The Prince of Print

By James Fallows

EARLY IN THIS SKILLFUL, colorful biography, John Stacks writes that his subject, James (Scotty) Reston of the New York Times, was "the best journalist of his time, and perhaps the best of any time." This is a stretch. The saving grace of journalism is that it has room for so many varied methods and practitioners. Ernie Pyle, Robert Capa and Edward R. Murrow all covered the same war but in different ways; it's senseless to try to rank them.

Still, in one particular form of journalism--Washington-based newspaper coverage of the decisions, motives and actions of major governmental figures--Reston was for two decades after World War II a truly dominant figure. When the new President, John Kennedy, came out of a harrowing meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, he went straight to a prearranged session with Reston to discuss Khrushchev's apparent threat of a nuclear showdown. In the months between that meeting and the Cuban missile crisis, Reston's reporting played the role it often had since the 1940s: it was the most authoritative indicator of what those in the U.S. government really had in mind.

Because he stayed on the public stage long past his prime, and because journalists' works and reputations fade with amazing speed, Reston is undervalued now. This biography--Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism (Little, Brown; 373 pages), by a veteran Time editor--explains the ingredients and impact of Reston's achievements while noting the lessons from his later failures.

Known as Scotty because he was born near Glasgow, Scotland, in 1909, Reston was raised in Dayton, Ohio, under difficult circumstances. He was nearly expelled from the University of Illinois journalism school when a Depression-era bank failure made his $100 tuition check bounce. Memories of his early penury, Stacks says, and his immigrant's outsider mentality stuck with Reston through his life, even though by his 40s he was a well-paid pillar of the East Coast establishment.

The details of Reston's rise within the Times, from his arrival as a raw reporter at age 29 to his takeover of the Washington bureau 15 years later, will intrigue any fan of bureaucratic politics. Stacks makes clear that Reston used every ploy of the classic man on the make. He sought and flattered professional patrons. He was useful and devoted to the Sulzberger family, which owned the Times--and to Katharine Graham, who kept trying to lure him to the Washington Post. He made pre-emptive strikes against in-house rivals. He lost only one major battle inside the Times--against Abe Rosenthal, executive editor in the 1980s, for control of the paper.

That Reston was genuinely liked, rather than resented, was due in part to another organizational trait: his eye for and generosity to new talent. He helped bring to the Times a stunning array of young journalists: Russell Baker, Tom Wicker, David Halberstam, Max Frankel and Anthony Lewis. His proteges, Stacks says, retained a purer affection for him than did his sons, for whom his work left less time.

Of course, the basis of Reston's standing was his consistent ability to come up with scoops. One example from many: in the fall of 1944, representatives of the Allied governments met at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, to plan the U.N. Reston used connections, bluff and charm to persuade a delegate to turn over his briefing book, with every government's negotiating strategy. The Times ran the contents, and Reston won the Pulitzer Prize.

Reston's decline, in Stacks' view, was hastened by the ascent of Richard Nixon. Reston had trusted and been trusted by senior officials for years. But when he trusted Nixon's National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, he was burned for the first time. According to Stacks, Kissinger lied both to Reston about the advice he had given Nixon and to Nixon about his contacts with Reston. Reston, who had already begun sounding more like a grandee than a reporter, went far out on a limb in defending Kissinger in his columns, and to younger reporters he looked like a dupe.

It's not obvious that this arc represents the "rise and fall of American journalism," as claimed in the book's subtitle. The rise chronicled so well in the book is mainly that of Reston. What Stacks presents as the fall is actually the end of a quarter-century interlude. From the start of World War II to the escalation of the Vietnam War, many leaders of the press felt, in Stacks' words, "a sense of common purpose with the government and political leaders," much as they did immediately after Sept. 11. Journalism's challenge now, as in most of American history, is to be critical and independent without being mindlessly cynical. Hope for meeting that challenge rests with the next generation of upstarts as ambitious as the young Scotty Reston.