of these traps.

Then he reminded his readers that their government, Kennedy’s government, routinely employed murder as a tool of statecraft. “How many of us—on the Left now—did not welcome the assassination of Diem and his brother Nhu in South Vietnam?” Diem was the South Vietnamese leader whom Kennedy had turned against; he and his brother were killed in an American-sponsored coup less than three weeks before the assassination in Dallas. “We all reach for the dagger, or the gun, in our thinking when it suits our political view to do so. We all believe the end justifies the means. We all favor murder, when it reaches our own hated opponents. In this sense we share the guilt with Oswald and Ruby and the rightist crackpots. When the right to kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young President was slain. It is not just the ease in obtaining guns, it is the ease in obtaining excuses, that fosters assassination.”

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.