Doubtful Guide

The New York Times's James ("Scotty") Reston is a sharp, Pulitzer-Prizewinning correspondent who specializes in finding out what the State Department is thinking, rather than what it is saying out loud. Armed with integrity and prestige, he has ready access to most of the department's top brass, plenty of chances for "guidance" talks when he wants them.

Last week Scotty Reston passed along some exclusive and startling guidance to his readers: Secretary of State Acheson had reversed his policy on China. "Last January," Reston wrote, "Secretary of State Dean Acheson was ridiculing the Chinese Nationalists in public, exhorting the Dutch and the French to recognize that a revolution had taken place in Asia, and emphasizing that the first rule of United States policy in the Far East was to refrain from doing anything that would drive the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Communists together.

"Now," wrote Reston, "Mr. Acheson is all for giving more help to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, insisting that military considerations must determine United States policy toward the future of Formosa, [and] conducting a policy of economic sanctions against the Peiping regime . . ."

Reston doubtless was reporting just what he had heard. Also he was reporting the kind of story the State Department would love to put out on a don't-quote-me basis to head off public irritation over continuing confusion about China. The facts, as other newsmen saw them, were quite different: Acheson was still governed by bitter resentment toward Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff had proposed a counteroffensive against the Communists in a high-level conference, Acheson had opposed it.

By week's end, Scotty Reston's story was still exclusive--a good sign, in well-covered Washington, that nobody could find facts to support it.

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