The Press: How to Lose a Beat

At his home on Washington's Woodley Road one evening last week, New York Times Bureau Chief James Barrett Reston was getting ready to go out with his family when the telephone rang. "O.K.," said the voice on the phone. "You can get them." For Reston "them" meant only one thing: the secret records of the Yalta Conference. Like other Washington newsmen, "Scotty" Reston knew that the report might be released any time. Only the day before, the State Department had volunteered to supply 24 "confidential" copies of the record to Congress. But the Democrats, knowing the record might thus leak out. refused to go along with the idea (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). As the State Department withdrew its offer, Scotty Reston went to work on his sources to turn up a copy on his own.

Last week the result of his enterprise not only got him the first copy of the Yalta record; it forced the State Department to release the text to the press of the world. It also enabled the Times to perform a notable journalistic feat. While most other papers were carrying only sketchy Yalta stories, the Times set in type and printed the full text of the 200,000 -word Yalta Conference record, along with news stories, pictures and editorial comment. It ran nearly 32 full pages, the longest text the paper has ever run (second: the 15-page Pearl Harbor Report).

Phone Books. After the phone call, Reston hustled to "an office," there got the record from his caller. Reston refused to say who he was. but newsmen guessed Reston's source was someone in the State Department itself. He got the two-volume. 834-page report under three conditions : 1) the Times would publish the full conference record. 2) the books were to be kept handy so that they could be returned in 15 minutes, and 3) they were not to be taken apart. Thus the books could not be sent to the Times's New York office, but had to be copied in Washington. Reston had already phoned Times Managing Editor Turner Catledge to alert him that he might be getting the report, and the Times had decided to publish it, since "no question of national security" was involved. With the two volumes in hand, Reston set his Washington bureau to work transmitting the record to New York. Said he: "It was like being given two phone books to transmit."

One group of staffers started to copy Volume II (the conference record) page by page on the office Thermo-Fax machine ordinarily used to copy letters and other single sheets of paper. Meanwhile, Staff Photographer George Tames was put to work photographing Volume I (the background papers). As duplicates came off the Thermo-Fax machine, five Teletype operators began sending the conference record over the Times's leased wires to New York. They worked all night, and by next day had 14 additional Western Union circuits operating at one time to New York. They tied up so many wires that there were not enough left to send out the text of the President's press conference, and the Times had to give some of the lines up. Meanwhile, Times Correspondent Bess Furman took the filmed copy of the background papers to New York. (Excerpts were printed the day after the full conference record appeared.)