James Reston Jr.

James Barrett Reston Jr. (March 8, 1941 – July 19, 2023) was an American journalist, documentarian and author of political and historical fiction and non-fiction. He wrote about the Vietnam War, the Jonestown Massacre, civil rights, the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and the September 11 attacks.

Reston was born in Manhattan, New York City. His father James "Scotty" Reston was an editor of the New York Times. His mother, Sarah Jane "Sally" Fulton, was a journalist, photographer, writer, and publisher who joined her husband on foreign assignments in Europe and Asia during World War II. His maternal grandfather, William J. Fulton, served two terms as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois.

Reston's family moved to Washington, D.C. when he was two years old. He attended the St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. He earned his B.A. in philosophy in 1963 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 still retains the single-game scoring record for the university—five goals against North Carolina State University on October 18, 1962. He attended Oxford University during his junior year.

Reston was an assistant to and speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall from 1964 to 1965. He was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News from 1964 to 1965. From 1965 to 1968, he served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer and sergeant. From 1971 to 1981, he was a lecturer in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1976 to 1977, he was a fiction reviewer for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reston wrote numerous pieces about amnesty for Vietnam deserters, people who had left the United States rather than serving in the war. This led to two books, both collection of essays, When Can I Come Home, in 1972 and The Amnesty of John David Herndon in 1973. Reston said, "Now as a veteran against the war, I gravitated to the issue of amnesty for Vietnam war resisters, no doubt because emotionally I sympathized deeply with their plight and their decision in contrast to my own course."

From 1976 to 1977, Reston was David Frost's Watergate adviser for the historic Nixon interviews. Reston's book about the interviews, The Conviction of Richard Nixon, was the inspiration for Peter Morgan's 2006 play Frost/Nixon, in which the character Jim Reston is the narrator. It was made into a film in 2008, also called Frost/Nixon.

Reston's articles appeared in American Heritage, American Theatre, George, Esquire, National Geographic, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Omni, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Saturday Review, Time, Vanity Fair, and Washington Post Magazine.

His works of both fiction and non-fiction cover a wide range of historical and political topics. 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, Time magazine published his cover story on the impact of the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet into Jupiter.