Under his given name Isidor Feinstein, Stone first contributed to The Nation in 1934; his last article for the magazine was “End of a Profligate Era,” published in the October 31, 1987, issue. Thus, he was part of that rare club: contributors to The Nation over the course of six decades. The following tribute to Stone appeared as an editorial in the Nation of July 10, 1989:

One reason the establishment had so much trouble classifying Izzy was his attitude toward it: “All idols must be overthrown; all sacred dogmas exposed to criticism; the windows thrown open; the cobwebs swept away!” As editor and publisher of the world’s most famous newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, as a reporter and columnist for PM and its successor papers, as Washington editor of The Nation, as a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Izzy was a quadruple threat. He combined the meat-and-potatoes moxie of a police reporter, the instinct for precision of a scholar, the question-phrasing skill of a Socrates…and the political philosophy of an anarchist.

June 18, 1989 To mark The Nation’s 150th anniversary, every morning this year The Almanac will highlight something that happened that day in history and how The Nation covered it. Get The Almanac every day (or every week) by signing up to the e-mail newsletter.