James Reston Jr.

Reston was born in New York City September 1, 1943[2] while his father James "Scotty" Reston was editor of the New York Times.[3] His mother Sally Fulton was a journalist and publisher who joined her husband on foreign assignments in Europe and Asia during World War II. His maternal grandfather served two terms as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois.[4] Reston was raised in Washington, D.C.. He earned his BA in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) while on a Morehead Scholarship. At UNC, he was an All-South soccer player, and retains the single game scoring record for the university (5 goals against NC State, October 18, 1962). He attended Oxford University during his junior year.[5]

The author was an assistant to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (1964–1965) and served in the U.S. Army (1965–1968) as an intelligence officer. He was a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina (1971–1981).[6] joining a circle of novelists that included Reynolds Price, Lee Smith, Doris Betts, Allan Gurganus, Max Steele, and Fred Chapell. Reston is a Global Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C.[7] and has been a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a resident scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.[5]

His works of both fiction and non-fiction cover a wide range of historical and political topics.

Five of Reston's works cover focus on medieval and Renaissance history., Galileo: A Life, The Last Apocalypse, Warriors of God, Dogs of God, and Luther's Fortress have been translated into thirteen foreign languages.

In 1976–1977, Reston was David Frost's Watergate adviser for the historic Nixon interviews which forced ex-President Nixon to apologize for his Watergate crimes and remains the most watched public affairs television program in broadcast history. (The Watergate interrogation had an audience of 57 million viewers.) Touted in an April 1978 Playboy article as Frost's "top gun," Reston wrote an 80 page interrogation document for Frost, before the Watergate interrogation that included tapes of incriminating conversations between Richard Nixon and his aide, Charles Colson that surprised Nixon and allowed Frost to take control of the interchange. Reston's book on the historic interviews, The Conviction of Richard Nixon, is the basis for Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, in which the Jim Reston character is the narrator.

In October 2019 he published his diary of the last six weeks of the Nixon presidency which he wrote in 1974 when he came to Washington from North Carolina to witness the impeachment drama. Its title is The Impeachment Diary: Eyewitness to the Removal of a President.

In 1985 Reston was the Newsweek, PBS, and BBC candidate to be the first writer in space on the NASA space shuttle. That program was scrapped after the Challenger accident in January 1986. On May 23, 1994 the author published his second cover story in Time magazine entitled "Cosmic Clash" on the amazing impact of the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet into the planet, Jupiter.

A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam Memorial was published in 2017. Springing from the roots of his military service during the Vietnam War, the book tells the story of the five-year battle between youthful Maya Lin, the winning designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and a determined group of veterans, led by ex-Virginia senator Jim Webb, who opposed the design as insulting to veterans and who tried to scuttle the choice. The New York Times dubbed A Rift in the Earth "a superb and unexpectedly affecting book".

Reston wrote four plays. All were stage adaptations of his books. "Sherman the Peacemaker" premiered at the Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C. in 1979, and was an outgrowth of his book, Sherman's March and Vietnam (1985). "Jonestown Express" , based upon his 1981 book, Our Father Who Art in Hell, premiered at the Trinity Square Repertory Company in 1982; "Galileo's Torch", adapted from his biography of Galileo, Galileo: A Life (1994) has had seven productions between 2014–17, including at the University of Oklahoma, Folger Shakespeare Theatre, and the Castleton Festival in 2017; and "Luther's Trumpet", an adaptation of his 2016 book, Luther's Fortress, premiered in September 2018 and was re-mounted as a hybrid zoom production in May 2021, under the auspices of the theater program at George Mason University, starring two of Washington's most prominent stage actors, Ed Gero and Craig Wallace..

Reston's articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, The New York Times Magazine, George, Esquire, American Theatre, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. In recent years he has lectured widely in the United States and overseas on the millennium and the Crusades, citing their relevance to modern issues.

Reston is the son of James "Scotty" Reston and Sarah Jane Fulton. He is married to Denise Leary, a lawyer who served as deputy general counsel at National Public Radio for 25 years., They have three children, and live in Chevy Chase, Maryland. His eldest daughter, Maeve, is a television journalist at CNN.[8] His second child, Devin, is a stock broker in Montana. Reston's book, Fragile Innocence, A Father's Memoir of His Daughter's Courageous Journey (2006), is the story of his disabled daughter, Hillary. A front page review in the Washington Post called it "carefully crafted....a page-turning read" and Newsweek called it "a story of love and hope." A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2006 and a finalist for the 2006 Books for a Better Life Award, it was briefly on the Washington Post best seller list.

Reston is depicted in the 2008 film Frost/Nixon, portrayed by Sam Rockwell.[9]

He was awarded the Prix Italia and the Dupont–Columbia Award for his 1983 90-minute radio documentary on National Public Radio, Father Cares: the Last of Jonestown.

• Official Website
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• James Reston Jr. at IMDb