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EARLY IN THIS SKILLFUL, colorful biography, John Stacks writes that his subject, James (Scotty) Reston of the New York Times, was "the best journalist of his time, and perhaps the best of any time." This is a stretch. The saving grace of journalism is that it has room for so many varied methods and practitioners. Ernie Pyle, Robert Capa and Edward R. Murrow all covered the same war but in different ways; it's senseless to try to rank them...
Still, in one particular form of journalism--Washington-based newspaper coverage of the decisions, motives and actions of major governmental figures--Reston was for two decades after World War II a truly dominant figure. When the new President, John Kennedy, came out of a harrowing meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, he went straight to a prearranged session with Reston to discuss Khrushchev's apparent threat of a nuclear showdown. In the months between that meeting and the Cuban missile crisis, Reston's reporting played the role it often had since the 1940s: it was the most authoritative...
Because he stayed on the public stage long past his prime, and because journalists' works and reputations fade with amazing speed, Reston is undervalued now. This biography--Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism (Little, Brown; 373 pages), by a veteran Time editor--explains the ingredients and impact of Reston's achievements while noting the lessons from his later failures...
Known as Scotty because he was born near Glasgow, Scotland, in 1909, Reston was raised in Dayton, Ohio, under difficult circumstances. He was nearly expelled from the University of Illinois journalism school when a Depression-era bank failure made his $100 tuition check bounce. Memories of his early penury, Stacks says, and his immigrant's outsider mentality stuck with Reston through his life, even though by his 40s he was a well-paid pillar of the East Coast establishment...
...matter of expectations, losing a job can be hardest, psychologically, on those who have the farthest to fall. Nathan Wolf had five degrees, 34 years of experience at IBM and a new career as a patent lawyer--or so he thought. Laid off by a law firm in Reston, Va., he finds it "embarrassing" to have to network. The job hunt is stressful, despite the support of his wife and five children. "Let's be very blunt about it," he says. "I'm 61, and I'm probably not seen as the best investment, even though I carry so much...