But like many Washington reporters, Reston was willing to at least feign friendship. A transcript of a private phone call between Reston and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in March 1975 shows Kissinger beseeching the veteran columnist: “I talk to you now as a friend. They [the Israelis] have been playing with our chips in a rather reckless way.” The secretary asks, “Scotty, what else can we do?… If you were secretary of state or the president, what is the U.S. position?” Reston deflects Kissinger’s attempts to co-opt him by replying “I don’t know” or “it’s a nightmare”–but plays along with the clubby confidences. Kissinger ends the conversation, “Oh well, then let’s have a drink on Wednesday or Thursday. But this conversation really… don’t ascribe anything to me.”

Reston’s private papers, which will be opened to the public next week by the University of Illinois, are full of such tidbits. They are a rare and complete record of the old Washington game of access journalism. At one point Reston records in his diary that Kissinger has told him the conditions under which the United States might normalize relations with Cuba. Kissinger “authorized me,” Reston writes, “to repeat them to [Fidel] Castro if I saw him.” Ambassador Reston? At the same time, Reston’s private correspondence and diaries offer insights into a man of considerable dignity who resisted blatant attempts at manipulation and who wrestled with the difficult question of when to publish government secrets.

His worst mistake was the Bay of Pigs. At his recommendation, the Times watered down a story in April 1961 that the CIA was about to stage an invasion of Cuba by an exile army. When the invasion was a disaster, even President Kennedy regretted that the Times had not more forcefully blown the whistle. A patriot, Reston agonized over the duties of a journalist during the cold war. “We are obviously in a period when it is not always easy to be a good newspaperman and a good citizen,” he wrote his editor, Turner Catledge, in 1953. “Therefore, some information will have to be withheld.”

Reston was without question right to sit on his biggest scoop: that America had discovered nuclear missiles in Cuba and planned to blockade the island. At JFK’s personal request, Reston held off for 48 hours, until the president had a chance to address the nation and the world. And unlike some of his rival pundits, Reston, his papers show, resisted the CIA’s attempts during the 1950s to use his column to plant disinformation. Similarly, when President Lyndon Johnson summoned Reston to the Oval Office in 1964 and started dishing dirt about Barry Goldwater (right out of Goldwater’s FBI file), Reston refused to be used as a conduit for scandal and sensation. That same year, declining to examine in print various conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, he explained to a friend, “This is a question of manners, rather than journalism.” After checking with his friend Chief Justice Earl Warren, he wanted to wait for the official investigation into Kennedy’s death.

Today’s reporters would scoff at such deference to authority. But they could use a dose of Reston’s reasoned sensitivity. After Republican leader Sen. Robert Taft visits his home one evening in 1947, Reston laments in his diary that journalists have become “caricaturists.” Taft is generally described as “stuffy, cheerless, and calculating,” but Reston finds him “friendly, open-minded, and almost boyishly happy.” The moral, Reston writes, is “gather your own information about people as much as you can; test every popular conception; and don’t be in a hurry about people.” In the age of the round-the-clock news cycle, still good advice.