Word: reston
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...