Journalism the Way They Used to Write It : A TIME OF CHANGE <i> by Harrison E. Salisbury (Harper & Row/A Cornelia & Michael Bessie Book: $22; 368 pp.) </i>

The Golden Age of American newspaper reporting began in the zany 1920s (Aimee Semple McPherson, the Snyder-Gray murder case, Al Capone and all that) and continued unabated through the Depression and the New Deal, the years of appeasement and fascism abroad, the war correspondent years of World War II and the Korean War, the Cold War years of the 1950s. But by the 1960s, things had begun to fade for the guys in trench coats lugging typewriters off to Berlin and Vienna and trying to get into Warsaw or Prague and never getting into Peking.

Jobs were fading, big-city newspaper competition was fading with closures and mergers, and even war was fading as the reporter’s specialty. Television cameras had begun poking into Vietnam jungle skirmishing and military hospitals and command posts that had hitherto been the exclusive province of the experienced observant eye and swiftly written prose.

But in the meantime, it had been an era that produced an extraordinary outpouring of quality writing by journalists--all the way from brilliant police-beat rewrite copy up to profound and colorful reporting of history-in-the-making. It was an age of magazine journalism as well as newspaper journalism, and it was a natural evolution for a reporter-writer to go on to become a book author.

And what journalist-authors and what books this era spawned--beginning with Vincent Sheean’s classic “Personal History,” which is still vivid reading 50 years after it first appeared. After that came Negley Farson with “Way of a Transgressor,” and then John Gunther’s “Inside Europe,” William L. Shirer’s “Berlin Diary,” books by Eric Severeid, Robert St. John, Elliot Paul, Dorothy Thompson, A. J. Leibling, Keyes Beach, Theodore H. White and a flock of other first-rate reporter-writers who never made it to Book-of-the-Month Club. These were books by reporters, first and foremost, who could write crisp, clean, tight and intelligent prose. We are now in an era where reporters wind up reporting what has been seen and heard on television, and television “newsmen” hire ghost writers to jazz up their tinsel autobiographies.

Harrison E. Salisbury began his long, vivid and distinguished newspaper career in Minneapolis in 1927, just as the Golden Age of reporting was getting into stride. His latest work, “A Time of Change,” is his second volume of personal career memoirs. It may turn out to be the last memoir from the Golden Age that began with Jimmy Sheean’s, although Joseph Alsop is working to make good on his autobiographical promise about a career that included covering the Lindberg kidnaping trial. But this does not mean that Harrison Salisbury has written his last book. Along with his productive years on the New York Times, he has produced 27 books so far, and he has only just turned 80.

“A Time of Change,” recounting highlights of Salisbury’s reporting and editing years from the mid-1950s, moves swiftly and readably from the street gangs and garbage collectors of New York to Albania, Outer Mongolia, North Korea, Tibet, Hanoi, Phnom-Penh, Sofia, Warsaw, the White House and the power corridors of the New York Times. There are endless vivid glimpses of history-in-the-making--not always as important as the reporter believes them to be, but this is a common fault of journalists that makes for good reporting and reading.

Above all, Salisbury is passionate about reporting, and the craft and profession of journalism, and his professional passion seems to light up and sometimes inflame every page. It is a book about reporting and a reporter at work, relentlessly at work.

“My heroes in journalism have been the muckrakers--past and present,” Salisbury declares. “I wanted to be a correspondent and not an editor. I didn’t want to make marks on papers or push them around. I belonged to the scene where I felt challenged, excited, at home. I loved to write, with a sense of how important it was to see with my own eyes, hear with my own ears, touch with my own hands, before making a judgment.”

When Salisbury came back from five years in Moscow to join the New York Times city staff in 1954, one of his first assignments was the perennial piece on New York’s garbage problem. He looked up past versions of the story in the Times’ library, and launched his update by riding a garbage truck for six hours in the early morning dark of a freezing December day.

He continued to set out a couple of times a year on special assignments abroad, and he sought to make Red China his focal point after his years reporting on the Soviet Union. He worked assiduously to get to places other correspondents weren’t penetrating--a little too assiduously, some of his colleagues certainly felt. But that is how he landed in Hanoi at Christmas of 1967 to cover American bombs falling on the city. His Hanoi stories were disastrous for President Johnson’s “credibility gap,” and his account of this episode from beginning to end, including the “peace feelers” that he brought back with him from North Vietnam, is one of the highlights of his rambling action-packed memoir.

Salisbury was, and still is, a relentless and indefatigable reporter, totally engage as the French would say--involved, immersed in his subject at hand. This leads to some doubtful judgments. He believes, for example, that Stalin maneuvered the Red Chinese into entering the Korean War as a means of preserving enmity between China and the United States. But surely if anyone brought Red China into that war it was Gen. Douglas MacArthur with his disastrous advance to the Yalu River.

The book abounds in vivid portraiture--that blinkered American revolutionary Anna Louise Strong, China’s Chou En-lai, Soong Ching-ling who was the widow of China’s first revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, and many others. And in the end, Salisbury zeroes in on the Times’ executive editor, Abe Rosenthal--a sympathetic effort to understand a man who could not understand himself.

It’s a book about the way it was before reporting turned into what now seems to be one great, long, unending photo opportunity.