February 28, 1984

Lecturing in the Villard Room on “The Shaky State of the World,” veteran investigative journalist I.F. Stone said, “There is an air of wounded macho in the United States, an air that is making the 20th century terribly volatile. I am worried about the fate of the world now,” Stone told some 170 students and faculty members, “as never before.” Stone found President Reagan, said David Fisher ’87 in The Miscellany News, “guilty of over-simplification and impatience. Reagan has ‘played up to the Super-rich and the Super-stupid,’ and has benefited on the corporation and the rich.”

An aggressive writer for The Philadelphia Record, The New York Post, The Nation and PM, Stone used I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which he started after being blacklisted in 1950 as an alleged communist, to criticize McCarthyism, J. Edgar Hoover, anti-Semitism, racial discrimination, nuclear proliferation and the war in Vietnam.