Stone, Shepard, 1908-1990

Dates

• Existence: 1908 - 1990

Biography

Shepard Stone was born March 31, 1908, in Nashua, NH. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1929, and took his Ph.D in History from the University of Berlin, Germany, in 1933. He was married to Charlotte Hasenclever, a German national, the same year. Stone was a writer, reporter, and Assistant Sunday editor of The New York Times from 1933-1949, with the exception of the war years. In 1939 he published a short book entitled The Shadow Over Europe--The Challenge of Nazi Germany, and co-edited, with Hanson Baldwin, We Saw It Happen. Stone served in the U.S. Army from 1942-1946, and was active in intelligence work. In the last few months of 1945, he worked in Military Government, helping to reestablish a free press in the American Occupation Zone in Germany. He returned to The New York Times upon his discharge from the Army, but in 1949 was recruited by the newly appointed High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, to be Assistant Director of Public Affairs under his administration. He was soon promoted to Director, and spent the next several years living and working in Germany. After the end of McCloy's tenure as High Commissioner, Stone left the newspaper business and became Director of International Affairs at the Ford Foundation, a post he occupied until 1967. While at the Ford Foundation, Stone was responsible for developing programs in Western and Eastern Europe, including the exchange of scholars between the United States and the Communist bloc. He directed programs in the scholarly and intellectual area related to Atlantic cooperation, and developed projects related to the mass media, as well as travelling to Asia to open channels for Foundation participation in projects on that continent. Shepard Stone left the Ford Foundation in 1967 to become President of The International Association For Cultural Freedom, a reinvention of The Congress For Cultural Freedom, which had been discredited when it came to light that much of its funding came from the CIA. In 1974, he left that organization to become Director of the first overseas affiliate of The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, Aspen in Berlin, where he remained until his retirement in 1988. Returning to the United States, the Stones divided their time between their home in South Newfane, Vermont, and an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Shepard Stone was a consultant at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Stone was a member of the Council On Foreign Relations, a trustee of Bennington College, Goethe House in New York City, and The Aspen Institute For Humanistic Studies, a member of the Century Club, the Athenaeum in London, and for several years, a member of the Dartmouth College Alumni Council and the Visiting Committee of the Slavic Department of Harvard University. A truly international citizen, he participated in many of the Pugwash and Bilderberg conferences, and was friends with many of the influential people of his time. He died May 4, 1990, in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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