Stay on the Outside

...But was it...

...By chapter six, Reston is not only telling us properly that "the modern newspaper is searching for a new role, or ought to be" but is weightily adding that in his opinion this role "lies in the field of thoughtful explanation which tends to make the reporter more of an ally of the government official than a competitor...

...I should not have expected Reston, in his day one of the best disclosers in the business, to dissent from this powerful Nineteenth Century view...

...The dignity and freedom of the press are trammeled from the moment it accepts an ancillary position...

...Reston writes as a Washington insider...

...In another instance, that of the Bay of Pigs, when the American press as a whole leaned over backwards to do what officialdom wanted it to do and told the public altogether too little too late, Reston confirms that "after the event, but not before," Kennedy himself agreed that "less responsibility— in fact pitiless publicity—on the part of the press might have saved the nation from the consequences of that fiasco...

...He does his best to persuade his fellow newspapermen that "the old principle of publish and be damned, while very romantic, bold, and hairy, can often damage the national interest...

...The argument as to the right relationship between government and press has been going on a long time...

...He is now one of the best of the serious columnists operating from that columnist-ridden city and an associate editor of The New York Times to boot...

...But he is too good a newsman for one to see him adopting it without a qualm...

...They served the nation well by refusing all persuasion to be quiet, even at the risk of being accused of risking soldiers' lives by publicity...

...The purpose and duties of the two powers are constantly separate, generally independent, sometimes diametrically opposite...

...I would lay it down as a good working rule that the most dangerous newspaper is the "responsible" one...

...He is one of the mandarins of modern journalism...

...Newspapers owed it to the country to be responsible in international affairs, he declared in tones President Johnson would have approved...

...Reston quotes a number of instances where the natural inclination of governments towards secrecy and the public right to know have been in conflict...

...He also tells us that when President Kennedy, late in 1961, decided to raise the American "presence" in Vietnam from a few hundred military "advisers" to a military force of more than 15,000, George W. Ball, then Under Secretary of State, opposed the move and, with remarkable prescience, argued that to commit American prestige in this way would inevitably lead to an escalation to at least 300,000 troops...

...Having myself been on both sides of the fence at various times—as a newspaper editor, foreign correspondent, and columnist, and also as a wartime head of press censorship and a peacetime press adviser to a Prime Minister—I am by no means sure that I agree with him except as regards a narrow range of material...

...In an era of greater and greater concentration of power at the top, it is the business of eminent journalists to be constantly watchful of this natural governmental and bureaucratic trend...

...As the book proceeds, however, the mandarin takes over...

...Not for it an alliance between reporter and government official...

...But to claim as he does in his final paragraph that "the responsible government official and the responsible reporter" work best when they are "allies one with another" and with the "minority of thoughtful people" in the country is to beg some big questions, including the nature of responsibility and the nature, also, of the true journalistic commitment in a democracy...

...It is that the rising power of the United States in world affairs, and particularly of the President, requires "not a more compliant press but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire...

...The proper function of newspapers is to be dangerous to those who govern, even when their intentions are of the best— still more so when those intentions are suspect...

...Would it not have avoided a great deal of international trouble, plus a lot of hard lying, at no great loss in essential information if it had been brought out into the open earlier...

...It is impossible not to feel for him professional respect as well as personal liking...

...Nothing of this argument was allowed into the open and on the whole Reston seems to agree that Government officials were right to keep it quiet...

...So does Delane's ringing declaration: "The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time and instantly by disclosing them to make them the common property of the nation...

...We cannot," said Delane, "admit that a newspaper's purpose is to share the labors of statesmanship or that it is bound by the same limitations, the same duties, the same liabilities as that of Ministers...

...He recognizes a defect of the modern press: it deals too much with events, too little with the significance of events...

...He sympathizes with their desire to avoid "startling news stories...

...The Times reacted sharply...

...I am glad that some of the British press, led by the Guardian, saw things differently at the time of the Suez crisis...

...The press lives by disclosure...

...But possibly because of the audience he was speaking to, he now seems excessively anxious that journalists should be well thought of by those in authority...

...The journalist should stay on the outside for fear that he be taken in...

...But would not a few startling news stories at that stage have been infinitely preferable to what has followed from the refusal to let press and the public have a voice in the argument...

...But he still thinks The New York Times was right not to publish this fact until one of the planes was shot down in 1960...

...There is much that is wise and sensible in Reston's book...

...Across the years this still seems to me a pretty good statement of the journalistic problem...

...All the same I am bound to confess that his new book, based on three Elihu Root lectures before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, bothers me a little...

...His initial premise is impeccable...

...Reviewed by Lord Francis Williams James Reston was for long one of the most admired of Washington correspondents with a record of news breaks to turn any rival purple with chagrin and fill the breasts of British newsmen, operating in a less expansive climate of diplomatic confidences, with envy...

...He tells us, for example, that he knew for more than a year that the United States was flying high altitude planes (U-2) over the Soviet Union from a base in Pakistan...

...It is an understandable stance and a comfortable one...

...This is Reston the newsman speaking...

...It came up more than a century ago, in February, 1852, when Lord Derby lost his temper with the London Times, then under the editorship of John Thaddeus Delane, for exposing a deal he was cooking with Louis Napoleon instead of thoughtfully explaining it...

...And the problem is, as I know from experience both as a getter and giver of official information, that there is constant pressure from the official side to extend the range of what it is not permissible, or at any rate "helpful," to publish...

...He has some proposals, worthy but not very far reaching, for dealing with this...