James Reston

James Barrett Reston, nicknamed "Scotty", was an American journalist whose career spanned the mid-1930s to the early 1990s. He was associated for many years with The New York Times.

Reston was born on November 3, 1909 in Clydebank, Scotland, into a poor, devout Scottish Presbyterian family that emigrated to the United States in 1920. He sailed with his mother and sister to New York as steerage passengers on board SS Mobile, and they were inspected at Ellis Island on September 28, 1920.

The family settled in the Dayton, Ohio area, and Reston graduated from Oakwood High School. In 1927, he was a medalist in the first Ohio High School Golf Championship. He was Ohio Public Links champion in 1931 and in 1932 was a member of the University of Illinois' Big Ten championship team.

After working briefly for the Springfield, Ohio Daily News, he joined the Associated Press in 1934. He moved to the London bureau of The New York Times in 1939, but returned to New York in 1940. In 1942, he took leave of absence to establish a U.S. Office of War Information in London. Rejoining the Times in 1945, Reston was assigned to Washington, D.C., as national correspondent. In 1948, he was appointed diplomatic correspondent. (During the August 27, 1948, radio broadcast over which he presided, his title is Pulitzer Prize–winning bureau chief.) In 1953, he became bureau chief and columnist.

In subsequent years, Reston served as associate editor of the Times from 1964 to 1968, executive editor from 1968 to 1969, and vice president from 1969 to 1974. He wrote a nationally syndicated column from 1974 until 1987, when he became a senior columnist. During the Nixon administration, he was on the master list of Nixon political opponents. Reston retired from the Times in 1989. Reston was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1980.

Reston interviewed many of the world's leaders and wrote extensively about the leading events and issues of his time. He interviewed President John F. Kennedy immediately after the 1961 Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev on the heels of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Stephen Kinzer's 2013 book The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War portrayed Reston as a key contact of former CIA chief Allen Dulles who had collaborated with the CIA in Operation Mockingbird, in which the agency sought to influence global reporting and journalism.

Reston married his wife, Sally (born Sarah Jane Fulton), on December 24, 1935, after meeting her at the University of Illinois. He also was a member of Sigma Pi fraternity's Phi Chapter at Illinois. They had three sons; James, a journalist, non-fiction writer and playwright; Thomas, formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for public affairs and the deputy spokesman for the State Department; and Richard, the retired publisher of the Vineyard Gazette, a newspaper on Martha's Vineyard purchased by the elder Reston in 1968.

While at Illinois, he was roommates with John C. Evans, who was also a Sigma Pi brother.

He died on December 6, 1995at age 86 in Washington, D.C.