Scotty: The Rise and Fall of James B. Reston, America's Greatest Journalist, by John F. Stacks. Little, Brown & Co. 384 pages. $29.95.
Book publishers won't tell you but I will: There are far more remarkable lives being lived out there than there are remarkable interpretations of those lives. That's why most biographies wind up letting down the subject and reader alike.
New York Times columnist James Reston was one of the most important journalists of the 20th century. Like his friend and mentor Walter Lippmann, Reston in his prime possessed a political influence that is almost inconceivable today. Unfortunately, John F. Stacks' Scotty, while earnest and useful, never really brings this compelling figure into satisfying focus.
Reston's nickname derived from his native Scotland. He came to America as a boy, and in classic immigrant fashion he spent the rest of his life striving to get from the outside to the inside. And when it came to political journalism, no one got more inside than Reston did.
There were more facile writers, and he wasn't the original thinker Lippmann was. But the tireless Reston was unparalleled in his ability to work Washington's power elite. Coming to prominence in the late '40s and '50s, when Washington was a much more intimate and trusting town, Reston cultivated a circle that included Felix Frankfurter, Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford and many other players on the main stage. He would become an intimate of presidents.
A stunning example was seen in June 1961, at the Vienna summit where young John Kennedy had his hat handed to him by wily Nikita Khrushchev.
Afterward, the first person a shaken JFK debriefed was not his staff but Scotty Reston.
Stacks, former chief of correspondents for Time magazine, does an admirable job of describing how Reston navigated that delicate line between gaining spectacular access and getting too close to his subjects. Because politicians could trust Reston, they used him as a sounding board and transmitter of ideas. That made him a must-read, which in turn increased his influence.
But Stacks fails to put Reston into any real context. There is no articulation of how widespread his popularity was. Oddly, he all but ignores Reston's work in the '50s, when the columnist's influence was reaching its peak. Someone who didn't already know Reston's reputation -- pretty much anyone under 40, say -- would carry away little idea why he mattered to anyone outside Washington or New York.
Toward the end of his career, after Vietnam and Watergate had forever changed the nature of the press-politico relationship, Reston allowed himself to be taken advantage of by the manipulative Henry Kissinger and was rebuked by a younger, more cynical generation of journalists. But this sad episode was less about the fall of journalism, as Stacks suggests, than it was another case of a fading star clinging too long to the spotlight.
Thomas Kunkel is dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He spent 20 years as a newspaper reporter and editor. He wrote Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker.