James Barrett "Scotty" Reston's legacy to his profession is difficult to exaggerate. From his storybook beginning as the ambitious son of poor, devout, Scottish-Presbyterian immigrant parents, Reston rose to become at age forty-three bureau chief of The World's Most Important Newspaper in what was then arguably The World's Most Important City. In doing so, he helped to redefine the business of journalism through his own indefatigable reporting of the inner workings of American diplomacy, as well as through his inspired hiring policies.

Upon taking over the Washington bureau from the somnolently self-satisfied Arthur Krock, Reston flanked his own reporting with a new generation of energetic, well-educated young journalists like Anthony Lewis, Russell Baker, and Tom Wicker. With David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan telexing their reports from Vietnam, Reston set a standard for discovering and nurturing talent that few, if any, contemporary editors can hope to match. Moreover, as the most influential Timesman in Washington during the heyday of the cold war and its most respected pundit throughout nearly four decades, Reston also enjoyed a uniquely privileged vantage point from which to observe the machinations of the men entrusted with the power of the government of the United States. He could then report on and explain their actions to his readers in the context of an op-ed column published on the most prestigious page that daily journalism has yet to produce. It is with regard to his career as a pundit, rather than as a reporter, however, that Reston's legacy becomes more troubling.

The insider pundit, of whom Reston is perhaps the preeminent example, plays a unique and frequenty overlooked role in the functioning of American democracy. The First Amendment guarantees a free press but not necessarily an intelligent one. The accumulated strictures of what has come to be defined as journalistic "objectivity," moreover, constrict the press's natural intelligence by forcing it to print the mendacities, simplifications, and clever deceptions that politicians and other sources make up for their own purposes. Democracy is impossible without an intelligent, intelligible "culture of community conversation," as John Dewey argued, through which citizens can communicate with one another and form political opinions within the context of something approaching a coherent world view. But the cult of journalistic objectivity, while offering relatively reliable information, does nothing to foster such a culture.

Alone in our national political dialogue, the pundits are granted permission to offer opinions and place events in context -- to go beyond the "he said, she said" strictures of objective journalism to explain and advance more complicated propositions than the platitudinous sound-bites that dominate so much of our politics. But if they choose to forego this opportunity and instead parrot the pap offered up by the politicians, then they become not our last line of democratic defense but just another cog in the wheel of demagogic deception.

The most important question to ask about a Washington pundit, therefore, is who, exactly, is he writing for? A pundit who writes primarily for his sources benefits not only from his local popularity but also from the continuing stream of inside dope that a pleasing press provides. Such a pundit will be sought out for his advice by politicians and perhaps even asked to coach a pre-debate performance. His readers may find his column witty, enlightening, and occasionally uplifting, but the overall impact of this illusory process will be the slow destruction of democratic debate.

A Washington pundit who writes for his audience, however, will soon be faced with an extremely difficult dilemma. Without access to friendly sources, a regular column becomes so much mental masturbation. Almost no one, save an exceptional Michael Kinsley or Mary McGrory, is sufficiently creative to come up regularly with fresh and interesting perspectives on the news without cultivated access to high-level sources.

The story of James Reston's career is, in many ways, the story of how a reporter and pundit balanced these two competing tendencies. As the premier columnist and bureau chief for the Times, Reston had all the natural access behind closed doors that the journalism profession can muster. Coupled with his institutional power and prestige was a remarkably engaging personality and an infectious belief in the decency of his fellow citizens. It is easy to criticize Reston's work. It is almost impossible, any number of old Washington hands will explain, not to like him.

Reston's memoir, Deadline, written after almost fifty years as a Timesman and published four years after his valedictory column, offers a healthy portion of insider dope about past events as well as an overly generous assortment of homespun wisdom about America, the Times, the journalism business generally, and Sally Fulton Reston, of Sycamore, Illinois -- who, if the author is to be trusted, is to wives what Roger Ailes is to negative campaigns. There are plenty of stories here that will fascinate and delight any serious student of journalism. They include a few of the "Now It Can Be Told" variety relating to Reston and the Times's behind-the-scenes involvement in important matters of state.

Reston explains, for example, how he scooped the world by publishing the confidential details of the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference, prompting an FBI investigation in the process. And he goes into detail, for the first time, about his role in the Times's tense publication of the entire Yalta negotiating record in 1953 and again in the investigation of J. Robert Oppenheimer a year later. In the latter case, a chance meeting on the Eastern shuttle led Reston to discover the details of the trumped-up security charges against the famous physicist. Reston agreed to sit on the story while Oppenheimer prepared his defense, finally breaking it less than twenty-four hours before the government did so itself. The pundit later worried that his "famous scoop" had prejudiced the board if inquiry against Oppenheimer and thus implicated him in the tragedy.

But what clearly fascinates Reston more than these events themselves are the personalities behind them. He devotes long sections of the book to profiles of the grand actors of the period, from Churchill through ten American presidents, key diplomats, and a number of famous pundits.

Reston clearly has moments that should go down in epigram history. My favorite is his description of Richard Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them." More interesting are his choices of the kinds of people he admired. They say a great deal about the mindset of insider Washington and about the kind of punditry that Reston and his many imitators would produce during the course of the American half-century during which he -- together with Walter Lippmann -- reigned professionally supreme. For as Reston himself points out, unlike the genius Lippmann, he did not profess to have many special brilliant insights of his own. He frequently peddled not his own opinions, but instead relied on some "compulsory plagiarism" of the ideas of "well-informed officials" in high-level quarters. Exactly because Lippmann's example was so unapproachable to most journalists, Reston's model of punditry became in many ways the more influential one.

Many men who have passed through Washington during these decades have earned Reston's respect. (Owing largely to the times, one would have to say, the only women to figure heavily in this narrative are Reston's mother and his wife.) Reston liked and admired Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and George Kennan. He felt enormous sympathy for Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. And he is particularly kind to his employers at the Times, as well as to his neighbor, friend, and fellow pundit Lippmann, about whom he nevertheless appears to have complex and occasionally mixed feelings.

But the two intellectual giants who loom over Reston's world larger than the others are the master geopoliticians Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger. Ironically, it is these two men who also stand above all others in their impatience with, bordering on contempt for, the strictures of democracy in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

Reston considers Acheson "the central figure" and "principal architect" of America's emergence "from isolation to the defense of Western civilization." He notes that although Acheson was wrong about the Chinese entry into Korea, costing America many tens of thousands of lives, wrong about the importance of winning the Vietnam War, thereby costing even more lives, "recklessly belligerent" in his advice to John Kennedy about Khrushchev's threat to Berlin, and disastrously mistaken in his view of the Bay of Pigs (in both cases risking superpower nuclear war for largely peripheral causes), on what Reston calls "the big questions for which he had responsibility," no secretary of state in his time "earned so much gratitude or got so little." This is, to say the least, an extraordinarily generous assessment. Of Acheson's legendary contempt for Congress and the media, Reston is alarmingly forgiving. Nor does he shed much light on his own role as a communicator for Acheson's world view. In Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson's The Wise Men, the authors note that Reston would often publish important stories regarding "big planning at State" following the days he lunched with Acheson at the Metropolitan Club.

To read Reston on Henry Kissinger today is, as it was during the Nixon administration, a little embarrassing. (Reston once titled one of his columns "By Henry Kissinger with James Reston.") Nothing in his experience in Washington, Reston says over and over in these memoirs, "was ever quite as good or as bad as the fashionable opinion of the day," and he thinks of Kissinger as a prime example of this. Reston says he "hates to think of what might have happened" if Kissinger "hadn't been around during the slaughter of Vietnam or the scandals of Watergate." He calls Kissinger "one of the most intelligent, imaginative, and effective public servants of his time."

Now we can argue for the next thousand years about whether Kissinger's foreign policy machinations were brilliant or criminal. We can even grant Reston's belief that Nixon might have gone ever further off the deep end in Indochina without Kissinger there to help him pick his secret bombing targets and plan his invasion of Cambodia. But in praising Kissinger, Reston is praising a man who regularly misled him, who wiretapped NSC staff members to determine who was leaking to reporters when they revealed his unconstitutional maneuverings, and who urged Nixon to prosecute Reston's newspaper for its constitutionally protected publication of the Pentagon Papers. During the infamous 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, Reston wrote of Kissinger that "he has said nothing in public about the bombing in North Vietnam, which he undoubtedly opposes. . . . If the bombing goes on . . . Mr. Kissinger will be free to resign." The only problem with the interpretation, however, was that the bombings were Kissinger's idea. He misled Reston about his own position and then misled the White House staff about these conversations, finally admitting the truth when confronted with his phone records. (These events are detailed in Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power.)

This kind of deception took place on a massive scale throughout, before, during, and after the Kissinger reign. Reston was not uniquely gullible and certainly not venal in his willingness to pass along Kissinger's lies. He no doubt believed them himself. But therein lies the problem. To be an effective "responsible" pundit in the Reston mode, one must grant top government officials an extraordinary degree of latitude with the truth. Time and again, our leaders have demonstrated that they are simply not to be trusted.

Reston says he has no taste for ideology and does not consider himself a loyal member of either party. He believes in men of good character, intelligence, and expertise. But because he took it upon himself to decide just who these men were, Reston too often allowed himself and his column to be used not as a critical eye for an uninformed citizenry but as a propaganda tool for a mendacious leadership. In these instances, he wrote for his sources, not for his audience. This is the primary occupational hazard in the business of insider punditry and Scotty Reston, for all his inherent decency, native intelligence, and legendary journalistic prowess, fell into it more than once.

Younger journalists have a great deal to learn from Reston's example. As a reporter, he helped set a new standard in the second half of the twentieth century and can be seen, together with Lippmann, as a seminal figure in the rise of the press to its contemporary status as America's most powerful private institution. As a pundit, his record is less inspiring. But it will be no discredit to the man if his inheritors learn from his mistakes as well as from his triumphs.

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