AIG's Fables
Roving SCRAPBOOK correspondent P. J. O'Rourke sends us the charming pamphlet whose cover is depicted here. It was published by the troubled insurance giant AIG in happier days (copyright 2000). In retrospect, it's clear that the heedless, live-for-today, merrymaking grasshopper in the drawing represents AIG, and the rapacious fox the credit default swap debacle.
Writes P. J.: "This pamphlet was pressed into my hand after a speech I gave by a fellow trying to fan the flames of economic populism, no doubt. I--on the other hand--think AIG was spending its money well. Pity the AIG executives didn't read it."
Of the six Aesop fables in the booklet, P.J. commends especially "The Mermaid and the Woodcutter," in which a woodcutter loses his axe in a pool of water. A mermaid comes to the surface with axes of gold and silver. The woodcutter tells her they don't belong to him; his was "an old, worn iron axe." She rewards him for his honesty by giving him all three axes. His brother the next day says to himself, "I'll try the same trick, and I'll come home wealthy, too!" He throws his axe into the water; the mermaid surfaces with a golden one and asks: "Is this the one you lost?" "That's the one!" he lies--at which point she drops it back into the depths, saying, "For your dishonesty, you'll have no axe at all." Moral: Honesty is the best policy.
Our favorite, though, is the fabulous tale told on the back cover: "Regardless of age, life's financial lessons should be easy to understand. As children, you relied on parents for guidance and insight. As parents, you can rely on us. . . . With assets that exceed $600 billion, we clearly have more to share than just a wealth of experience. We have financial strength. The moral of this story? We know money."
The real moral turns out to be hidden in plain view on the cover: Never trust strangers claiming to do something "for your children."
Izzy? Yes, He Is.
Anyone who has ever opened a book published by the PublicAffairs press will find a dedication page written by its founder, Peter Osnos. He recognizes "three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me." And first on the list is I.F. Stone (1907-1989),
proprietor of I.F. Stone's Weekly, [who] combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history . . .
Well, not so "independent" as his admirers might have thought. Since his death 20 years ago there has been a presumption that Stone was, apart from being a hero to the old Stalinist left and a cult figure among Vietnam-era radicals, a onetime Soviet agent. This was based on the testimony of an ex-KGB man named Oleg Kalugin who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, described his contacts with Stone to a British journalist.
As is often the case in these instances, there was a certain ambiguity in Kalugin's account, and the complaint against Stone has never been thoroughly researched and examined--until now. With the imminent publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev (see their piece on a related subject on page 16), the case against Stone is made, chapter and verse, based on a close examination of new evidence from the Soviet archives, and other related documents. Haynes and Klehr are the preeminent scholars of declassified Soviet intelligence, and Vassiliev is a distinguished Russian journalist and historian of espionage.
This revelation comes as no great shock to THE SCRAPBOOK--the beloved "Izzy" Stone, after all, was the author of the classic Hidden History of the Korean War (1952), which explains that the Korean War began when the South Koreans invaded North Korea, just as Stalin said they had--but the left is especially reluctant to part with its illusions, and the myth of I.F. Stone is no exception.
Take angry independent journalist Eric Alterman, for example, who writes on an Internet site about references in the KGB archives to Stone assisting "Soviet intelligence on a number of such tasks: talent-spotting, acting as a courier by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalistic tidbits and data the KGB found interesting."
This is an outrage, he exclaims.
First off, none of those activities comport with my . . . definition of the word "spy." Stone did not obtain any secret information of any kind, nor even any government information of any kind, much less that related to military or naval affairs.
Which, THE SCRAPBOOK concedes, is true--so far as we know. All I.F. Stone did was appear on the Kremlin payroll between 1936 and 1939--we still don't know if subsequent efforts to enlist his services succeeded or not--and secretly carry information from one Soviet spy to another, provide helpful material to his contact agents, and recruit other people to enlist as Communist spies.
Of course, none of this damning information may coincide with Comrade Alterman's "definition of the word 'spy' "--there is no evidence that Stone drove an Aston Martin, wore a trench coat in all weather, or preferred his martinis shaken, not stirred--but it sure sounds like espionage to THE SCRAPBOOK.
Then again, it must be difficult to come to terms with the awful truth about someone so consistently lionized on the left as the late Soviet agent I.F. Stone. "Stone and I were close friends during the final decade or so of his life," Alterman writes, "and he never mentioned anything of this to me."
Imagine!
Sentences We Didn't Finish
"Why did Spitzer do it? Because . . . he could not help himself. He spent his life on the run, always achieving, always working, always impressing, and the engine that drove him to the highest levels of politics could not simply be turned off when the hotel-room door closed. He understood he was doing something wrong, and he knew the price he could pay. . . . But hubristically, yet all too humanly, he lost control. 'I thought we could handle it, and we did for a while,' he says. 'And then . . . ' " (Jon Meacham, Newsweek, April 27).