Word: reston
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...Reston did not hide his distaste for Castro's Cuba. He said that the "self-interest of the [U.S.] undoubtedly requires the overthrow of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, which is providing a political and, increasingly, a military base of communism in the Carribean" (column, April 12, 1961). The column was headlined "The Moral Question...
...RESTON said in a 1965 lecture to the Council on Foreign Relations that "the rising power of the United States in world affairs, and particularly of the American president, requires not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism, as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire...
...lecture Reston said, "Much of the time, contrary to the official mythology, the people who write the news are not the enemies but the allies of public officials." But he is wrong to think that a government-press alliance is in the national interest. Government protects its own interests, and the press's job is to question the government's every action...
Throughout his career on The Times, Reston has chased an elusive vision of America. Gay Talese wrote in his study of The Times, The Kingdom and the Power, that Reston's America "was a land in which the citizens seemed not so disenchanted, the police not so brutal, the United States's bombing in Vietnam not entirely unjustified, the politicans in Washington not so self-serving, the age of Jefferson not so long ago or lost in essence...
...When Reston began working for The Times's London bureau in 1939, the U.S. had not yet felt the shock waves of the Vietnam War; most Americans shared Reston's faith in America's innate goodness. The day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Reston wrote: "The United States went to war today as a great nation should--with simplicity, dignity, and unprecedented unity...