BOOKS
The Courtship of James Reston
Scotty: James B. Reston and The Rise
and Fall of American Journalism |
In June 1961 John F. Kennedy attended two summit meetings in Vienna. The first offered a blustery encounter with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, eager to establish his mastery over the young American president. At length, a visibly shaken Kennedy muttered, "It will be a cold winter." Ten minutes after leaving Khrushchev, JFK had his second high-level encounter in the Austrian capital, this one conducted behind drawn curtains in the American Embassy.
"How was it?" asked James "Scotty" Reston, columnist and Washington bureau chief for The New York Times.
"Worst thing in my life," said Kennedy. "He savaged me." As Reston jotted notes ("Not the usual bullshit. There is a look a man has when he has to tell the truth.") the president vowed stiffer resistance to Communist encroachment in Berlin and South Vietnam. It was a seminal moment in the cold war that bracketed Reston's career, elevating him and his newspaper to unprecedented power and influence. But it also hints at what John F. Stacks calls "the most delicate of straddles" wherein even the most respected journalist can unwittingly barter objectivity for access, as fame dulls his critical judgment.
Out of Reston's papers, extensive interviews with his family and professional associates, and his own distinguished career as a correspondent and editor at Time, Stacks has woven a narrative at once empathetic and unblinking. In this it reflects the virtues of its subject. "Scotty was above all things a good human being," says one colleague, speaking for many. "He was also a superb reporter." This presents no small biographical challenge. Reston was joyfully married for half a century to the only woman he ever loved, and his story takes color from the personalities and events he covered and, to a degree scarcely imaginable today, influenced.
Stacks proves more than adequate to the test. He movingly evokes the petty humiliations and loveless theology that defined Reston's youth in the Clydebank neighborhood of Glasgow. The boy's resolve to be assimilated into his adopted home ("I'm going to be an American if it kills me") foreshadowed his adult drive and seductive charm. Yet for all the access, prestige, and affluence he realized, the Scottish immigrant never entirely outgrew his outsider status. Fueled by vulnerability, Reston became the preeminent reporter of his era. This alone makes him a compelling figure in twentieth century newspapering.
What lends Scotty its larger significance, however, is Stacks's probing examination of the wary courtship of source and scribe. In Reston's case, the line between observer and participant was especially treacherous. "We're like the British Empire," he once told a colleague, "we don't have any friends, we only have interests when it comes to government." This did not prevent him from cultivating at least the appearance of friendship with sources as varied as Anthony Eden, Adlai Stevenson, Felix Frankfurter, Arthur Vandenburg, and Robert MacNamara. The habit was ingrained early. While still in high school, Reston caddied for James Cox, the Ohio newspaper publisher and 1920 Democratic presidential candidate. A loan from Cox enabled Reston to graduate from the University of Illinois during the bleak Depression year of 1933. Reston's byline first appeared in a Cox-owned newspaper in tiny Springfield, Ohio.
Always deliberate, Reston's literary perfectionism clashed with the unforgiving schedule of the newsroom. Older hands teased the cub sportswriter, "What do you think this is, a quarterly?" Later, as traveling secretary to the Cincinnati Reds, Reston met Robert Taft, who would provide a ticket of admission to Alice Roosevelt Longworth's waspish Washington salon. Most important of all, Reston came to the notice of Arthur Hays Sulzberger — Mr. Gus to intimates. With his equally cosmopolitan wife, Iphigene, Sulzberger would all but adopt the ambitious younger man, whose reserved public face masked a wit and generosity belying his description of his fellow Scots as "tight as a Pullman window."
Reporting for work in the London bureau of The New York Times on September 1, 1939, Reston quickly made a name for himself. He infuriated Winston Churchill by devising a schoolboy code ("please tell Harvard I want my son entered") that was sophisticated enough to evade British censors trying to hide naval losses at Scapa Flow. Four years later Reston won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes by ferreting out secrets of the Dumbarton Oaks conference called to design a postwar landscape. Reston's readers knew about the Marshall Plan weeks before it was publicly unveiled.
Applying similar ingenuity, he broke the silence surrounding the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose security clearance had been revoked amid allegations of disloyalty. In exchange for time to rebut the charges, Oppenheimer's lawyer offered the Times an exclusive. "I had no personal feelings about Oppenheimer," the columnist said later. "I had used him to get an important story and he had used me for his defense." To use and be used. "There is no more pungent expression of the relationship between reporter and public figure," writes Stacks. Not content to describe a litany of scoops, the author deconstructs "the impulse of the outsider to become an insider . . . expressed as the desire to know what the insiders know."
It is a relationship fraught with potential for misunderstanding. For example, as president, Dwight Eisenhower was only too willing to enlist Reston as a pawn on the diplomatic chessboard. By reporting the movement of America bombers closer to the Chinese mainland, Reston lent credence to Eisenhower's shadowy threat to use atomic weapons on the Korean peninsula unless an armistice was reached. Like most presidents, Ike had a short memory, and a shorter fuse. Tired of being portrayed as disengaged from his own administration, Eisenhower finally snapped. "Who the hell does Scotty Reston think he is telling me how to run the country?" he barked.
Reston's confidence mirrored that of the liberal establishment that had defeated Hitler and overcome the Great Depression. Along the way it centralized authority in Washington as never before, making the nation's capital the most coveted of datelines. Unsurprisingly, Reston thought Eisenhower too passive a leader, a judgment largely repealed by later historians. He was equally dismissive of Ronald Reagan, whose counter-reformation threatened Washington's primacy even as it disregarded the journalistic oracles of Georgetown.
As a staunch foe of Wisconsin's Senator Joseph McCarthy, Reston debated anti-McCarthy tactics with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Stirring a tumbler of whiskey with his thick fingers while casually relating debates within the Eisenhower White House over the possibility of nuclear war, Dulles was an unlikely confidant. To prevent McCarthy and his allies from selectively leaking the hitherto secret record of the Yalta conference that sanctioned Soviet expansion in Europe, Dulles looked the other way as a State Department deputy "in charge of the calculated leak department" handed the explosive documents to Reston and the Times.
He could not know it at the time, but the fifties were Reston's glory years. The telegenic John F. Kennedy transformed Washington journalism in ways that permanently undercut the Olympian priesthood of columnists like Reston and Walter Lippman, who were accustomed to explaining America to itself over bacon and eggs.
Lamenting the televised press conference as "the goofiest thing since the hula hoop," Reston wryly declared the auditorium of the State Department a fine venue for a heavyweight boxing match, "but asking questions in it is like making love in Grand Central Terminal." Self-interest aside, Reston's discomfiture with the new order made him a prophet as well as a sage. For if television removed journalistic and ideological filters, it also emphasized stagecraft over substance. Privileged White House backgrounders gave way to cool blue backdrops. Pictures replaced words.
In other respects, Reston was emphatically a man of his time, as well as the Times. If he paid insufficient attention to his own family, he recruited a remarkable group of surrogate sons, including Russell Baker, David Halberstam, R. W. Apple Jr., Neil Sheehan, Tom Wicker, Steve Roberts, and Anthony Lewis. Women need not apply to the rarified fraternity known as Reston's Rangers. Briefly, he considered employing Mary McGrory, but only if she would work the Times switchboard in the morning. Reston's chauvinism was matched by his aversion to keyhole journalism. Tipped off to rumors surrounding Kennedy's marital life, he declared, "I will not have The New York Times muckraking the president of the United States."
Having been critical of Arthur Krock, his predecessor as chief of the Times Washington bureau, for "playing footsie" with the Kennedys, Reston himself became the chosen instrument for communicating JFK's post-Vienna resolve. In the summer of 1961, the Soviet Union entombed East Berlin behind a shameful wall, and embarked on a new round of hydrogen bomb tests. Concerned that the Soviets might dismiss his stern response as so much White House rhetoric, Kennedy sought reinforcements. He invited Reston for a private walk on the beach near his Massachusetts compound. The columnist duly delivered his own ultimatum — datelined Hyannis Port, in case anyone failed to get the message — to the men in Moscow. It was a grave error of judgment, he wrote, to assume that the United States would acquiesce in defeat "without resorting to the ultimate weapons of nuclear power. For nuclear war in such circumstances is not 'unthinkable.' It is in cold fact being thought about and planned."
Some of the book's most dramatic passages revolve around the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when a White House reluctant to launch a preemptive strike on Castro's regime aimed one instead at the Times. In a tense conversation, Kennedy confirmed to Reston the presence of offensive Soviet missiles in Cuba. He confided as well his plan to impose a naval blockade of the island, coupling this with a warning that premature release of the news might cause events to spin out of control. Reston sought assurances that this was not another Bay of Pigs (where the Times had tempered its coverage following a heated internal debate over the word "imminent"). There would be no invasion, Kennedy told him. "You have my word of honor."
Under the circumstances this was sufficient for Reston and the Times high command. Such promises would lose their credibility in the poisoned atmosphere bred by Vietnam and Watergate. Convinced that Lyndon Johnson was betraying his 1964 campaign promises against sending American boys to fight an Asian war, Reston received the inevitable chastisement ("Why don't you get on the team? You have only one president.") Bravely, the columnist told LBJ that personal pride was clouding his geopolitical judgment. "I'm not trying to save my face," Johnson claimed as he ushered Reston out of the Oval Office. "I'm trying to save my ass."
Near the end of his career, Stacks asserts, "Reston's greatest virtues became liabilities. He trusted the untrustworthy, apparently believing he was too important to be lied to." It is a harsh indictment, for which the author provides contradictory evidence. Indeed, the worst thing about this otherwise excellent book is its apocalyptic title. Reston had little to do with "the fall of American journalism." Nor was he corrupted, as Stacks implies; he merely became comfortable with a contracting circle of voices, confusing America with the Washington scene to which he had become permanently affixed. His greatest offense was to fall out of fashion.
Reston's account of Chappaquidick began, with chilling insensitivity, "Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family." The young woman who died in Ted Kennedy's car, Mary Jo Kopechne, went unmentioned until the fourth paragraph of the story — an embarrassing oversight soon corrected by editors in New York. Far worse, according to Stacks, was for Reston to come under the spell of Henry Kissinger. In largely absolving Kissinger of responsibility for the December 1972 bombing campaign in North Vietnam — denounced as "war by tantrum" by Reston himself — the aging journalist lost his footing and his credibility, Stacks argues. Never mind that Kissinger's attempt to slant news of an earlier bombing campaign, over Cambodia, in 1970 elicited from Reston a one-word response — "Nuts!" — followed by a column denouncing administration secrecy. Or that Reston had jokingly threatened to publish the Pentagon Papers in the Vineyard Gazette, the small-town weekly he operated as a costly sideline, should the Times shy away from embarrassing some of his own most prominent sources.
Reston admired Kissinger's tough-minded belief "that in a lawless, nuclear world, survival was ethic enough for a diplomat." Stacks disagrees. "A less elegant description of Kissinger," he writes bitterly, "would portray him as a brilliant, lying, conniving, manipulative, power-hungry opportunist of the first order." Whatever one may think of this assessment, it reveals more about the author's biases than it does about his subject. And it exposes political and cultural nerve endings still raw thirty years later.
Reston didn't betray his readers' trust. He just got old. "We are living in an age of destruction," he complained in 1979. The press was determined, "for good reasons, to expose the weakness and corruption of government at all levels, but in the process tends to dramatize the worst in everything and everybody." Late in life, having written the obligatory memoir, Reston made the obligatory visit to C-Span, where he acknowledged his ambivalence about television. Recognizing its educational potential, the print equivalent of Walter Cronkite appeared visibly discomforted by its enforced intimacy. "It frightens me because it makes you think about yourself," said Reston. "I do not think thinking about yourself is a formula for happiness."
Tell that to the hard bodies dispensing today's soft news, or the strident ringmasters of cable who measure success in decibels and demographics. The real corruption of American journalism, as Stacks concedes in a melancholy afterword, lies in the sycophancy and sensationalism resulting from corporate control and a mindless obsession with the bottom line. At the end, Stacks contrasts Reston's decency with the reflexive distrust bred by official spin and mendacity. "He was skeptical without ever lapsing into the current disease of American journalism: unrelieved cynicism." Is it any wonder, then, that the mourners who attended Reston's funeral in December 1995 grieved for the loss of their friend, and much more?
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