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man, an almost Restonian species: they were lean and tweedy journalists, usually quite tall, educated at better universities and brighter than they first seemed to be. They were deceptively aware and low-pressured, slow nodders and ponderous puffers of pipes, very polite and altogether disarming. Most of them had been reared in the Midwest or South, or at least they affected the easy manner of small-town America, contrasting noticeably with the many fast-talking, citysharp men who had emerged from crowded urban neighborhoods and worked on
The Times
’ staff in New York, a city that, as time went on, Reston began to loathe almost as much as did ArthurKrock, who, in later years, saw New York as a city of decadent aggression.
    Having hired such men, Reston, unlike the editors in New York, did not let them languish in a large impersonal newsroom waiting for another
Titanic
to sink; with a staff one-twentieth the size of New York’s, Reston could and did get to know each man personally, and he assigned each of them to cover an important phase of government activity that would guarantee them ample space and a byline in
The Times
, and this in turn gave them an identity in the newspaper and an entrée to the influential circles of the capital. To work on Reston’s staff was to be a member of an elite corps of
Times
men, and Reston used his considerable influence with top management to see that his men were well paid and appreciated, and he expected nothing in return but loyalty to
The Times
, pride in the bureau, and he also asked that they please call him by his nickname—“Scotty.” Even the office boys called him that. Scotty Reston. They idolized him.
    To the younger men on the staff, it was
Reston
who personified whatever grandeur
The Times
had, not the high priests in New York, and when one of his reporters was offered a much better job on another paper, he was very slow in accepting it. It meant leaving Scotty. Some reporters were so inspired by Reston’s manner and talent that they tried to imitate him, one going so far as to dress like him, switching to bow ties and button-down shirts, to smoke a pipe like him, to walk with his bounce and glitter, to try to mimic the way he spoke, the latter being an impossible undertaking—for there was something in the timbre of Reston’s wonderful distant voice, the words he slowly chose, the way he paused, that gave to almost everything he said the ring of instant history.
    Many New Yorkers, not unexpectedly, were envious of Reston’s staff, and would have loved to become a part of it. On those rare occasions when New York reporters would be working with Reston and some of his men on a special out-of-town assignment—such as a big space shot from Cape Kennedy, Florida—the New Yorkers would become the benefactors of certain little conveniences rendered by Reston’s mere presence; for example, in the morning outside of Reston’s motel door there would be a fresh bundle of twenty-five copies of
The Times
flown to Florida from New York at Reston’s request. Reston understood the journalists’ ego—he knew that what most of them miss when working on a remote assignment is the breakfast pleasure of their own words and by-line.
    Several New York reporters tried to be transferred to Reston’s bureau, but very few made it. Reston did not have to accept any applicants or choices from the New York office, and he usually did not, preferring to make his own discoveries in the smaller towns closer to the heart of America, and Reston could also prevent New York reporters from moving into the Washington area to cover news. In 1959 he even did this to one of New York’s specialists, A. H. Raskin, generally regarded as the best labor reporter in the nation. Raskin had then been covering the daily developments of a big steel strike, moving with the story from New York to Pittsburgh, and then he followed it into Washington as a Presidential panel was about to hold hearings on a possible