Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism available in Paperback
Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism
- ISBN-10:
- 0803293399
- ISBN-13:
- 9780803293397
- Pub. Date:
- 01/01/2006
- Publisher:
- UNP - Bison Books
- ISBN-10:
- 0803293399
- ISBN-13:
- 9780803293397
- Pub. Date:
- 01/01/2006
- Publisher:
- UNP - Bison Books
Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism
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Overview
Reston was the most powerful, most admired, and most influential newspaper columnist America had ever seen, the best journalist of his time and perhaps of any time. He tapped into his vast reserves of intelligence, energy, and ambition to rise steadily in the ranks of the New York Times and helped make it the greatest paper in the world. Eventually, however, some of Reston's greatest virtues became liabilities, and proximity to power took its toll.
More than a brilliant biography, Scotty is a secret history-of one man's life, of what went on behind closed Washington doors, of the stories that shaped our world and of those that never made the papers.
John F. Stacks is a former deputy managing editor and chief of correspondents for Time magazine. For more than three decades he reported on Congress, the White House, and presidential politics, covering the national campaigns from 1968 through 1980. He is the author of three other books and lives in New York.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803293397 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNP - Bison Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2006 |
| Pages: | 374 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
John F. Stacks is a former deputy managing editor and chief of correspondents for Time magazine. For more than three decades he reported on Congress, the White House, and presidential politics, covering the national campaigns from 1968 through 1980. He is the author of three other books and lives in New York.
Read an Excerpt
Scotty
James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American JournalismBy John F. Stacks
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006 John F. StacksAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780803293397
Chapter One
The Reporter and the President
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY arrived in Vienna on June 3, 1961. As he drove through the streets, tens of thousands of Austrians lined the roadway to cheer the young American president. Kennedy had just come from a triumphal meeting in Paris with the crusty president of France, Charles de Gaulle. He was full of confidence and hope that his upcoming summit meeting with the leader of the Soviet Union would serve to ease tensions between the two nuclear superpowers. But Chairman Nikita Khrushchev surprised Kennedy. Taking advantage of Kennedy's youth and his recent embarrassment in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in Cuba, Khrushchev spent the next two days denouncing American imperialism. And he demanded that the Soviet Union be given the right to control access to West Berlin in divided Germany, something he knew Kennedy could not concede.
In fact, the Vienna summit meeting went so badly from the American point of view that Kennedy asked for a final, private session with Khrushchev to try to salvage some mutual understanding between the two nations. With only their translators present, Kennedy began by reminding the Soviet leader that eachcountry had the ability to destroy the other. He then asked Khrushchev to back off his demands on Berlin. The bombastic Khrushchev did no such thing, warning Kennedy that "force would be met by force," adding that "if the U.S. wants war, that's its problem." Kennedy was stunned.
"Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war," Kennedy concluded. "It will be a cold winter."
The first person with whom Kennedy discussed this bleak, frightening encounter was not his secretary of state nor any member of his administration. Astonishingly, it was a journalist, James Barrett Reston, Washington bureau chief and columnist for the New York Times. By prior arrangement, Reston had slipped into the American embassy and was waiting, with curtains drawn to conceal his presence, to interview Kennedy. The president arrived ten minutes after leaving his last meeting with Khrushchev.
Reston, older than the young president, had recently been on the cover of Time magazine, which called him, quite accurately, the most powerful journalist in Washington. He had been covering the nation's capital since the early 1940s. Shorter than Kennedy, Reston generally dressed in a casually tweedy way, often with a bow tie and almost always with a briar pipe and a pouch of tobacco in his pocket. Reston had a full head of brown hair now graying slightly on the sides and a round, open face that invited confidence but disguised a good deal of cunning and ambition. He was quite accustomed to dealing with powerful men.
"How was it?" Reston asked casually.
"Worst thing in my life. He savaged me," Kennedy responded. The president seemed to Reston to be almost in shock, repeating himself and speaking with astonishing candor to the journalist. "Not the usual bullshit," Reston wrote in his notepad. "There is a look a man has when he has to tell the truth." Kennedy went on to say that to counter the battering by Khrushchev, which he attributed to the Soviet leader's underestimation of Kennedy's resolve, the United States would have to stand more firmly against the Soviets' demands in Berlin and against the mounting Communist insurgency in South Vietnam. Reston wrote later that he was "speechless" when Kennedy mentioned Vietnam, since that troubled country was at that point nowhere near the heart of the Cold War conflict and, in Reston's estimation, did not carry much weight in the superpower tug-of-war. Ever afterward, Kennedy's remark to Reston was seen by historians and by Reston himself as the moment marking the beginning of America's long slide into the tragedy of Vietnam.
From the perspective of our own time, that Reston was with Kennedy at this critical moment in American history is almost unimaginable. No reporter, no matter how famous his face or his byline, would have this sort of access today, would be trusted to hear an American president reacting honestly and without pretense to a frightening failure that could have presaged nuclear war - and then, without stated rules or restrictions, would be able to write carefully and subtly about that encounter. The relationship between journalists and politicians in America is today most often a distant and hostile one, marked by distrust and anger and cynicism.
James "Scotty" Reston was the best journalist of his time, and perhaps the best of any time. He was a reporter of amazing skill, able to relieve powerful men of their most important secrets. He was a writer of easy, graceful prose who revolutionized the style in which American newspapers are written. As a columnist, he was a shaper of public opinion, an explicator of the byzantine politics of Washington and the world. In his heyday, he was read by more Americans than any other single writer on public affairs. As a newspaper executive, he recruited men of enormous talent into the previously rather shabby career of journalism and inspired an entire later generation to join the trade. Together they raised the quality of journalism beyond what it had ever been. He was skeptical without ever lapsing into the current disease of American journalism: unrelieved cynicism.
Working at the reporter's trade is an odd way to make a living. The pay at the beginning is barely above minimum wage, and even at the end of a career, except at the very upper reaches of the craft, the compensation is barely enough to achieve entry into the middle class, no matter how loosely that category is defined. There is little status attached to the work; most people view reporters as parasites, taking their sustenance from tragedy, misfortune, misdeeds, and the public humiliation attendant to failure and illegality. Bad news is usually good news for the reporter, since the worse the tragedy, the more egregious the misbehavior, the more alarming the threat, the more avidly the story will be consumed.
There is nothing glamorous about most of the work. Almost as a matter of ritual inauguration, the neophyte reporter is sent to cover the police department, where the stories are raw, the cops are contemptuous, and unless there is a spectacular crime involving socially prominent people, the stories wind up deep inside the newspaper. There is not much pleasure in interviewing, say, the widow of a cabdriver shot by a robber, or the parents of a boy tragically drowned the night before, or, as I once did, a father numb with grief after his two little boys had been killed by a pack of feral dogs.
After a period of apprenticeship, the reporter moves indoors to cover the tedium of civic lunches and canned speeches. Then, with some luck, there might come the chance to write, even with a bit of the edge of discovery and outrage, about the chronically miserable public schools. The best reporters throw their energies into the beat, but often as not, nothing changes.
Covering election politics is frequently the next step up the career ladder. Here the reporter is often viewed as a pariah, seen by the candidate and the campaign as a potential debunker of the glowing self-portraits they wish to paint for the public. And rarely is the reporter seen as a pillar of the broader community. At a social gathering, admitting that one is a reporter is roughly like saying one is a mortician: necessary perhaps, but not welcome.
In the days when James B. Reston was entering the trade, men and a few bold women became reporters (the appellation "journalist" was widely adopted later in an effort to dignify the trade, which also began calling itself, with absolutely no justification, a "profession") in part because there were low barriers to entry. A high school degree was an asset, as was a certain facility with formulaic English. A college education was certainly not required. The smartest and most able might finally reach the position of editor, and there, at the top of the masthead, there was respectability, some measure of community prestige, and on the biggest and best newspapers in the largest cities, even a certain prosperity.
"Journalism" may not be a profession, like the law or medicine, but the craft of reporting does require skill. As in the manual trades, there is a continuum in newspapering, from competence to mastery to superior craftsmanship, even to art. The best reporters have a few qualities in abundance that set them above the rest of their trade. Curiosity is foremost. The desire to learn how the world works, how people live their lives, to understand what is really happening below the surface of appearances - this is what drives the best reporters. It is a cliché in the trade that reporting is like being paid to go to a graduate school that lasts a lifetime. That cliché is true. For the reporter who succeeds - who moves from cop shop, as we always called it, to school board, city hall, Washington, a presidential campaign, the White House, exotic foreign assignments - the trade is an unending education. It is, after all, the news business, and so the work is about discovering what is new, what is different, what is actually the case as opposed to what seems to be the case. The best reporting is not just about what happened but about why it happened and what may happen next. It is about discovery, not of some profound scientific truth, but of how human beings go about their lives, how they do their jobs, how their businesses operate, about what kinds of people public figures really are. The reporter is the curious amateur, poking into unfamiliar worlds for others too busy with their own lives to follow their own curiosity. The joy of discovery for the curious reporter can be found in the mundane or the profoundly important. I can still remember the pleasure of finding out, when I was twenty-two years old, how an artificial cattle-breeding cooperative worked, how the bulls were rated, and how, with amazing precision, they were induced to deliver their creamy product. I can remember the pleasure, almost two decades later, in finding out exactly how Ronald Reagan operated inside his own White House.
Reporting is not academic work. To find out the reality of things, leaving aside the problem of knowing the entire reality, the reporter has to find the people who really know what is going on and then get them to explain what they are doing and why. The reporter plays consciously on the fact that simply having someone pay attention is mildly intoxicating for the object of that attention. But the more secret the information, the more carefully it is guarded, the more difficult is the transaction between reporter and source. To accomplish that exchange - that is, to get another person to divulge information sometimes against self-interest - is the high art of reporting. So the second quality of the great reporter is the ability to establish a trusting relationship with the people who have the information. The relationship between reporter and source can take various forms. It can be simple and direct: the source has information he or she wants made public, and the reporter can provide that service. It can be more complicated: the source has information he or she wants made public but does not want to be identified as the person who made it public, becoming an anonymous source. Or more complicated still: the source does not want to make the information public but does not want to lie to the reporter, fearing his or her reputation for honesty will be damaged. So the source divulges the information and trusts that the reporter will treat the material as "background" for further reporting. The trust inherent in these transactions goes both ways; the source must trust the reporter, and the reporter must, to some extent, believe in the essential truthfulness of the source. There are gradations and variations: the reporter may trust the source up to a point but understand the limit of the source's knowledge and bear in mind the self-interest of the source. Good reporters have the ability to make sources willing to talk to them. Great reporters make sources want to talk to them.
The source not only needs to trust the basic integrity of the reporter but also must trust the intelligence and understanding the reporter has about the subject at hand and believe that ignorance will not distort the resulting story. That is the third important asset of the great reporter: he or she understands the subject at hand nearly as well as the source. It is not enough for the reporter to be curious; he must also be informed enough to place the new information in context, to weigh its value, to explain how it changes the known body of information about that subject. The good reporter must bring context to what has been learned. The good reporter needs to read more than he writes, to learn the antecedents of the story at hand. The reporter needs to be a striver, a person who wants to raise himself up, if not to the high status and accomplishment of top experts, at least high enough to reduce the gap of information and understanding between source and reporter.
A master reporter must stay outside the story, independent enough to make judgments about the truth of the matter, the wisdom of the participants, the likely consequences of events being reported. At the same time, he must be far enough inside the process to be known by knowledgeable sources, to be trusted, to have access to those who know the story. This is the most delicate of straddles, an outsider who can penetrate to the inside of a story. Success in the trade, especially success at the top of a trade in which the subject matter often includes the most urgent and important issues facing the nation and even the world, requires a rare combination of ambition and restraint, of inquisitiveness and discretion, of the burning desire to expose and explain along with the good sense to know what must remain private.
For the reporter, there is always danger lurking. Writing a story that is factually wrong can be damaging. Being seen as a propagandist for a particular source or a particular point of view is likewise extremely destructive to the journalist's reputation. The combination of error and special pleading for a source is ruinous. These dangers increase in direct proportion to the fame and status of the reporter. Fame will of course attract attention to the reportorial failure. And that very fame, the record and accomplishments and scoops accumulated through the years, can dull the reporter's skepticism. It can seem to the famous reporter, after a lifetime of excellence in his craft, that no one would dare lie to him. But no reporter is ever immune to that danger. Journalism is a craft in which one's mistakes and misjudgments are visible to all.
Continues...
Excerpted from Scotty by John F. Stacks Copyright © 2006 by John F. Stacks. Excerpted by permission.
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