Word: reston
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York Times's James ("Scotty") Reston is a sharp, Pulitzer-Prizewinning correspondent who specializes in finding out what the State Department is thinking, rather than what it is saying out loud. Armed with integrity and prestige, he has ready access to most of the department's top brass, plenty of chances for "guidance" talks when he wants them...
Last week Scotty Reston passed along some exclusive and startling guidance to his readers: Secretary of State Acheson had reversed his policy on China. "Last January," Reston wrote, "Secretary of State Dean Acheson was ridiculing the Chinese Nationalists in public, exhorting the Dutch and the French to recognize that a revolution had taken place in Asia, and emphasizing that the first rule of United States policy in the Far East was to refrain from doing anything that would drive the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Communists together...
...Merely balancing accusation with denial no longer seems enough." In groping toward a solution of the problem, the Times has been running more bylined interpretive pieces by correspondents and such staff experts as Military Analyst Hanson Baldwin, whose articles carry as much weight in the Pentagon as Reston's do in the State Department...
...grave fault with that method, said "Scotty" Reston, is that the negotiations are completed before the public knows about them, so that the "critic in the press . . . has to upset a whole series of applecarts if he wants to make any major change in the policy." What is needed, Reston said, is a working arrangement by which Government officials can tell responsible reporters the broad lines of their policy beforehand so that there can be "some objective discussion of the facts in public...
Failing this, it is up to reporters to get the news anyway. If the late great William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette could attend a Washington press conference nowadays, concluded Reston, "I think ... he would feel . . . that [reporters] had become a little too courteous . . . He'd want to know why there was just a handful of the large corps of Washington reporters probing into these life & death questions of atomic energy, the organization of the armed services, the conduct of our foreign policy ... I imagine he would tell us that officials in Washington or Emporia had always sought...