On television last year Reston was asked how he decided whether to print something when the national interest was at stake. Although as an Associate Editor of the Times he rates mention on the mastheads, he replied that he is simply a reporter, and that his editor decides what to publish.

But Reston does think about these questions. At the very beginning of World War II he broke British censorship to report the sinking of a British cruiser by a German submarine in the Firth of Fourth. By 1945 he was describing the incident as an error in judgement. He still does.

And Arthur M. Schleinger Jr. describes in A Thousand Days Reston recommended that the Times not publish a story Tad Szule filed from Miami in 1961 reporting that a landing on Cuba seemed imminent. "Reston counselled against publication: either the story would alter Castro, in which case the Times would be responsible for casualties on the beach, or else the expidition would be cancelled in which case the Times would be responsible for grave interference with national policy."

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In 1953 Reston was offered the job of Editor of the Washington Post, which would have put him in charge of the Post's editorial page. He told Krock about the offer, and in order to keep Reston with the Times, Krock stepped down as bureau chief and gave Reston the job.

As the Times' "Washington Correspondent"-the bureau chief's official title-bureau got a Sunday column. Although he continued to report on a day-to-day basis, his focus shifted slightly. "I try to ask myself," he said in 1958, "what's not getting reported? What's not on the agenda? What's the big story we're all missing? That way I lean against the wind."

Reston began to step back just a little, to discuss process as well as product. Where his 1944 Pulitzer came for finding out what the government was working on, his second, in 1956, came for figuring out how the government was working. He won the prize for a series of articles on the functioning of the executive branch during President Eisenhower's illness.

This is not to say that Reston has ever really entered the realm of the abstract. His columns are almost always tied to current events. He will sometimes call a dozen people to produce a single sentence. And facing a 7 p.m. deadline, he often does not sit down at his typewriter until 4. Late one afternoon, when asked when he was going to start writing. Reston replied that he wasn't an intellectual and did not need to sit around thinking. He was waiting, he said, turning back to the ticker, to see what the news was.

To a large extent Reston works the way he does because he likes to. He writes best under pressure, and has a terrible time with magazine articles until just before the deadline. He gets very impatient with theories according to one Times man, and "really has a terror of being out of touch."

But staying close to the news is also a matter of conviction as well as temperament. Reston is practically obsessed with the importance of the newspaper's educational role. (In forty-minute interview recently, that was the only topic on which he volunteered a comment-and he spoke with fervor when he did.) And newspapers can best perform this role by showing the significance of current events.

"The 19th Century was the era of the novelist," he explained in 1958. "The 20th is the era of the journalist. A distracted people, busy with the