Reporters: Beating Dad Can Be Fun

Any day of the week, two Reston by lines can pop up in the Paris-based Herald Tribune International. Or two Smiths. Or two Alfred Friendlys. Not that these correspondents are greedy, or overworked — it is just that they are father-son combinations.

Simultaneous publication is entirely accidental since the six individuals concerned are based on different papers.

Al Friendly roams Europe for the Washington Post, while Al Jr. is West Af rican correspondent for the New York Times. James Reston writes his New York Times column from Washington; his son Richard is the Los Angeles Times's Moscow correspondent. Red Smith writes a syndicated sports col umn that appears in the Trib; Terence Smith covers the Mideast for the New York Times. When the Washington Post bought into the Paris Trib and the New York Times international later merged with it, all of them tumbled into the same paper.

Not Bothered by Shadows. "It's kind of fun being in the same paper with the old man," says Richard Reston, "be cause he's only in three times a week with his column and on that basis I have a chance of beating him four times a week."*The younger Friendly concedes that "Daddy is a much more graceful writer than I am, and can definitely type faster. But I have a better eye for color." He was not at all apprehensive when Daddy, who had been managing editor of the Washington Post, returned to news reporting and was sent to cover the Mideast war. "He did as good a job as anyone who was out there," thinks his son. "He's got a lot of promise."

The fathers insist that they do not influence the sons. "When Terry first started writing," says Red Smith, "I used to interrupt him and ask why he used one word when he meant another. Later, it occurred to me that it might bother him. So I stopped." James Reston pondered the fact that his son might be "cast into the old man's shadow. It's a psychological problem. No proud kid wants to go and hear: 'You're Scotty Reston's son.' " But the kids don't seem to be intimidated by their fathers' reputations. "They're making it on their own," says Trib Editor Murray Weiss. "They'd all be here even if their fathers were plumbers."

Being Wrong Together. Covering such disparate parts of the world, fathers and sons seldom cross paths—and maybe it's just as well. The only occasion when the Friendlys met was the 1965 election in Turkey. Without necessarily consulting each other's notes, both confidently predicted that the left would make impressive gains. Come election day, it turned out to be the conservatives that triumphed at the polls. On another occasion, the Friendly bylines were inadvertently switched by the Trib, putting Senior momentarily in Nigeria, Junior in Israel. And then there was that day last month when Junior managed to produce two bylined pieces for an edition while Senior contributed one. "That's the best we've done so far," says Senior.