Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

Elderly movie actors have one big advantage over aging journalists. The actor may now look his age doing headache commercials, but a younger public brought up on television reruns has a live and fond memory of him at his once best. Yet when a newspaperman like James ("Scotty") Reston, 77, gives up his New York Times column after more than 30 years at it, how many outside his own craft recall the days when he was the best journalist of his time?

There are no films of Scotty Reston in his starring days, but as a reporter he was the real thing. He won the first of his two Pulitzer prizes in 1945 after publishing plans for the United Nations drawn up by each of the five powers that would become permanent members of the Security Council. He got all the papers at once but created a bigger sensation by doling out his scoops for days, one at a time. The FBI was put on his trail; an enraged Secretary of State called up Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador, demanding to know whether he had leaked. Halifax denied it, then barred Reston from the embassy. Actually, Reston's source was the Chinese.

A stocky, courtly, self-deprecating man, Reston likes to say that "scoops don't come from the top, but from the periphery -- from allies, or from congressional committees that have to be told something in advance." Nonetheless, as his reputation as a diplomatic correspondent grew, scoops came from the top too. It was John Foster Dulles who leaked the Yalta papers after Reston persuaded him that Senator Joe McCarthy was making Dulles look bad with informed innuendos about their contents. The Times published the full text in 32 pages.

In his eleven years as Washington bureau chief of the Times, Reston proved a shrewd man at spotting talent. He also instituted a practice, like a Supreme Court Justice's, of selecting young interns to "clerk" for a year; out of this group came the present bureau chief, Craig Whitney, as well as Times correspondents at the White House, the State Department and on Capitol Hill. In Reston they found a hard-working, long-hours boss, congenial colleague and fierce defender of his troops.

His poor and Calvinist upbringing (he was born at Clydebank in Scotland, brought to the U.S. at eleven) instilled a strict moral sense in Reston. As a young reporter covering Franklin Roosevelt he refused to join the "coterie of reporters who played cards with the President at night at Warm Springs" and then in the 1944 election failed to report his weakened health. Such dereliction shocked Reston and put him on guard against presidential intimacy. "In 40 years, I've only been in the living quarters of the White House five times," he says, and disapproves of Columnist George Will's "taking Nancy Reagan to lunch."

In covering Presidents he kept a professional distance. Eisenhower once demanded, "Who does Scotty think he is, telling me how to run the country?" Nixon put Reston on his enemies list, "which was all right with me." Reston was the first reporter to interview John Kennedy in Vienna when the young President, fresh from his Bay of Pigs disaster, emerged "terribly shaken" from his meeting with Khrushchev. Humiliated by the Russian, Kennedy realized he would have to beef up American defenses, mentioning Viet Nam to Reston, and thus, in Reston's view, "starting us down that slippery slope." When Reagan was elected, Reston -- who had been uninspired by his candidacy -- was in the first group of columnists invited to an intimate dinner at the White House. "He was awfully nice, but it was no go," Reston says. "We asked him questions and were fed anecdotes."

Reston began to write his Washington column back in 1953. He had been invited by Publisher Philip Graham of the Washington Post "to 'come over and run the paper.' I was never really tempted, but I used it to bargain at the Times," which countered by offering him the column (fear of losing Russell Baker, Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis, Reston adds, got these colleagues their columns too). In 1968, during a crisis, he was asked to run the Times; he reluctantly did so for a time. Looking back, he says, "I was never happy in New York, and never a good executive editor, while still trying to write the column."

That column, appearing in 330 American papers, is what a later generation knows of Reston. Brought up in the Times tradition that opinions were to be expressed only in editorials, he thought of his own role as chiefly an explainer of the news. He was never an ideologue. In the days when the old Washington establishment still mattered, Reston, with his own unparalleled knowledge and acquaintance in the capital, would write confidently of what "this town" thinks, which is even more presumptuous than hazarding what "the White House" or "the Pentagon" is said to think. Turning out two or three columns a week, over 5,000 of them, and never missing a deadline, Reston sometimes let such thermostatic impressionism substitute for hard reporting. As the years went by, a younger generation of journalists saw complacency, not tolerance, in his readiness to give each new President the benefit of the doubt, or in his avuncular reminders that the country had survived other crises.

; Sometimes Reston's optimism about America, when unbuttressed by evidence, could sound like Reagan -- or like Polonius ("Things here are seldom as good or as bad as most people think they are"). He was always better when rescued by events that stirred a Calvinist rage, as during his final months as columnist when Reagan's misdeeds and inadequacies incensed Reston. He believes the country's problems are solvable if there is honest public dialogue, and if the U.S. is governed by "noble models" instead of what he regards as this Administration's encouragement of greed. Reston bounces off to semiretirement, defining himself in his farewell column as an "up-to-date, stick-in-the-mud optimist."