BOOK REVIEW : A Self-Portrait of Pontiff of U.S. Politics : DEADLINE A Memoir <i> by James Reston</i> ; Random House; $25, 554 pages

As I read “Deadline,” the memoirs of veteran New York Times columnist James Reston, I was struck by the contrast between his autobiography and the recent work of another--forgive me--journalist, Geraldo Rivera’s “Exposing Myself.”

Across the gulf between these two memoirs lies the frontier between not only one generation and another, one epoch and another, but also one civilization and another. It’s enough, in a weak moment, to make one nostalgic for the chivalry and good manners that prevailed among the aristocracy of American journalism in the old days.

James (Scotty) Reston, former Washington bureau chief and pundit for the New York Times, was the ultimate insider in American politics and diplomacy for more than half a century--but his memoirs are invariably discreet, well-mannered and genteel.

Reston characterizes his book as a political memoir that “got away from me and turned into a love story about America and other impossible dreams.” And he fully appreciates that, at 82, he is a living relic: “I wanted to leave my darlings,” he says of his children and grandchildren, “a glimpse of a world that is vanishing.”

Unlike Rivera’s exercise in exhibitionism, the hot flashes in “Deadline” are not glandular. Rather, they hark back to scandals that no longer strike us as particularly scandalous, as when he quotes Joseph Kennedy on Winston Churchill--”I do not have any confidence in a man who is always sucking on a whiskey bottle”--and then sniffs that old Joe’s crack “did not . . . interfere with the ambassador’s investments as one of the biggest whiskey dealers in America.”

In a sense, “Deadline” is as much about the New York Times as it is about Reston. The good gray newspaper for which he worked, and which draped him with the mantle of power and respectability, only encouraged his gentility. “Things don’t happen at the Times,” he explains “they emerge by slow growth like flowers from the seed.”

Of course, the chumminess of old-school journalism had its dark side. Reston reveals how CIA director Allen Dulles, former Princeton classmate of a high-ranking Times executive, influenced the newspaper to pull a reporter off a story because of unsupported accusations that he was “unreliable”--and “tried, occasionally with success, to recruit Times reporters overseas to serve as secret agents.”

And, precisely because he was an insider, Reston was loath to blow the whistle on the powerful men whose lives were his beat. He once told Pierre Salinger, John F. Kennedy’s press secretary, that he “was not interested in the President’s personal monkey business” and complained only that he “didn’t see how I could explain it if somebody took a potshot at him one night after he had ditched the reporters.”

Reston, an endangered species who survived the sea change in journalism that followed Watergate, confesses that the New York Times and other newspapers allowed themselves to be too easily used by Joe McCarthy: “Putting quotation marks around McCarthy’s false charges,” he writes, “did not relieve us of complicity in McCarthy’s campaign.”

“Deadlines” may not exactly sizzle, but Reston has some great stories to tell. At its best moments, “Deadline” gives us a wry and ironic take on some of the most cherished myths and icons of American journalism.

He confides, for example, that he spent the Blitz in the posh Savoy Hotel in London--”a sturdy building, with the deepest shelters and one of the best restaurants in town”--and he even managed to get in an occasional round of golf with Ed Murrow: “We played around the unexploded bombs marked GROUNDS UNDER REPAIR.”

As “an unreconstructed Scotch Calvinist,” Reston cannot resist the temptation to deliver a sermon on the almost theological conflict between “expediency and morality” in public life. But if there is anyone who is entitled to pontificate, it is the man who served for so many years as the pontiff of American politics.

“It was, I came to believe, no good to look for saints in the midst of the dangerous complexities that confront Presidents and secretaries of state in the atomic age,” he concludes. “At the same time, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the disastrous decisions taken in the past were traceable to ignorance, presumption, vanity, fear and other personal shortcomings.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Bernard Shaw 3: The Lure of Fantasy” by Michael Holroyd (Random House) .