Celebrating a Media Maverick

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These human scarecrows and juvenile delinquents in the news photos and on the television screens might become a majority overnight. If they can provoke a race riot, if they can make the issue seem starkly North versus South, the United States could find itself in the gravest crisis since Fort Sumter. Every day's delay by the President, whose enormous personal prestige might be put to good use at this juncture, risks irreversible events.

Unfortunately we have a President who is nine-tenths figurehead. A figurehead must be manipulated. There seems to be no one around to tell him what to do, and so he turns up in the same picture pages, happily relaxing on the eighteenth green. 'Mr. Brownell also informed the President,' the New York Times reported almost tongue in cheek, 'that a Nashville school had been bombed. Mr. Hagerty said the President's reaction to this had been 'the same as anyone else's would be-he thought it was a terrible thing.' ' The gaping walls of the Hattie Cotton School are not as terrible as this gaping vacuum in the presidency.

If the situation were not so deadly serious, one would be tempted to satirize the contrast between the airlift swiftly unloading arms six thousand miles away in Jordan to meet an exaggerated crisis in Syria with the irresolution the government shows at home. The dangers of communism seem to arouse Washington much more quickly than those of racism, though the latter comes up in a form which is a fundamental challenge to law itself.

This is a time to see ourselves as others see us. The ugly hate-filled faces of the whites in Little Rock and Nashville, the bravery of the Negro children and their parents, the minister knocked down and beaten in Birmingham, the poor feeble-minded Negro emasculated by Klansmen just to prove their mettle, are giving the colored majority on this planet a picture of us it will be hard to eradicate. Whether here or in Algiers, the white race just doesn't seem as civilized as it claims to be.

In Defense of the Campus Rebels

Considering the Vietnam War protests, Stone criticizes the methodology but praises the intention.
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.

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