Q. Have you ever been accused of being a friend of the White House?

A. Never. It is our job to watch them, not to be friends with them. --James Reston's column,   June 29, 1973

JAMES RESTON has watched presidents from Roosevelt to Nixon, and while he has not been friends with them, he has offered them a great deal of friendly advice in his columns. Reston seems more cynical these days, but he is still holding tightly to those exalted American institutions--the Presidency and the Republic. Nixon still can lift himself out of the Watergate quagmire, Reston says; by revealing the truth, Nixon can save his weakened presidency. Even after the disclosure of an 18-minute gap in one of the Watergate tapes, Reston said that by inviting leaders of Congress to the White House to talk about Watergate, Nixon "made progress toward restoring confidence in his battered administration" (column, November 16, 1973).

He admires Nixon for refusing to yield. In the same column, he wrote, "You can't blame a man for trying to save his honor and his life, and this is now obviously what [Nixon's] trying, and trying with some success, to do." Reston approaches the issue of impeachment with great reluctance. One can envision him sitting in front of his typewriter shuddering at the thought of what impeachment might do to the fragile presidency.

Obsessed with preserving the institution of the presidency, Reston pays too little attention to the fact that Nixon's presidency is not worth saving. Reston's fascination with powerful men, especially American presidents, goes back to his early reporting days. He respected Roosevelt and the way he ran the war, he admired Truman's straight-forwardness, he regarded Eisenhower as a light-weight. He both praised and criticized Kennedy, Johnson confused him, and Nixon confounded him. But while Reston could vilify the man, he maintained his awe of the office.

Of all the men and women who write for The Times, none has as great a reputation as Reston. He commands the respect of his newspaper's staff and publisher; his columns are read in congressional offices, the White House, and foreign capitals. It therefore is especially disturbing that he should take it upon himself to withhold news from the American people, to decide that he knows what constitutes the public's right to know.

The most flagrant instance of Reston's selfcensorship came in April 1961. Ten days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Times reporter Tad Szulc put together a detailed story describing the training of Cuban refugees in Miami and the imminence of an invasion. But before the first edition came off the presses, Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos--on Reston's advice--ordered several changes. The story was moved from the lead column eight position to column four, and the headline was reduced from four columns to one column. All references to the imminence of the invasion were eliminated, and information linking the CIA to the invasion was omitted.

The story appeared on April 7. On April 17 the Cuban refugee force landed in Cuba. The U.S. government, through the CIA, was deeply involved in the invasion, although President Kennedy had assured the Washington press corps only three days earlier that the United States would not intervene in Cuba "under any circumstances" (press conference, April 12, 1961).

Kennedy reportedly said in 1962 that if The Times had printed all it knew, the United States would have been saved from a "colossal mistake." But Reston has maintained that disclosure would not have prevented the invasion, and that publication would have endangered the lives of the invading Cuban refugees.

Reston did not hide his distaste for Castro's Cuba. He said that the "self-interest of the [U.S.] undoubtedly requires the overthrow of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, which is providing a political and, increasingly, a military base of communism in the Carribean" (column, April 12, 1961). The column was headlined "The Moral Question."

RESTON said in a 1965 lecture to the Council on Foreign Relations that "the rising power of the United States in world affairs, and particularly of the American president, requires not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism, as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire."

But his vision of the press-as-cannon became press-as-popgun when "the national interest" was involved. Invocation of the phrase could limit his criticism of the government's Vietnam policy. And he knew of the U-2 flights a year before one of the planes was shot down, but his view of "the national interest" prevented him from printing what he knew.

In his 1965 lecture Reston said, "Much of the time, contrary to the official mythology, the people who write the news are not the enemies but the allies of public officials." But he is wrong to think that a government-press alliance is in the national interest. Government protects its own interests, and the press's job is to question the government's every action.

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Throughout his career on The Times, Reston has chased an elusive vision of America. Gay Talese wrote in his study of The Times, The Kingdom and the Power, that Reston's America "was a land in which the citizens seemed not so disenchanted, the police not so brutal, the United States's bombing in Vietnam not entirely unjustified, the politicans in Washington not so self-serving, the age of Jefferson not so long ago or lost in essence."