The special duty of the press, he explained in a speech in the spring of 1945, is making sure the government tells the people what it is up to.

This was just what the government had tried to avoid doing at Dumbarton Oaks, he said. "They knew that years of work had gone into the draft plans that were submitted by the four great powers there. They boasted of the care with which they had worked on the plans which the public had never seen. They knew that as the conference progressed and weeks were spent cabling back and forth between Moscow and Washington on the diction and punctuation of the document, something was being formed that was much more definite and binding than the phrase 'preliminary and exploratory' indicated."

That, said Reston, was why he had gone after the position papers, and why the Times had published them. "Nothing is more effective in political life than a fait accompli," he said. "Nobody knows this better than the politician. It is therefore the duty of the reporter to get the facts as quickly as possible...."

Just after the war, Reston says, he realized the dimensions of this duty. For a diplomatic correspondent, at least, reporting policy while it was still being debated was becoming more important than reporting policy that had been announced. As he later explained it in a speech:

"The power of the executive to decide issues in the secret stage of negotiations with other nations is growing all the time, and this, I fear, is going to impose new obligations on reporters and probably bring them even more into conflict with officials than in the past....

"We no longer have a government of 'equal powers' in the field of foreign affairs, if we ever did have. The Congress retains all its power over the purse and it still has the right to review, but the President and the Secretary of State in the Executive Branch are now more than ever before in a position to call the turn. When the President announces to the world that he wants aid for Greece, the Congress does not really have complete freedom of action; it can go along with him or repudicate and humiliate him-and it will hesitate to do the latter....

"Thus, it seems to me, if public opinion is to retain anything but the power of protests, after the event, the reporter has to move into the action much earlier in the development of policy than formerly."

This insight gave Reston his angle; it has justified his curiosity and organized his thinking ever since. Even at the time, it must have made a great deal fall into place. He was able to define his job in a way that suited his temperament perfectly.

For Reston was, in the best sense, a scoop artist - a specialist at getting information other reporters hadn't. (For a time in the early '50s, he averaged two scoops a week.) And he was also an idealist - who in 1942 had written Prelude to Victory, which he called "not a book so much as an outburst of bad temper ... against anything and anybody who is concentrating but winning this war."

Yet unlike some crack newspapermen and dedicated pamphleteers he did not, and does not, hold a conspiracy theory of history. For him the function of a newspaper is not so much to expose evil as to educate, to reduce the sum total of confusion and ignorance in the world. So the prospect of continuous battle to prevent unnecessary secrecy and unintentional accumulation of power must have been rather pleasing.

Reston's realization that policy must be reported while it is still being debated gave him his modus operandi: "Read the newspapers and raise in your own mind the unanswered questions. You can anticipate what the government will do, and, on the basis of that, go after it." This "projective analysis" became Reston's specialty. A good example was his prediction, in 1947, that Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was about to retire.

It was generally known that Byrnes wished to step down. It was also known that whenever any opening appeared in the Administration, President Truman asked why General George Marshall wouldn't be a good man to fill it. So, when the AP ticker reported that Marshall had been called home from Nanking, Reston guessed that Brynes was quitting, and hinted as much in his stories. He also called Brynes and asked him. Byrnes hedged. Then Krock called. Byrnes wouldn't speak to him. Instead Brynes called the White House to say the Times was on to the story. Truman released it immediately, a few days ahead of schedule.

Reston is fully as ruthless as he is shrewd. Using a "periphery technique," he accumulates bits of information from various places, then confronts the primary source and tries to bluff the full story out of him. He is said to be the finest bluffer in Washington.

In general, Reston employs an easy-going, folksy approach. But he can also be abrupt; one of his favorite tricks is calling an official, asking a question, and then waiting, without saying anything else. One Times man says he will do "almost anything" to get information.

Reston himself is coyer about his methods. "I have often given the impression that I knew a little more than I did," he admits. But "obviously," he says, "if I go in to see George Ball and he's called out of the room, I don't get up and read the papers on his desk. It's just a question of common honesty."