James Reston entered journalism of a golf. This is interesting because he was a very good golfer, and, to start with, a mediocre journalist. He won the Ohio public links championship at the age of 15 and was fascinated by the men who came to cover his triumph. Soon he was running copy for reporters in his home town.

At the University of Ilinois he majored in journalism--getting mostly C's-and captained the varsity golf team. And after graduation he got his first job--as a reporter for the Springfield (Ohio) Daily News at $10 a week--from a man he had caddied for as a body.

Newsweek has given the world to understand that when Reston finished at Illinois he wanted to start a golf course; that he approached James Cox who hired him for the Daily News) seeking financial support; and that he only accepted the reporting job when Cox pointed out that 1932 was a bad year for business ventures. All this Reston denies.

Time magazine has quoted Reston's mother as saying he was only dissuaded from becoming a professional golfer immediately after high school, by "prayer and argument." Reston, on the other hand, says he was "never really interested" in anything but reporting.

Today, in any case, he's the most powerful reporter in Washington, and since he works 14 hours a day he has no time for golf.

Reston had a motley assortment of jobs in the early part of his career. In 1933 he left the Daily News to work for the sports publicity office of Ohio State University. The next year he became travelling press secretary for the Cincinnati Redlegs. In each town the team visited, Reston went to the local newspaper and asked for a job. After eight months he got one-through his high school friend Milton Caniff, later of Steve Canyon fame-with the Associated Press in New York. He wrote sports features, and for a time a chit-chat column about books and theatre called "A New Yorker at Large."

In 1937 the AP sent him to London--to write sports stories in the summer and cover the Foreign Office in the winter. That was his break. "I didn't even know what the map of Europe looked like," he says, "I had read, read, read." In 1939 he joined the New York Times bureau in London.

Reston was no prodigy. He had been turned down twice by the Times of New York when he was hired in London. But starting slowly may have been good fortune. Perhaps as a result Reston has never believed he had all the answers-or even, to listen to him, any of the answers. His first rule in gathering information is not to pretend to know a subject when he doesn't. "I do my homework on what the problems are," he says, "and then keep asking questions about the solutions".

There is a certain shrewdness in his attitude that "you can get anybody to tell you almost anything if you make him think he's smarter than you are." As someone who has worked closely with him put it, "a key thing about his personality is that he's always remained a Midwesterner with a Midwesterner's distrust of Easterners."

But his curiosity is genuine-one might even say profound. "This is a guy," says the same Times man "who thinks he can learn something from everybody. This is a personal as well as a professional trait. He wants to know what you're thinking. He especially wants to know what young people are thinking." One Harvard student who has known Reston for many years says he can remember being "grilled" by him when he was nine.

After he joined the Times Reston's curiosity began to pay off. In 1941 he moved to the Washington bureau. The following year he took three months off from the Times to organize the U.S. Office of War Information in London. In December of 1942 he returned to this country as assistant to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the Times. Nine months later he became acting head of he London bureau. In 1944 he went to Washington to stay.

An explanation of Reston's rise that crops up in magazine articles is that his sense of inferiority to his wife drove him to it. He married Sarah (Sally) Jane Fulton on Christmas Eve, 1935. Her father was a lawyer. His was an immigrant mechanic; the family had moved to Dayton from Clydebank, Scotland when Reston was ten. At Illinois she was Phi Beta Kappa. For Reston, according to a friend, college "didn't take." Reston says simply: "I married above me."

Perhaps there is truth in the theory-though if virtue needs explanation it is more likely that Reston's Scotch Presbyterian upbringing accounts for his extraordinary drive. In Cambridge some time ago, however, Reston described a contribution his wife has made to his career that casts the whole thing in a different light. He is regarded as an expert listener. How did he acquire that skill? "Well, first of all," he said with a smile "you marry the right girl. And she tells you: You're talking too much. You cut him off just when he was about to tell you something...."

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When Reston returned to Washington in 1944, bureau chief Arthur Krock assigned him to the diplomatic beat. He made his reputation almost immediately, and in spectacular fashion.