Man of Influence
(See Cover) The green phone -- phone-green to match the office walls -- rang imperiously. New York City, said the long-distance operator, was calling Mr. James Reston, and in a moment Mr. Reston, Washington correspond ent of the New York Times, was talking to Adlai Stevenson. The titular head of the Democratic Party, a longtime Reston admirer, confidant and news source, was getting ready for his South American tour, and he wanted to know if the Times in tended to cover it. As a matter of fact, Stevenson hinted, it would be dandy if Reston himself went along. Well, no, said Reston, he could not go, but he assured his caller that the Times would -- as it has in the last eight years -- give ample cover age to Adlai Stevenson.
A short time after his talk with Stevenson, "Scotty" Reston put through a call of his own to the junior U.S. Senator from Arkansas, Democrat J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and another Reston friend and source. This time, the Washington correspondent had an assignment for the Senator. Reston had been brooding about the problems that would face a newly elected U.S. President, "that exhausted man who stumbles across the line the first of November," with but eleven weeks before taking office in January.
Wouldn't it be useful, suggested Reston, to prepare the President-elect for the or deal of office, with 1 ) summaries of the studies of the presidential work load drafted by Eisenhower commissions, and 2) a precis of the unfinished business left by the departing President? And, he added in his quietly persuasive way, how states manlike for the junior Senator from Ar kansas to propose the performance of such an unselfish service to someone in the Administration -- perhaps Douglas Dillon, Under Secretary of State. Fulbright agreed to give the idea full consideration.*
Where Is Mr. Reston? The middle-sized (5 ft. 8 in., 158 Ibs.), middle-aged (50) man who gives assignments to U.S. Senators and assurances to presidential prospects is a man of such mild ways and unassuming mien that he could easily get lost in the legions of the Washington press. But he sticks out of it so far that an awestruck fellow columnist once was moved to compare his altitude with that of the Deity. In Poland last summer, U.S. newsmen traveling with Vice President Nixon were nettled at the inquiry of their hosts: "Where is Mr. Reston?''
Mr. Reston is usually where the best story is. A crack reporter, a good writer, a thoughtful columnist, and an able administrative chief of the biggest newspaper bureau (23 staffers) in Washington, he brings to his job a sober, Calvinistic sense of responsibility. He has never had a private audience with President Eisenhower (or with any other U.S. President), but that does not mean that Presidents are unaware of him. "Who does Scotty Reston think he is," Ike once complained, "telling me how to run the country?"
"Soft & Oily." Telling the President how to run the country--or, more accurately, telling the people how the country should be run--is the favorite occupation of the Washington press corps. This is a role that becomes all the more important in a presidential election year, when the press corps turns its formidable attention to the question of which candidate will run the country the way the capital correspondents would like to see it run.
This role of the press has constitutional guarantees and historical precedents. The first journalist with national impact was undoubtedly Thomas Paine, who emigrated to the Colonies from England in 1774 and found his calling: diarist of the Revolution. His pamphlets, independently published but genuine precursors of interpretive journalism, inflamed the colonists to revolt; Common Sense sold better than 300,000 copies, turned Tories into Whigs, and was read to troops standing at attention in the field.
Despite Paine's example, capital journalism languished until another immigrant, Scottish-born James Gordon Bennett, arrived on the Washington scene in 1827. As special correspondent for the New York Enquirer, he quizzed administrative leaders, exposed corruption, and went to capital balls. Because of his partisanship to Andrew Jackson, he was fed the first official "leaks." He also became the first professional newsman to interview a President. "I went up to His Excellency," wrote Bennett after an audience with Martin Van Buren in 1839. "He held out his hand. It was soft and oily."
With Great Power. Now the halls of Government are overrun by a press corps that has been described by one of its own as "the greatest concentration of self-adoration and misplaced vanity on earth." There are more journalists (1,361) in the nation's capital than there are Congressmen. The big bureaus of the Associated Press and United Press International send upwards of 70,000 words a day out of Washington; Scotty Reston's New York Times bureau sends about half that much, including the official transcripts of conferences and speeches that are fodder for the U.S. newspaper with the greatest sense of historical record. In this unending flow from the Potomac, the Washington press corps--filling top spots in the news columns and on the newscasts every day--wields great power over public opinion.
Among the top Washington wielders of this power, the range of style, ability and responsibility is as broad as the U.S. itself. It stretches from the gross inaccuracies of Drew Pearson, who is at once the least reliable and the best ratcatching reporter in town, to the sage, sometimes unfathomable profundities of Walter Lippmann, treating the current news as though it were already history. It includes Doris Fleeson, the self-appointed whip of the Democratic Party, who only last week accused her party of McCarthy tactics in castigating the sins of the Eisenhower Administration without offering any salvation for them.
The aging shepherd of the far-right flank, David Lawrence, commands 282 papers but speaks in such stodgy tones as to be inaudible to readers beguiled by ballistic missiles and revolutionary change. There is Joe Alsop, one of the best descriptive reporters in the business, who attacks any Administration's defense policy with shrill alarums and tends to confuse himself with the prophet Jeremiah; Roscoe Drummond, whose liberal Republican tones are so muted as to be ineffective; and the Times's own fusty senior statesman, Arthur Krock, 73, who in his cumbersome way can still analyze a complicated point with more sound sense than most of his colleagues.
Toning Leads. In his bestselling novel, Advise and Consent, former New York Timesman Allen Drury expertly tells what a fascinating story Washington can be for these men who cover it. But Drury also paints a devastating picture of a majority of the Washington press corps (which is heavily liberal Democratic) toning its leads and its emphasis to sway opinion for the people it considers "liberal" and against those it looks upon as not liberal enough. Many of the Washington corps, including Drury's former boss, Scotty Reston, think that Drury's broad brush is unfair, but it covers enough truth to make some Washington newsmen squirm.
In the political context, Scotty Reston is not so easily classified as such doctrinaire liberals as Columnist Marquis Childs or radio-TV's Eric Sevareid. He is a liberal, and his key sources are weighted on the liberal side, including, in addition to Stevenson and Fulbright, Presidential Aspirant Hubert Humphrey and Senate Democratic Whip Mike Mansfield. But he tries earnestly, both in his thinking and his reporting, to avoid classification either by ideology or party. He was for Eisenhower in 1952 and for Stevenson in 1956, and his stories showed it. He has been on the cold side of cool toward Richard Nixon, but he may be changing that position; he once said after a session with Nixon: "He's not the way he is painted in the press." Reston's managing editor, 58-year-old Turner Catledge, says of him: "I would think he is somewhat on the liberal side, but he's still young."
Planting a Story. Whatever his position on a man or an issue, Reston's view is probably the most important in the Washington press corps. Not only politicians but other newsmen watch Reston's tone and are influenced by it. Part of this influence--as well as a large part of Reston's success with sources--can be attributed to the fact that he represents that towering institution, the New York Times. But part of it is unquestionably due to Reston's great ability, industry and purpose. He is driven by the firm conviction that a newsman's duty is to dig out, expose and criticize the seeds of Government policy before they become policy--so that there may be genuine public debate. His deep, burning purpose is to favorably influence the course of important public events.
The Washington correspondent of the Times sometimes plants his own stories. He will think through his own plan for a course of action, then ask the appropriate source about it, get the source's assurance that the plan will be considered, then write a story reporting that the matter is under consideration. With some exaggeration--but no more than enough to make the point--one of Reston's colleagues has said: "I've discovered how Scotty works. He gets up in the morning and thinks about what he is going to write that day. Next he sits down, writes it and sends it off to his paper. After that, he goes over to the appropriate Government department and explains what he has written and how he expects them to conform with that day's story."
From Ordinary Stuff. James Barrett Reston's qualifications as a newsman are pure homespun, patiently and industriously loomed from quite ordinary stuff. Reston was born, the second child of James and Johanna Reston, in Clydebank, Scotland on Nov. 3, 1909. His father, a machinist, took the family to the U.S. in 1911, but returned to Scotland in a few months, after Mrs. Reston fell ill. They settled in Alexandria, Dumbartonshire, in a "but and ben"--two rooms in a row of brick tenements on Gray Street, near the factory. The back parlor was used only on occasions such as Christmas and other holidays; otherwise the family lived in the front room, Mrs. Reston cooking over a grate, the two children, Jimmy and his elder sister (by four years) Joan, sleeping crosswise at the foot of the bed.
"There was great emphasis on religion," Reston remembers. Playing cards were not allowed in the house. On Sundays the whole family walked two miles to morning Presbyterian services in Renton, Father Reston's birthplace, repeated the four-mile round trip for vespers. Sunday meals were cold, having been prepared the night before so that there would be no cooking on the Sabbath. Long hours of Bible and poetry reading inspired in Jimmy's heart the ambition to be a preacher, a calling that Reston's mother stoutly--and with considerable point--insists he is following today.
In 1920 the Restons came back to the U.S. to stay. The father found work in the Delco division of the General Motors Corp. in Dayton, Ohio, and the family lodged in an industrial section of the town. There Jimmy Reston spent his youth, impressed by Mother Johanna's example of frugality ("She would walk an extra mile to a different grocery store to save 15-c-"). Johanna had great ambitions for her son. "Make something of yourself," she urged. "It's no sin to be poor, but it's a sin to remain in poverty."
Saved by Prayer. To preserve her son from that sin, Mother Reston took him out of Stivers High School in his junior year and moved the family into a better neighborhood so that Jimmy could be enrolled in Oakwood High. But by then he had discovered golf and his own facility for it--he was Ohio state high school champion in 1927--and the transfer almost did not take. Never a scholar, he neglected books for the links and other pastimes, came so close to dismissal that only the indignant intercession of his mother saved him.
"Prayer and argument," as Mrs. Reston puts it, also rescued him from a postgraduate ambition to turn golf pro, and after a year of editing the Delco house organ, he entered the University of Illinois. Reston knew vaguely that he wanted to be some sort of journalist, perhaps a sportswriter; as a golfer, he had got his picture in the paper, struck up acquaintance with Dayton sportswriters and run copy for them, and this life beckoned to him. He took the journalism course.
Bull Sessions & Teas. "It was easy to distinguish Scotty from the rest of the students," says Fred Siebert, now director of the school of journalism at Michigan State University, then a young instructor in reporting at Illinois. The distinction was not grades, however. Reston barely got by with a C average, flunked philosophy in his junior year, and once got a D in his major, journalism. Says Siebert: "He was always serious and hardworking, yet with a certain flair. He didn't rush through an assignment, but rather took it easy, picking out words and meanings that gave whatever he did a special flavor."
This purpose emerged slowly. Reston joined an informal circle of students who sat up nights at intellectual bull sessions, but he rarely had much to say. Bruce Weirick, his English professor, coaxed him to come to teas at his home, where a few of Weirick's keener students ardently discussed literature and philosophy. One of Weirick's more dazzling scholars was brilliant, dark-haired Sarah Jane Fulton, daughter of a Sycamore, 111. lawyer, president of her sorority, and an A student who made Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. Sally Fulton was sure even then--as few others were--that the young man who squired her to free lectures and concerts was destined for big things. They were married in Larchmont, N.Y. in 1935. Says Reston: "I married above me."
Cox & MacPhail. After graduation (without honors) in 1932, Reston got a job (at $10 a week) on the Springfield, Ohio News from its publisher, James M. Cox, onetime Democratic candidate for President (1920) and owner of a string of newspapers. Cox had known Reston as a young caddy at the Dayton Country Club, had liked him, and had seen him through a financial crisis by lending him $100 for tuition during Reston's senior year at Illinois. Reston was lured away from the News by baseball's Larry MacPhail, who hired him as traveling secretary for the Cincinnati Reds, a club that in those days was a dump heap for ancient major league castoffs. Besides checking gate receipts, Reston often had the duty of dribbling the oldtimers onto the train after they had spent an evening diluting the memory of some humiliating defeat.
Wherever the Reds took him, Reston dropped in on big-city newspapers and asked for a job. In New York in 1934, he visited the Associated Press to see an old schoolmate at Stivers High, Milton Caniff, then drawing a cartoon called Dickie Dare. Caniff put him in touch with the head of the A.P. Feature Service, and Reston was taken on at $175 a month. He wrote sports features and also ground out a column, imitative of O. O. Mclntyre, called "A New Yorker at Large."
Sportswriting was fun, but Reston, partially prompted by his bride, longed for greater things. "In dull periods," he said, sports reporting is an insufferable bore." In one dull period, he wangled his way onto the A.P.'s London bureau, where curious combination assignment, half sports and half Foreign Office reporting, lad opened up in 1937. Soon Reston, who says, "I didn't even know where Germany was on the map," was concentrating on the embassies. Reston shrewdly cultivated friendships with some of the young foreign officers, notably Lester B. ("Mike") Pearson, then first secretary in the Canadian embassy, now leader of Canada's opposition Liberal Party, and France's Jean Monnet, both of whom rose along with Reston and later became good news sources. He also caught the eye of the New York Times's London Bureau Chief Ferdinand Kuhn, who hired Reston for his staff in 1939. It was quite a coup for Scotty Reston, who had been, trying to get a job on the Times for years and had always been turned away at the door.
Seek the Unhappy. Scotty Reston's first big break came in 1944 after he had moved to the Times's Washington bureau. The Allied powers were meeting at Dumbarton Oaks, in Georgetown, to think about organized world security. Employing his theory that "you should always look around for the guys who are unhappy," Reston found them among the Chinese. Their unhappiness was translated, by Reston persuasion, into a stunning gift: the entire position papers of the Allied powers attending the conference. This was a smashing scoop, and any other reporter probably would have hurled the caboodle onto Page One. Instead, the canny Scot husbanded his riches, doling them out bit by bit, day by day, as the negotiations reached some point covered in his private file. The Department of State, in a mystified frenzy, falsely accused the British of leaking to Reston and protested to the Times and the FBI started investigating Reporter Reston. British Ambassador Lord Halifax, a friend of Reston's, refused to see him: "I'm not going to keep your friendship at the price of losing that of the American Secretary of State."
The array of Dumbarton Oaks exclusives elevated Reston to the top rank of Washington correspondents. Other exclusive stories followed with impressive rapidity. At the San Francisco United Nations conference in 1945, the press corps gathered for an important press conference at which the key figure was Britain's Anthony Eden. The Times expected Reston to handle the story, but he could not be found. Then a door opened, and Eden strolled in chatting confidentially with a man at his side--Scotty Reston.
Soon, by untiring effort ("He is industrious beyond belief," says Timesman Arthur Krock), Reston became the diplomatic correspondent of the Times and attracted covetous outside attention. When, in 1953, the Washington Post and Times Herald invited him to be its editorial page editor, Reston felt this one was too good to turn down. He told Arthur Krock about it; and Krock, without consulting New York, made Reston the one irresistible counteroffer: Krock's own job, as chief of the Times bureau. Said Krock, then 66, stepping aside: "I knew I was in a position to offer him a strong inducement to stay with the Times for life." Said Scotty Reston: "The man who directs the flow of news from this capital--in this revolutionary period--through this newspaper--makes a contribution to his country. That's a hell of a responsibility."
Mr. Scotty. Reston exercises that responsibility in a far different way from Arthur Krock: while Krock held only two staff conferences in the 21 years he headed the bureau, Reston calls the staff together frequently, talks to them in specific terms about their beats, exhorts them to get the story before it is announced. To the staff, the old correspondent was always Mr. Krock; now even the office boy calls the boss Scotty.
Reston has no compelling outside interests--except those that affect his work. "Mr. Reston," says Mr. Krock, "is not exactly what you would call a cultivated man." Reston says he has not read a novel in 20 years--but he has read practically every nonfiction work that he thought would be valuable in improving the way he does his job. This self-education has helped make Reston a reporter who can write well on almost any subject from the public appeal of Elvis Presley to the pitfalls of relating contemporary America to the decline of Rome. Says Managing Editor Catledge: "If he called me and said Tosca is coming to Washington and I want to cover it, I'd expect a goddam good story from him."
Like many newspapermen whose working hours are controlled more by deadlines than by their own wishes, Reston feels that he does not have enough time for his family. But the family is the one interest that can get him away from the job. The Times's Washington correspondent is also an unsalaried contributor to Reston's Weekly, a journal issued sporadically from 3124 Woodley Road, N.W., and sent to friends and relatives. The younger two of Reston's three sons--Richard, 22, who was graduated last month from the University of Wisconsin, Jim, 18, a freshman at the University of North Carolina, and Tommy, 13, an eighth-grader at Washington's Gordon Junior High School--have served as editors. The paper's policy is firm. Warned Editor Jim several years ago: "The editor has no time for crackpots, and will not publish political propaganda for anybody."
A Great Phone Man. Working for his other bosses at the Times keeps Reston busy 12 to 15 hours a day. He is usually up around 6 to collect the four papers on the front steps, the Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. These he reads with deep concentration, over a pot of coffee, making notes. At 8 he listens to the news broadcast on the radio, and just before 9 Sally drives him to work.
Arriving before most of his staff, he goes to work on the telephone, occasionally recording his conversations (with a beeper that warns his sources that their words are being transcribed). "Reston is one of the most effective telephone men I've ever seen," says Krock, and most of Washington agrees. He still works the embassies thoroughly, piling straws that may build into stories. With the diplomatic corps, he ranks well above his colleagues (says the London Observer's Patrick O'Donovan: "He's the most European of the [U.S.] reporters"). Gratified governments have given him the French Legion of Honor, Norway's Order of St. Olav, Chile's Order of Merit, and the Belgian Order of Leopold.
Whatever story he is covering, Scotty Reston uses the power of the Times boldly and wisely. Some of his best stories come from people who want to leak the news to the Times. But this is not to say that he does not dig out many a story. He uses the periphery technique, getting all the facts he can around the edges, then throwing what he knows at the main source, and bluffing out the whole story. In his last two years as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson refused to see Reston alone. When Acheson was stepping out of State, Reston asked him: "Why couldn't we get along? I could have been very useful to you." Acheson's reply: "Because you would get the combination to the safe before you were through."
John Foster Dulles did see Reston alone, to the chagrin of some other Washington correspondents. The New York Herald Tribune's Marguerite Higgins, who also had regular access to Dulles, recalls that when she was able to see Dulles alone, he had the disconcerting habit of saying, "As I was telling Scotty earlier this week . . ."
This kind of stature makes Scotty Reston one of the highest-paid (more than $40,000 a year in salary, plus a $1,000 fee for an occasional lecture) and one of the best-adjusted newsmen in Washington. "Nobody ought to be paid," he once said to a friend, "for having as much fun as we do." But the remark is misleading. If there is any fun in Reston, it comes out only in his occasional humorous pieces for the Times, e.g., his stories about "Uniquack," the machine that can answer any question:
Q. I take it you don't think much of human logic.
A. I haven't seen much of it lately. The President says everything's dandy, and takes another trip. Everybody knows everything's not dandy, but they say it's nice to see the President getting around like that. Dozens of committees study defense, education and housing, and issue millions of words saying we'd better pull up our socks. The President says our socks are just where they ought to be. He adds that he knows more about socks than anybody else, having worn them all his life.
The Era of Interpretation. Approaching the job of getting and interpreting the news with his Calvinistic gravity of purpose, Reston works as if the very life of the republic rested on his ability, and the ability of his fraternity, to alert the people on the issues of the day. He worries that the people are not listening as carefully as they should to interpretive reporters like Scotty Reston. "There is more good, hard, tough reporting coming out of Washington," says Reston, "than the public shows much stomach for."
Good, hard, tough reporting is what serious Scotty Reston means to keep on trying to give to the public."The 19th century," he says, "was the era of the novelist. The 20th is the era of the journalist. A distracted people, busy with the fierce competitions of modern life, must be addressed while they are paying attention, which is usually at the moment of some great national or international event."
*This problem of continuity has also occurred to Presidents. In 1932 Herbert Hoover invited Franklin D. Roosevelt to briefings on policy and work in progress. Harry Truman, anxious to keep his 1948 opponent informed on foreign-policy developments, ordered a Teleprinter installed on Tom Dewey's campaign train, sent him "important messages that came to me on the subject of international affairs." Similarly, in 1952, he invited President-elect ' Eisenhower to the White House for chats about the "transition period."
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