Self-corrections welcome.

Last week, the New York Times celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary under its current regime. To get it said, yet again: It is the greatest news institution in the history of the world, in the absence of which many of us would stumble about as if without arms or legs.

A truly fine aspect of the Times is its ever so careful writing into the record of corrections of its own bad moments. These, unhappily, are very bad moments. In the Thirties, Walter Duranty told the world that there was nothing whatever to worry about, never mind those reports about the starvation of the Kulaks by Josef Stalin. Abundant coverage, in later years, was given to those and other crimes of Stalin.

Two weeks ago, appropriately on its one-hundredth birthday, the Times gave us two self-corrections, in the Book Review and in the articles section. In the Book Review a remarkable review by Terry Teachout of Joan Mellen's biography, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Mr. Teachout is devastating in his exploration of Miss Hellman's lifelong infatuation with Soviet Communism.

Lillian Hellman's review of her own political career had been published in 1976, called Scoundrel Time. It was hailed on the front page of the Times Book Review as a work comparable to those of Thoreau and Emerson. Similar notice of it was taken in the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Only Hilton Kramer, then an art critic at the Times, demurred. Miss Hellman had presented herself as the soul of courage and resolution, the Joan of Arc of the McCarthy era. What she was was a lovesick child of Josef Stalin and an unpleasant human being.

The next week, in its Sunday magazine, the Times published photographs taken during the reign of Mao in China (by Li Zhen Sheng). They are mostly pictures of people being shot and tortured. The text is by Edward Gargan, Hong Kong bureau chief of the Times, who records that "more than 50 million people starved to death in the vast famine [Mao] visited on his country in 1960 and 1961," and that was five years before the Cultural Revolution -- "ten years of madness, forced labor, exile, countless suicides, and millions of killings."

We know all that, don't we? "Throughout," the Times's Mr. Gargan goes on, "Mao was labeled a 'genius' for the cataclysm wrought in his name. And wave after wave of credulous American Sinologists and journalists wrote infatuated accounts of the Cultural Revolution, celebrating their perception of China's transformation."

Who was the most celebrated figure in the New York Times's journalistic hierarchy? Before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution? James Reston, of course. In 1971, writing from Tokyo after a visit to China (where his appendix was removed), Reston wrote, "I'm a Scotch Calvinist. I believe in redemption of the human spirit and the improvement of man. Maybe it's because I believe that or I want to believe it that I was struck by the tremendous effort to bring out what is best in man, what makes them good, what makes them cooperate with one another and be considerate and not beastly to one another. They are trying that."

Reston's eulogy disintegrated in the memory after such as Max Frankel and Abe Rosenthal descended on China. But it was the capstone of the pro-Mao sentiment in the Times, even as Herbert Matthews's tribute in 1961 was the high-water mark of the Times's enthusiasm for Fidel Castro.

The Times's historical corrections are done without acts of contrition. Rather like the thief who sends the money back in an anonymous package. Institutions have a difficult time apologizing for themselves. Vatican II was exceptional in this respect, when the Pope apologized for past acts of hostility to the Jews.

But it is different where individuals, not institutions, are the critical players. It is a pity that, before he died, Reston did not take any of a thousand opportunities to remark his own delusions. Garry Wills is very much alive and very quick to notice other people's moral/political indiscretions, in fact, sometimes quicker than the indiscretions. In his 34-page introduction he treated Lillian Hellman's book like a modern Areopagitica. Garry Wills's reading of history, as of 1977: "A newly aggressive Truman had launched the Cold War in the spring of 1947, with his plan to 'rescue' Greece and Turkey . . . We had still a world to save, with just those plans -- from NATO to the Korean War." At the time, I observed, in NATIONAL REVIEW, that Wills's introduction to Hellman might have been written in the Lenin Institute. Perhaps on his one-hundredth birthday, Garry Wills will show the courage of the New York Times.