James Reston (1909-1995) - 8 December 1995

Some years ago, a dozen maybe, a young and ambitious United States senator I knew dropped a casual remark that had the effect on me of a bomb going off.

Nobody, said the Senator, reads Reston anymore. I did, and so did the readers of over 300 newspapers that carried the New York Time's syndication service, read them for the columns, the political columns of James Reston as much for anything else.

But then the senator was one of those types of reader, of human being I shouldn't wonder, who is never quite sure enough of himself to defend his own tastes. There are enough of this type among the populations of the West, certainly to have created what you might call almost a service industry. It's the smart magazine that exists mainly to keep you in touch, not so much as the old schoolmaster said, with the best that is known and thought, but the best that is known and thought this week. You know the sort of thing, parallel columns of who's in and what's in and who's out. Trifle is out, tiramisu is in, Hemmingway's out, Virginia Wolfe is in again. Virginia Wolfe has been in I regret to say for the past 70 years. Sibelius is way out, Mahler is in, bridge is going out, backgammon is coming in, the little black dress is no longer in, the new rage – according to the men who are making them say – is the dress with fake leopard spots. Well what the smart alec senator left me with, was a suspicion that he might be slightly right, in the sense that a generation was growing up that either had never known James Reston in his great days or had come to take him for granted.

To correct this situation, I seized the opportunity of a forthcoming collection of Reston's pieces to call up the editor of a magazine – not a smart one, simply a very good one – who was sympathetic to my doing a piece on the fickleness of the reading public, by way of reviewing Reston's book. When the piece was published I sent a copy of it to Reston who was my oldest longest lasting friend in the reporting business, along with a note saying, enclosed is your obituary written ahead of time on the principle expressed by the poet W.H. Auden: "Let us honour if we can, the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one".

Well James, universally known as Scotty Reston, is now I'm sorry to say, horizontal. He died in Washington, the town he had come to and seen and conquered just over 50 years ago. Thursday morning's edition of the New York Times arrived coincidentally with a cheery Christmas card or two, including a presidential campaign postcard of 1916, Wilson and Hughes, and it made me think at once of another postcard, a photograph I saw once and have longed for ever since, it also was obviously intended as a presidential campaign photograph: two tall affable men, one of them remarkably handsome, standing on the first tee of a golf course in Dayton Ohio. They were there to open a new country club – not a chosen event that would endear them to voters today, but there they were Democrats, Governor Cox of Ohio and his running mate, a former assistant secretary of the navy during the war just over, it was 1920, one Franklin D. Roosevelt, both about to tee off. I hear a murmur of doubt, Roosevelt playing golf?

Well this was the spring of 1920, it was not till the summer of 1921, up on the family's summer place in Canada that Roosevelt contracted the dread disease everybody feared in those summer days: poliomyelitis, and was paralysed for the rest of his life.

So there they were, ready at the first tee, drivers in hand but the detail that makes the picture funny, and forever memorable to me was an urchin of a caddy, he was a 12-year-old Scottie Reston! How did he get there, and how did he get from there to become, as the Times correctly writes: "The most influential journalist of his generation"? Well staying with the careful American usage, I shall say that the boy was named James Barrett, called Scotty Reston, he was born in Clydebank Scotland, the son of a machinist in the shipyards. Life was pretty hard going and the stories that came from an emigrant friend or two in America were rosier. Scotty was no more than a baby when his parents decided, like the impoverished Andrew Carnegie, to seek the good life in America. But on the voyage, the mother fell ill and they no sooner landed at Ellis Island than they were on their way back to Scotland. It was the beginning of 1914 and any hopes they had of trying again in the next year or two were obviously blasted by the coming of the so-called Great War.

They stayed in Scotland and in dire poverty until it was all over. And in early 1920, they tried again, arrived, settled in Dayton Ohio. His father went to work in a motor car factory, so young Scotty had not been an American more than a few months when he was carrying the golf bags of the Democratic presidential candidates. It was an early omen and also a reflection of his love for the game. All he got out of college was a mediocre mark in everything but sports writing in which he got an A. He picked up pin money caddying and, determined against his Presbyterian mother's scandalised opposition to become a golf pro, twice he won the Ohio State Public Links Championship, eventually reconciled his mother's feeling and his own inclination, by turning into a sports journalist for five years. First in New York, then in London he was a sports writer for the associated press.

In London when the golfing and the tennis seasons were over, he was asked to cover the foreign office. It was a nervous time with Mussolini on the hop and Hitler on the rampage and Scotty had some rueful tales about his unsatisfactory contacts with the foreign office. "They seemed to think," he once said to me long ago "that reporters were there, not to find out the news but to copy it out from the Foreign Office releases." In fact, that's what they did think. He quit the A.P. and by a fickle stroke of destiny, joined the New York Time's London bureau on the 1st of September 1939, the day Hitler went into Poland. And from then on, sports would come only incidentally into his writing, though for years he could play a mean caddy form of golf. From then on he had two preoccupations: American foreign policy and the shifts and audacities whereby a man becomes president of the United States, and how, and how effectively he exerts power.

He will be known to most Americans today who read him as a columnist, a news analyst, which he was for about the last 30 years of his life. But the great and inimitable days, were his years as a reporter, and at the risk of sounding a touch crass, I'd like to stress his view, and mine, of the reporters job, because it's a craft that is, it seems to me, rapidly declining in the European papers I see, including very definitely the newspapers of Britain. It becomes harder and harder from this side to see British newspapers as anything but journals of opinion.

This country still maintains the tradition that struck me the first week I arrived here 63 years ago: the reporting pages are set apart in tone and substance from the editorial the leader opinions. One test of a good reporter is that you should not know from his political reports how he would vote when he turns from being a reporter into being a citizen.

Mr H. L. Mencken said it for me, when I was beginning to cut capers with young Scotty Reston, to the extent that a reporter is a liberal reporter or a conservative reporter or a communist reporter or a Republican reporter, he is no reporter at all. This quality was taken for granted in all the reporters I knew, as distinct from the columnists and commentators. What made Reston supreme at his craft was his immense unflagging hard work on a job, his capacity to tunnel for unknown facts, where the rest of us could see only the landscape over the tunnel, and his most envied gift of somehow wheedling out of, not public relations officers, but the big shots themselves: prime ministers and presidents and dictators and tycoons and holy men, wheedling out of them remarkable confessions of facts, of what happened, possibly because they saw in Scotty not a ruthless seeker of truth but an affable roly poly pipe smoking smiling Scot.

Somebody once quoted the King of England saying, and surely a mythical story: "After Britain went off the gold standard, I shouldn't be surprised if Scotty Reston wasn't behind this whole thing!" Certainly, Scotty would be the first to report that it was going to happen, as days before anybody he published the details of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference – no reporters were present – which laid out to the envy of other reporters and the astonishment of the men who'd been there, the whole blueprint of the oncoming United Nations.

I remember once at a Bermuda conference, between I think Macmillan and Kennedy about 1961, absolutely nothing was coming out of the press offices of either side and the parties of the first part could not be reached. We awaited in dumb frustration for the communique. That evening after an unproductive day, a 100 say reporters, were drifting and sifting and boozing around, Scotty was nowhere in sight. About 11 p.m. he rolled in, a little flushed, a puff of smoke preceding his entrance, jollier than usual. He got me off in a corner. I asked him, "How did the canary taste?" He chuckled and took a long happy draw on his pipe, on a promise that I would write nothing till tomorrow, he told me what had gone on at the conference, what he'd already filed for the Times: who said what to whom, what the communiqué would say, better, something communiqués are designed to hide, what the communique meant. Unlike most journalists proud of a coup, his story was exactly, right letter perfect. "Where do you get all this from?" I asked. "I was under the carpet," he said. He was always under the carpet. This genial shrewd man and incomparable journalist who gave a special glow to the title reporter, after a bad bout with the grimmest disease died on Wednesday evening at 86, full of years and to the end full of his quiet sly wisdom.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.