Memories of a Mentor
ROBERTS, STEVEN V.
Memories of a Mentor Deadline: A Memoir By James Reston Random House. 525 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Steven V Roberts Senior writer, "U.S. News and World Report" I first met James Reston in...
...A friend had told me that the man who was the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times as well as the capital's pre-eminent columnist chose one young reporter every year to serve as his assistant, and I was applying for the job...
...Jekyll and part Mr...
...An immigrant from Scotland who attended the University of Illinois, he would occasionally react to one of my more academic observations with a pithy reference to my alma mater: "That's your Harvard crap talking...
...Reston came to the Times from the Associated Press on September 1,1939, joining the London staff...
...suppose I told him something wrong...
...There is a basic decency about this man, a trusting belief in the most simple verities, spiced with a pungent wit...
...Stevenson ran anyway, and Scotty voted for Ike, citing Stevenson's own reasoning as his explanation...
...Then there was the Vienna summit in June 1961...
...and should win...
...You have the job...
...Twenty-five years later I'm still married, still grateful for his growling, and increasingly aware of the wisdom contained in his final regular column for the Times, published August 2, 1987...
...But he didn't hear what his brother said to me in the Vienna embassy, and I did...
...Scotty would do anything for his people, and he worried constantly about what would become of the great young reporters he had assembled in Washington...
...We would only be useful to him if we really told him what we thought...
...General Eisenhower, said Stevenson, would win...
...On other occasions he would ask enormous questions and expect instant answers...
...Scotty would be the first to admit that much of what he believes in is old-fashioned, but he makes no apologies and panders to no fads...
...Perhaps that is why he came into my office one day in mid-1965, as my clerkship was ending, and asked whether the Times had offered me a reporting job yet...
...He warmed to Eisenhower's Midwestern charm, but dismissed Jack Kennedy as "a little too clever and fancy for my taste...
...Some time during our first week of work he would show us a draft of a column and ask our opinion...
...When I began working for Scotty I was dating a young woman he was very fond of, Cokie Boggs, and no less than twice a day he would growl at me, "When are you going to marry that girl...
...Some weeks later I received a hand written note, sent to my home during the holidays...
...To this day, thanks largely to him, they dominate the paper: Max Frankel, Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, Russell Baker...
...I remember mumbling somethinginsightfullike, "It'sbrilliant, sir...
...Reston started hiring young assistants after his great friend, Felix Frankfurter, told him about Supreme Court clerks, and how invigorating it was for aging pontificators to tap into fresh ideas and youthful energy...
...He regrets, for example, that the Times allowed the State Department to bully the paper into not opening a bureau in Peking during the 1950s, even though the Chinese were ready to allow it...
...That belief was incinerated by the deceits of war, and by Watergate...
...like an outsider again...
...He would smile softly, sit us down, and say that anybody could answer his phone or type his letters...
...Strict Calvinist that he is, though, Scotty does not hesitate to render judgments about people he feels should know better...
...Reston writes admiringly of today's reporters that they are not "intimidated by Presidents, as we often were...
...When I worked for him, and Scotty wenttosee Secretary of State Dean Rusk or Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, he basically believed he was being told the truth...
...I think Scotty and I only became real friends after I told him about my own immigrant roots, and my childhood in a working-class town in New Jersey that closely resembled his hometown of Dayton, Ohio...
...That small gesture was typical of Reston, who has been a model and mentor for me ever since...
...Once there, he marched me into the office of Managing Editor E.C...
...He also blames the Times for too frequently accepting the official version of events in Vietnam, even when the paper's own reporters were writing otherwise...
...To be sure, it is full of compelling conversations and observations about the worlds of politics and diplomacy that he knows so well...
...From 1953 to 1987 he wrote in 750-word gulps, and in places his memoir reads like a collection of columns, but that structure has its virtues...
...His wife, Sally, and his three sons were the center of his life, and if he had one mission, it was to make sure everybody else was as well-married as he was...
...One of the joys of this book is the graceful rhythms of the prose, laced with sly Restonisms...
...If I said I needed more time, he would justify his request, and his high expectations, by saying: "You went to Harvard, didn't you...
...Think of it as a large box of chocolates, full of tasty and surprising nougats...
...He hated his brief assignment as executive editor of the Times in New York, "living in fancy quarters in the United Nations Plaza" and feeling "for the first time in years...
...During my year with Reston, he did display one puzzling trait that his memoir helps to explain...
...Scotty Reston, thank God, is not joyless when it comes to the pleasures of writing, and of remembering...
...I eventually did marry her...
...Here's another Christmas present," it said...
...Nor does he spare his own ancestors: "The Scots retain, with good reason, a reputation for being poor and proud, hard working and hard drinking, sentimental, argumentative, part Dr...
...Hyde, joyless in their pleasures, partial to education and religion, with strong Left-wing political opinions, most of them wrong...
...It was a busy news day...
...because he would end the Republicans' isolationist tradition and solidify the postwar alliance in Europe...
...Robert Kennedy, eager to protect his brother from blame," repeatedly insisted that Scotty had it wrong...
...only three were women...
...One memorable day he asked me to analyze Barry Goldwater's concept of freedom before the evening deadline...
...He does allow that it's not easy to win a Pulitzer Prize and a Father of the Year Award simultaneously...
...Like the man, this memoir is warm and witty and wise...
...Then a week or so later he'd bring in another column...
...He credits George Bush for being proud of his heritage and the "noble tradition of Skull and Bones at Yale," but chides that his performance in the 1988 campaign "was all bones and no skull, unfaithful to his natural character...
...When I answered no, he simply said, "Come withme...
...Only a few minutes after his harsh confrontation with Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, a "shaken and angry" President John F. Kennedy met with Reston at the American Embassy...
...To paraphrase Popeye: He is what he is...
...But Reston rose to prominence in the pre-Vietnam era, when government officials and journalists, while certainly wary of each other, shared a common bond and sense of purpose...
...Twenty-six of us held this post...
...Daniel, obviously not very enthusiastic about the whole prospect, said "All right, all right," and I stayed on for 25 years...
...the South Vietnamese government was collapsing yet again...
...but Scotty, as intimates call him, took time to talk to a 20-year-old kid who was not quite sure where Vietnam was...
...reading it is a bit like hearing a familiar, much-loved piece of music...
...Daniel and demanded: "Are you going to hire this kid or not...
...His hope for the younger generation, he wrote, "is that they'll finally know what old love means...
...What this book reveals is his lifelong awe, and scorn, of the well-born, welleducated elite of the Eastern Establishment...
...He says of his parents: "All their tips about getting up early, working hard, and punting on third down stood up fairly well...
...After relentless hectoring from his friends, and many false starts at the word processor, Scotty has finally published a memoir...
...There is Scotty in early 1952, summoned by Adlai E. Stevenson after midnight, pulling on pants over his pajamas and going to a downtown hotel to hear Stevenson say that President Truman had just urged him to run for President...
...Or at least most of the time...
...Judge an idea by its merits, not its pedigree...
...We went out to the airport, got on a plane for New York, and drove straight to the Times building...
...News and World Report" I first met James Reston in November of 1963, when I was a senior in college...
...But then, I'm prejudiced...
...The anxiety attack was intense...
...Indeed, he writes, the thing he "hated most" in life was "the fear of being rejected, of being ridiculed as an outsider, different and even absurd...
...Even while he was at the very top of his profession, he always retained his perspective, and his priorities...
...partly at her rather insistent urging, and partly because Scotty showed me it was possible to practice journalism and matrimony at the same time...
...As Scotty recalls the President's view: "It was now essential to demonstrate our firmness, and the place to do it, he remarked to my astonishment, was Vietnam...
...Throughout this book, Scotty worries that he, and the New York Times, did not always preserve enough distance and detachment from men of power...
...and we all had a similar experience...
...History largely blames Lyndon B. Johnson for the Vietnam War, but Scotty argues that JFK really made the first and decisive commitments...
...I remember suggesting a minor word change, and he immediately made it...
...But its greatest strength, I think, is something more personal...
...but the lesson was indelible...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
