At half past ten on the morning of August 22, 1944, representatives of the American, British and Russian governments sat down together at Dumbarton Oaks to plan the United Nations.

The Chinese were also participating in the conference but were not present at the start. At the request of the Russians, who wished to avoid Chinese pressure to enter the war against Japan, they were to meet with the British and Americans separately, after the Russians had retired.

The Washington Conversations on International Organization - that was the official title - were then in their second day. But the opening had been devoted to speeches and photographs. It was at the first executive session that the talks really got under way.

And starting with the first executive session the talks were secret. Military guards surrounded the Georgetown mansion. Reporters were barred from the grounds. They were not even allowed to question the delegates. The conference, it was explained, was merely "preliminary and exploratory." The results would of course be made public. But meanwhile, officials said, the day-to-day debate in the Dumbarton Oaks music room was necessarily confidential.

The only news was to come in the form of short communiques, issued jointly by the three delegations. The one for August 22 said simply that Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Under-Secretary of State and head of the U.S. delegation, had been chosen as permanent chairman of the Conversations, and that the three governments had presented the plans for an international security organization which they had prepared in advance.

All this Reston duly reported the next day in the Times. He summarized the communique and even mentioned the guards outside the mansion. He waited until the fourth paragraph to drop his bomb:

"THE NEW YORK TIMES, however, has learned from an unimpechable source the following digest of the three plans which were drafted by the Governments recently and exchanged by the Governments concerned for study and comment."

For the next 50 inches he outlined the plans. He carefully pointed out where a provision of the American plan differed from "other versions... reported by this and other correspondents." (This was a key provision, since it stipulated that Congress need not specifically approve the security organization's use of force against an aggressor.) At the end of the story Reston highlighted his triumph by printing the text of the uninformative three-paragraph communique.

The State Department was predictably annoyed. They even set the FBI to work - unsuccessfully - trying to trace the leak. But Reston was not flustered. And his scoop was only beginning.

Following his rule that "you should always look around for the guys who are unhappy," he had persuaded the Chinese to give him the complete texts of the position papers prepared by the governments. As the Conversations progressed, Reston discussed the relevant sections.

"If you continue to print this series of documents," Stettinius told Sulzberger, "the Russians will accuse us of bad faith and the wartime coalition will be ended."

"If unity is so weak among the great powers as to be shaken by a few factual stories," Sulzberger replied, "then it won't stand up anyway."

The stories stretched into November, and won Reston his first Pulitzer Prize.

***

Reston was only 34 when he broke the Dumbarton Oaks story. He had been in Washington less than a year. He was, as he puts it, "in a hell of a hurry." But there was more to his energy that ambition. He had been in journalism a third of his life, and he had convictions about his calling.