(Courtesy of The New York Times)
James Reston, a Giant of Journalism, Dies at 86
By R.W. Apple Jr.
December 7, 1995
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6— James Reston, former columnist, Washington correspondent and executive editor of The New York Times, died tonight at his home here. He was 86.
The cause was cancer, said his son Thomas.
First as a reporter and then, beginning in 1953, as a columnist, Mr. Reston was perhaps the most influential journalist of his generation. In Washington, where he was based, and also in other capitals around the world, he had unrivaled access to the high and the mighty. Yet he retained a wry, self-deprecating personality, free of bombast, and always sought to reduce political complexity to plain language.
"What I try to do," he said, "is write a letter to a friend who doesn't have time to find out all the goofy things that go on in Washington."
Interested in China and the Soviet Union as well as the United States, a student of diplomacy as well as domestic politics, he won two Pulitzer Prizes and dozens of other awards.
Mr. Reston was forgiving of the frailties of soldiers, statesmen and party hacks -- too forgiving, some of his critics later said, because he was too close to them. But his stern moral standards, rooted in the Victorian values of his youth, never wavered. He remained an idealist in a world of cynics.
From his strong-minded mother he inherited a Presbyterian conscience and an abiding sense of duty and responsibility. Work hard, he was taught. Work for large goals that transcend self-interest. Be cooperative. Be modest.
A talent scout of prodigious capacity, Mr. Reston hired and trained many of The Times's best-known journalists, and served as mentor to many more. To each of them, he passed along a lifetime's lessons about craft and country.
Mr. Reston's 50-year association with The Times began when he joined its London bureau on Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler's armies marched into Poland, igniting World War II. It was a fitting day on which to start his career at the paper, much of which would be spent recording and reflecting upon the aftermath of that fateful day.
His nationally syndicated column appeared regularly until 1987, when he became senior columnist. He retired from The Times in 1989, without ceremony, on his 80th birthday.
In an interview marking the occasion, he said the two greatest political triumphs in his lifetime had been the common defense system developed by the West after World War II and the improvement in the lot of black people in America since 1960.
Mr. Reston, who was born in Scotland, described the men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the Constitution as the great heroes in his adopted country's history. The document that they produced, he said, made possible "the triumph of the moderates" over the next two centuries.
A moderate himself, hostile to both fascism and communism, he described journalism's role in their eclipse as "one of the great pleasures of my life."
Asked whom he had most admired, he cited Franklin D. Roosevelt as the finest President he had known and Dean Acheson, Secretary of State in the Truman Administration, as "the key man" who "came to the fork in the road" and concluded that containing the Soviet Union would require a new alliance.
But he chose Jean Monnet, the French visionary who conceived the European Community, as the greatest man he had ever known as well as the person who had most deeply influenced his own thinking. Monnet proved, Mr. Reston often said, that "if you don't demand credit for things, you can push them through."
Mr. Reston thought of himself primarily as a reporter, and he often beat his competitors to be the first to write about major news events. His coverage of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington in 1944, which laid the groundwork for the United Nations, was one of the era's most important exclusives and won him his first Pulitzer, in 1945. Those articles disclosed the substance of secret documents that were then being circulated among delegations from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China on the structure of the proposed international organization.
Mr. Reston won his second Pulitzer in 1957 for distinguished reporting from Washington. The articles cited were written in June 1956 and analyzed the effects of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's illness on the functioning of the executive branch.
He was also responsible for The Times's publication in 1955 of the documents of the 1945 Yalta Conference. And in 1954 he disclosed that J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the making of the first atomic bomb, had subsequently been denied access to secret documents by the Atomic Energy Commission because of suspicion that he was passing information to the Soviet Union, a charge of which Oppenheimer was later cleared.
One exclusive dispatch came by accident. In 1971, as one of the first American reporters allowed into China, Mr. Reston developed appendicitis. His report, filed from his bed in the Anti-Imperialist Hospital in the capital, ran on the front page under the headline "Now, About My Operation in Peking."
From the 1950's on, Mr. Reston interviewed most of the world's leaders, often producing major news accounts that were scrutinized at the State Department for their every nuance. The interviews often bore the special Reston stamp: He sought to reveal not only the policies and the politics of the people he interviewed, but also their vision of life and their view of history.
Mr. Reston, who was called Scotty by virtually everyone who knew him, was 5 feet 8 inches tall and had a round and ruddy face, gray-green eyes, an ever-present pipe and an invariably pleasant manner. He was courteous not only to high-level officials but also to the young people who worked for him.
"He believes in hard work, in thrift, honor your parents, woman's place is in the home, play by the rules and live clean," his colleague Russell Baker once said.
Mr. Reston was credited by competitors with having more high-level news sources in Washington than almost any other reporter, although some critics felt that he was too kind in print to some of them. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, reviewing Mr. Reston's "The Artillery of the Press," a 1967 collection of his talks before the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that Mr. Reston had learned to his disadvantage "to treat all people in the manner of a newspaperman who must one day go back and see them again."
But in a 1980 article in The New Republic, Mr. Reston was quoted as saying: "If you spend your life as a hatchet man -- and there's something to be said for that -- then eventually you find that everybody's out to lunch when you call. You're left with only your own opinion. I wouldn't like that because my own opinions aren't that good."
Writing his column three times a week, Mr. Reston was a procrastinator, often filing right on deadline, to the dismay of night editors at The Times. A two-finger typist, he regularly wore out typewriters because he banged so hard on the keys, and his desk was a litter of papers, many of which bore tiny black marks where a stream of smoldering matches had landed in the course of a never-ending pipe-lighting ritual.
His columns, laced with quotations from Walter Lippmann, H. G. Wells, Matthew Arnold and Churchill, were a combination of high moral tone, detailed reporting, allusions to sports, impish humor and evocative descriptions of seasonal changes along the Potomac. They seldom offered absolute judgments about people or events; he used the word "maybe" more than most pundits.
His first column, on Oct. 18, 1953, established the Reston style.
"This town is still full of echoes from the days of America's isolation," he wrote of Washington. "It has changed in policy and personnel, more than any other world capital in the last generation. No nation has taken on so much or moved so far in such a hurry. Yet the habits of the past, like the bent figures of homeless former senators, still haunt the capital."
He often returned to certain themes, such as the role of the press. In his column of Oct. 30, 1968, when Spiro T. Agnew, soon to be elected Vice President, was denouncing news organizations, Mr. Reston wrote:
"The candidates and the press are fussing at each other again, and this is the way it should be. They have different jobs, and in many ways they are natural enemies, like cats and dogs. The first job of the candidate is to win, and he usually says what he thinks will help him win. The job of the reporter is to report what happens and decontaminate as much of the political poison as he can. The conflict is obvious."
In addition to his two Pulitzer Prizes, Mr. Reston was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986 and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award in 1991. He received the Overseas Press Club award for interpretation of international news three times, the George Polk Memorial Award for national reporting and the French Legion of Honor, and was named Commander, Order of the British Empire. He also received 28 honorary degrees.
After retiring, he fulfilled a longtime promise to his wife, Sally, by writing his memoirs. Titled "Deadline," they were published by Random House in 1991.
Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Ronald Steel, author of "Walter Lippmann and the American Century," called Mr. Reston "the quintessential Washington insider."
"Officials used him to test out new ideas on the public or to drop leaks for which they did not want to be held accountable," Mr. Steel wrote. "Because of his high position at The Times and his personal integrity, he was trusted both by those who provided the news and by those who read it.
"But what he did so well and so usefully for so long could not be done today. Journalism and the political world have changed too much."
James Barrett Reston began life about as far from the Washington power center as one could get.
He was born in Clydebank, Scotland, on Nov. 3, 1909, the son of James, a machinist, and Johanna Irving Reston. The Restons migrated to the United States when he was an infant, but Mrs. Reston became ill, and the family returned to Scotland.
There followed years of harsh poverty, of life in a brick tenement where young James and his sister slept crosswise at the foot of their parents' bed. In 1920 the family returned to the United States and settled in Dayton, Ohio. His father worked for the Delco Remy Division of General Motors.
When his parents were naturalized, young James automatically became an American citizen. In 1932, he graduated from the University of Illinois with an undistinguished academic record. He had majored in journalism, skipping the course in governmental reporting but getting an A in sportswriting.
During his high school years he caddied at the Dayton Country Club golf course. His own game became so good that he twice won the Ohio state public links championship and at Illinois was captain of the Big Ten championship golf team in 1932. His father wanted him to become a golf pro. His mother wanted him to be a preacher, which, he was to say later, is really what he became.
In the winters during his school days, he hung around The Dayton Daily News. "When the phone rang, I'd pick it up and take down the scores," he later recalled. "And from that I just moved into newspapering. I never thought of anything else."
Another link to the world of newspapers was Gov. James M. Cox, the Ohio publisher and 1920 Democratic Presidential candidate, for whom young Reston had caddied. Mr. Cox gave him his first job after college on one of the Cox newspapers in Ohio, The Springfield Daily News, where he earned $10 a week as the sports editor.
Later he was hired as traveling secretary and publicity director for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. In 1934 he moved to New York as a sportswriter for the Associated Press Feature Service.
The next year he married Sally Jane Fulton, a former college classmate who had been president of her sorority, an A student and a Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. Named Sara but always called Sally, she was the daughter of a judge from Sycamore, Ill., a small town near Chicago.
Mr. Reston once told a University of Illinois graduating class, "I should say in passing that I myself married a recklessly beautiful girl whom I first saw on Wright Street wearing a scarlet coat."
"My Gal Sal," as he called her in the dedication of "Sketches in the Sand," a collection of his columns published in 1967, became his closest confidante, frequent collaborator and steadiest supporter.
They had three sons, Richard, James Jr. and Thomas. Mr. Reston's own happy situation made him a champion of marriage, and he was forever asking his young bachelor colleagues when they were going to wed.
In 1937 The Associated Press sent Mr. Reston to London on a rather loose dual assignment: in summer covering sports events, in winter the British Foreign Office.
In 1939 he joined The Times and became low man on the totem pole in the London bureau, with a salary of $85 a week. He was so little known on the foreign desk in New York that his first byline in The Times had his name wrong -- John instead of James.
Then came the London blitz. The Times's office for much of the war was on the seventh floor of the Reuters Building on Fleet Street, which offered a view of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. He described this view of the battle in his first book, "Prelude to Victory."
"Before we got better sense, we used to put the lights off in the Times office every night and watch this effort," he wrote. "With uncanny regularity, the German bombers would come over just about 10 minutes after blackout and start dropping incendiary bombs all over this section. About an hour before we could see the flames, we would begin to hear the steady throb of scores of engines along the banks of the Thames; these were the pumps, driving the muddy water from the river up through miles of new hose. . . .
"A little later the sky would begin to change in color from midnight blue to a reddish glow, and soon the great dome of the cathedral would stand out in silhouette against the flames of perhaps a dozen raging fires. Night after night we watched this incredible scene, and morning after morning we marveled at the fact that the fires were somehow put out."
In December 1940 he was reassigned to Washington, and in 1942 published "Prelude to Victory," a call to action to the American people that was acclaimed here and abroad. Its theme was pure Reston: Unless Americans put aside personal aims and materialistic thinking and made sacrifices in a crusade for their country, the war would not be won.
In late 1942, Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, obtained a leave of absence from The Times for Mr. Reston and sent him to London to set up the agency's effort there.
John G. Winant, the United States Ambassador to Britain, recommended him to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then president and publisher of The Times, who was looking for an assistant. It was the beginning of Mr. Reston's close friendship with the Sulzberger family.
Mr. Reston returned to Washington and was named national correspondent in 1945. He made his mark with his coverage of Dumbarton Oaks, which illustrated a Reston maxim: Seek out the disgruntled party. His theory was that people who were disenchanted were more likely to talk candidly.
In this case, it was the Chinese representatives to the conference who were disenchanted. In his memoirs, Mr. Reston told of having met Chen Yi, one of the Chinese delegates, some years before the war through Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, wife of The Times's publisher. At Mr. Reston's urging, Chen Yi slipped him the complete texts of the proposals.
Instead of writing one long article, Mr. Reston doled out the information, producing an exclusive a day. The Russians thought Washington had leaked the material; Washington suspected the British, and the F.B.I. started an investigation of Mr. Reston.
In 1948 Mr. Reston became diplomatic correspondent for The Times, and in 1953 he became Washington bureau chief, succeeding Arthur Krock.
Mr. Reston continued as bureau chief until 1964, when he voluntarily relinquished the post to concentrate on his column.
In 1968 he was summoned to New York by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who had become publisher, to succeed Turner Catledge as executive editor, in charge of the entire news operation. The internal politics of the news department had received publicity after an unsuccessful effort by editors in New York to exert more control over the Washington bureau. Mr. Reston's mandate was to re-establish peace.
For 13 months he ran the news department while commuting to Washington a few times a week to write his column. It was an almost impossible job. In 1969, knowing that his column was suffering and that he had to choose between it and the editor's post, he gladly chose the column.
Mr. Reston was eminently a Washington man. He loved and understood the capital. Moreover, he had helped shape the Washington bureau. These were his people, and many of them regarded him as a father figure. The New York office, on the other hand, seemed a vast, impersonal beehive, and Mr. Reston never felt totally comfortable there.
During these years the Restons lived in a pleasant red brick house on Woodley Road in leafy northwest Washington and spent weekends at their log cabin in Fiery Run, Va. Mr. Reston often used Fiery Run as the dateline on his Thoreau-like columns about the restorative life in the country.
In 1968 the Restons purchased The Vineyard Gazette, a 122-year-old weekly on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where they vacationed in the summer. The paper has remained in the family; their son Richard is editor and publisher, and his wife, Mary Jo, is publisher and general manager.
Mr. Reston played a part in the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and in two other major news events involving The Times in questions of national security. The others were the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
In the spring of 1961, The Times was preparing to publish an article by Tad Szulc reporting that 5,000 or 6,000 Cuban exiles who had been training in the United States and in Central America for nine months were about to launch an invasion of Cuba to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro.
The article was planned for page 1 on April 7, under a four-column headline. But Orvil Dryfoos, then the publisher, was troubled by the security implications of the report. On April 6, he and Mr. Catledge, then managing editor, telephoned Mr. Reston, who advised them not to publish the article and cautioned against giving away the proposed timing of the landing as "imminent."
The article was published on April 7 under a one-column headline and with no mention of the invasion's date. The Bay of Pigs invasion took place 10 days later and ended in debacle. President John F. Kennedy, who took full responsibility, said that if The Times had published more about the operation, it might have saved the Administration from making such a colossal mistake.
"If I had it to do over, I would do exactly what we did at the time," Mr. Reston said later. "It is ridiculous to think that publishing the fact that the invasion was imminent would have avoided this disaster."
In 1962 Mr. Reston was apparently the only reporter who had found out that the Soviet Union, then under the leadership of Nikita S. Khrushchev, had secreted nuclear missiles in Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida. When Kennedy realized that Mr. Reston had the information, he telephoned him directly.
Four years later, Mr. Reston recounted the incident to E. Clifton Daniel, then managing editor of The Times.
"The President told me that he was going on television on Monday evening to report to the American people," Mr. Reston recalled. "He said that if we published the news about the missiles, Khrushchev could actually give him an ultimatum before he went on the air.
"I told the President I would report to my office in New York," Mr. Reston continued. "And if my advice was asked, I would recommend that we not publish. It was not my duty to decide."
Kennedy then called Mr. Dryfoos, the publisher, and asked him not to print Mr. Reston's article. Mr. Dryfoos left the matter up to Mr. Reston and his staff, and the article was withheld.
It was a different story, however, in 1971 when The Times obtained and published what became known as the Pentagon Papers, the Government's top-secret documents on the Vietnam War. Seeing this at once as "the story of the century," Mr. Reston was one of the editors who felt that the documents should be published because they were history and that therefore no question of national security was involved.
One of Mr. Reston's contributions to journalism was the corps of young reporters he discovered and developed.
In 1961 he instituted a program of internships for young would-be reporters, modeled on the clerkships at the United States Supreme Court and suggested to him by the late Justice Felix Frankfurter. Each year he would recruit a new college graduate as his clerk and researcher. He paid a price for this program, as time and again the young clerks with lofty journalistic thoughts would mix up his airline reservations or keep the Secretary of State waiting because they had failed to cancel a scheduled appointment.
Linda Greenhouse, who went on to report on the Supreme Court for The Times, recalled that on her first day as a clerk, Mr. Reston asked her to get Ted Sorensen on the phone and suggested she try Paul Weiss in New York. After unsuccessfully calling every Weiss-comma-Paul in the Manhattan phone book, she reported back to Mr. Reston.
"He didn't groan, tear his hair or -- more important, and the reason for my undying gratitude -- laugh at me," Ms. Greenhouse said. "He gently explained that Paul, Weiss was a New York law firm where Ted Sorensen was working, looked up the number and gave it to me."
It was perhaps this quality, this unfailing kindliness, that constituted his special attractiveness. It enabled him to view the faults and frailties of the world with compassion and to carry on in the belief that the best in mankind would eventually win out over the worst.
"Stick with the optimists, Niftie," he wrote in a column in February 1980, welcoming his new grandson, Devin Fitzgerald Reston, to the human race. "It's going to be tough enough even if they're right."
Mr. Reston is survived by his wife; his sons, Richard F. Reston of Martha's Vineyard, James B. Reston Jr. of Chevy Chase, Md., and Thomas B. Reston of Washington; his sister, Joanna Richey of Santa Cruz, Calif., and five grandchildren.
