Scotty Reston, American Optimist   

DEADLINE
By James Reston
Random House

DEADLINE
By James Reston
Random House
544 pages; $25

Finally, American journalism has a book that ought to last up there on the shelf beside Walter Lippmann's stuff. And this one isn't elitist, frosty, stuffy or humorless. The worst failing of Scotty Reston's shining memoir is its leaden title, "Deadline."

Russell Baker protested in advance that it sounds "like a Humphrey Bogart movie." He told Reston to name the book "Scotty."

That might appeal "to a lot of dog lovers," Reston thought, so he went his way, as he always has.

The towering New York Times man of the age obviously enjoyed writing this love letter to America, as he calls it. He arrived at Ellis Island from Scotland at age 10. At 80, he found writing a book enabled him "to reprint here the few sensible things I had written, and suppress the rest."

His look back across "this murderous century" and his principled place at the center of the news is quite simply the guidebook to the best values in the news business. Old pros will identify with it. Aspiring students will get a clear look at the right way to play the game. And Americans generally will take heart from Reston's cheerful look forward to the future of the republic. It reflects all the optimism, and the hope moderated by horse sense, that set his government reportage to song for 50 years.

He watched presidents come and go. "The most successful of them," he thought, "were the cheerful optimists, who appointed competent advisors and listened to them: Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. The least successful were the pessimists who assumed the worst in everybody and didn't listen to anybody: Nixon and Johnson."

John F. Kennedy "smiled a lot and appointed many intelligent people [but] was basically pessimistic and even skeptical about whether the American political system would work."

Lyndon Johnson wound up suffering "from a combination of ignorance, vanity and booze — increasingly from booze as his disappointments mounted." Reston recalls a summons to the White House in late 1965 to be asked, "Why don't you get on the team?", to which he responded that he felt Johnson was trying to save his face in Vietnam. "I'm not trying to save my face," the president said. "I'm trying to save my ass."

Richard Nixon? "What baffles me...was how such a man ever reached the White House...In the end it was left to the Constitution, which he tried to evade, to put an end to his astonishing career. I found that the most consoling event of the seventies."

Jimmy Carter "was not a politician...he was a missionary...he always seemed to be running up the down escalator...He was probably more intelligent and he certainly worked harder than any of them, but he had no sense of humor and thought people really wanted to hear the unvarnished facts — a dubious assumption...I never lost my respect for his character [but] he never really learned to say hello until it was time to say goodbye. The people wanted style and that's what they got with Reagan."

So how about Reagan? "It was the best theatrical performance of my days in Washington and the greatest triumph of television politics...He announced...it was morning in America, but he didn't like to get out of bed...He was often so absent-minded...that he had the most expensive banking and housing scandals on record and he didn't even notice them...While Roosevelt raised his voice to rescue the needy, Reagan used his power to defend the greedy...He read off the TelePrompTer as if he had just thought it all up...the voters preferred Reagan's policy of leaving the bill to the next generation...he made bad government popular. It was fun covering Ronald Reagan, sort of like going to the movies. Sitting there in the dark, you didn't believe much of what you saw and heard, but it took your mind off the facts."

Reston considered George Bush the presidential prospect with the most promise based on background and experience. But something happened to him on the way to the White House. Reston did not admire Bush's quick resort to military force.

With presidents like these, why is Reston optimistic? Because he saw in his time, he says, both political parties abandon "their old isolationist, protectionist and racist policies to deal with the threats of poverty, illiteracy and war...their representatives argued endlessly and often aimlessly over these issues for decades, and were still at it in the nineties, but I loved the racket, the exaggerations, the outrageous roguery of it all, for it was our natural way to compromise, and I didn't notice any other system in any other country that worked any better or as well."

Also, Reston felt the free nations' great advantage in the Cold War was not primarily military. "It came from their ideas of individual liberty, fair play, free trade, the right to dissent, and a decent respect for the truth."

So, he concluded, "though I was raised by the pessimistic Calvinists, I checked out with the optimists."

Along the way he saw a lot of history happen.

Adlai Stevenson told Reston, on the night that President Truman offered to back him for the Democratic nomination, that "Ike would win and, he added, he should win."

President Kennedy was still shaken and angry when Reston saw him in Vienna the night Khrushchev gave him an ultimatum on Berlin. Khrushchev thought, after the Bay of Pigs, that he had no guts, Kennedy said. So it was essential to demonstrate American firmness. "And the place to do it, he remarked to my astonishment, was Vietnam."

Reston's news decisions were seldom simple. John Foster Dulles used him to plant the story of U.S. readiness to use the atom bomb as a means of pressuring China toward a negotiated settlement of the Korean War. President Kennedy called him to Hyannis Port to say it would be "helpful" if he would write that the United States would respond with military force if Khrushchev cut off access to Berlin. Reston did, and Khrushchev didn't.

Was the Times right to withhold news of U-2 flights over Russia until Francis Gary Powers was shot down? "I thought so at the time," Reston says, "but now I am not so sure."

Was it right for the Times to withhold its report that the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was "imminent?" "It was one thing, I thought then and still do, to repeat that the anti-Castro forces were mobilizing (as the Times did) — but quite a different thing to inform Castro of the timing of the invasion."

Reston had no doubt about the need to overrule the Times lawyers when they tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers. "I said I was for printing everything, that if we didn't somebody else would, and if nobody else did, I would print them myself in our little family weekly, the Vineyard Gazette ."

"I was not a successful executive editor," Reston writes of the period when Punch Sulzberger had asked him to come up from Washington and try to quench the blood thirst among the unloving editors who were pawing their turf in New York. "I asked to be relieved..."

He preferred writing, and he was the best in the business at it, and he had the sense to return to it and leave the office politics to the maneuverers who found their importance in that. In this book, as in his columns, his mastery of the cadenced majesty of the English language gives permanence in print to the man's own qualities: decency and warmth, intelligence and balance, combativeness and humor, and a concern for the things that matter, much of it born of his beginnings under demanding Scottish parents and sustained by his lifelong love affair with his college sweetheart, Sally Fulton Reston. He does not mind letting us see, in this happy summing-up, the fulfilling sweep of his personal life from which he took his public bearing.

Many of Reston's virtues distinguish the press itself at its best. So how are we doing?

"I don't want the press to be popular, just to deserve to be believed," Scotty Reston says, "and in the past fifty years I have come to the not wholly objective conclusion that it has earned more respect than it gets."