James Reston

...Kissinger gets a mixed assessment...

...That reference points to a second theme of Deadline, one I suppose I am vocationally predisposed to reflect on...

...Deadline recounts this history thematically to a degree, but most strikingly in a series of perceptive portraits...

...Monnet's friend, James Reston, has given us a life that combines both dimensions...

...Commonweal 17 January 1992: 7...

...who he is dominates this very good book...

...Reston was a superb reporter—two Pulitzers testify to that but he possessed a public philosophy that provided continuity to the hundreds of columns he wrote on America and its role in the world...

...Dulles and Reagan do not...

...Reston confesses to a gap between his own faith and the sturdy Calvinist conviction of his parents, but it is clear from this memoir that his struggle to believe bore its own fruit...

...Reston records the powerful influence of both his and Sally's parents at several points...

...Most people try it for the life of an administration or perhaps a decade...

...The columns cut across the fabric of American public life in both its domestic and foreign dimensions, but the focus was an effort to interpret America's postwar role to the administrations who passed through Reston's home city and the public that elected them...

...What Reston did was strikingly important...

...some make it for twenty years...

...Reston began his career reporting World War 11, spent most of it interpreting the cold war for readers of the Times, and lived to write the obituary of the Soviet empire...

...In a 1959 essay, Reston contrasted Lippmann's life with the rest of the Washington press corps, seeing him as a man who maintained "a duality of engagement in the world of public affairs and disengagement from the world of affairs into the world of books and political philosophy, of reason and meditation on ultimate values...

...It's all here in 500 pages as readable as the column he wrote for thirty years...

...To be sure there were financial and other support systems that others would never dream of, but the story of this marriage is still a remarkable testimony of hope...

...Here is a life lived at the center of Washington power and politics not dominated by either...

...Of this encounter Reston writes: "He seemed to think that I could provide spiritual guidance, but I'm afraid my faith was not strong enough to help...

...From this platform he exercised an influence unlike that of any other journalist save Lippmann...

...This customary author's exculpation of oth6: 17 January 1992 Commonweal ers cannot be applied here, because on page after page Sally Reston is counselor, companion, and mainstay of the family...

...The Reston style is never mean or vindictive but it is clear whom he respected and whom he did not...

...Reston obviously admired Monnet's vision and his indominable drive and optimism, but he also highlights a personal view of Monnet's, his distinction between "those who want to be somebody and those who want to do something...

...Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Carter do well...

...It is a commentary on the uniqueness of Reston's own vision that this "reporter" pays most attention to a man who thought in terms of decades rather than daily headlines, a man who did not hold public office but conceived of new kinds of institutions for others to run...

...I remember Reston often invoking in his columns Abraham Lincoln's dictum that "we are devoid of faith and terrified by our skepticism...

...The thread that holds Reston's autobiography together is his relationship with Sally Fulton Reston, his wife of sixty years...

...Later on, Phil Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, came to discuss religion with Reston in the days just before Graham's tragic suicide...

...Reston seems a mellow Calvinist: schooled in the story of Original Sin, he was hardly surprised by the follies of history...

...Sally Reston comes through as at least an equal partner in a professional and familial story that beat the odds of the Washington pressure cooker...

...Family and faith sustained the private Reston, but most readers will be drawn to Deadline because the public Reston has been so much a part of our world...

...Deadline tells the story of a man who did not simply maintain his faith in stern surroundings, but used the perspective of faith to interpret the world events that were part of his daily work...

...In a fleeting but fascinating aside, he comments on Lippmann's view of religion— where skepticism did seem to triumph— and he tells the reader how he pursued the issue during Lippmann's final illness...

...For almost twenty years, I have had both pastoral and professional contact with a variety of men and women who have struggled to balance a career and family responsibilities in Washington...

...I wake sometimes in the night hearing his voice, or when walking alone, particularly at Fiery Run in Virginia, suddenly I think I see him at my side...

...WORLD WATCH J. Bryan Hehir JAMES RESTON MELLOW CALVINIST James Reston, the dean of American journalists, has performed a signal public service in writing Deadline: A Memoir (Random House, $25, 452 pp...

...David Halberstam (The Powers That Be), in comparing the two, described Reston as the dominant reporter of his era and Lippmann as its public philosopher...

...The person who comes through the book with unqualified praise is Jean Monnet, the mind behind the European Community...

...recounting his fifty years at the New York Times...

...Reston's life reads as one rooted in faith, but disciplined by its struggles with skepticism...

...His profession prides itself on its secularity, and he worked a beat in a city which seldom sustains faith but often tests it...

...but he came through it all with a fundamentally optimistic reading of human nature and the human story...

...For the current generation of Americans likely to see life in Washington through the lens of Watergate, Irangate, the savings and loan scandal, and the Thomas-Hill hearing, Reston provides a resounding counter-example...

...I am not sure how this will go down in an age shaped by different conceptions of male/female roles, but it is hard to criticize the results of the Restons' relationship...

...One dimension of the familial narrative is its strong intergenerational character...

...The toll is often very high...

...In direct and elegant prose, Reston traces a career shaped by the major events and personalities of the last fifty years: World War II, Yalta, the founding of the United Nations, Churchill and De Gaulle, ten presidents, and the close circle of those who shaped the thinking of presidents, prime ministers, and the reading public: Walter Lippmann, Arthur Krock, Jean Monnet, Dean Acheson, and Henry Kissinger...

...Even at eighty, he remembers his father in a way which is as powerful as it is poignant: "I was never able to achieve his redemptive faith, though I tried, but he has lived every day in my memory...

...But these events are not the "big picture," rather it is the way Reston interweaves historical events with his narrative of family, faith, and philosophy that are part of his story of the United States and its role in the world...

...The book describes a series of positions Reston held at the Times, but most readers knew him through the column that appeared from 1953-1987 (and occasionally since then...

...Halberstam's distinction is sound, but too absolute for my tastes...

...My wife Sally not only provided the story for this book but had to jolly it along for a couple of years and even help edit it at the end....She is in no way to blame for the final result, but with no Sally, no book...

...the Restons carried it off for half a century...