James Reston Jr.

James Reston Jr. (born March 8, 1941)[1] is a prolific American author, noted for the wide range of his subjects, who has written eighteen books and four plays.

James Reston Jr.
Born (1941-03-08) March 8, 1941
New York City
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Occupation
  • Author
  • Playwright
Children3
Parent(s)James Reston
Sally Fulton

Early life

Reston was born in New York City and raised in Washington, D.C., the son of journalist James "Scotty" Reston and Sally Fulton. He was awarded a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned his BA in philosophy there in 1963. 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.[1]

Career

Reston 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 (1971–81).[2] Reston is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C.[3] and has been a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a resident scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Reston is the author of 18 books, four plays, and numerous articles in national magazines. His works of both fiction and non-fiction cover a wide range of historical and political topics. 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. In a column in the New York Times, April 23, 1983,Anthony Lewis said of the NPR program: "It is quite simply one of the great achievements in the history of broadcasting."

Five of Reston's works, Galileo: A Life, The Last Apocalypse, Warriors of God, Dogs of God, and Luther's Fortress have been translated into thirteen foreign languages. Warriors of God was an international best seller. The Last Apocalypse was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1999. His 2015 book, Luther's Fortress, was nominated for the prestigious Philip Schaff Prize for the best book about church history published in 2015–16. The Innocence of Joan Little, Warriors of God, Collision at Home Plate and a forthcoming novel, The 19th Hijacker, have been optioned by Hollywood.

In 1976–77, 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 the play Frost/Nixon, in which the Jim Reston character is the narrator. In the Hollywood film adaptation of the play, directed by Ron Howard, Reston is played by the actor Sam Rockwell. The movie received five Academy Award nominations.

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. Of it, the distinguished constitutional scholar and Harvard professor, Laurence Tribe wrote: "If ever there was an “eyewitness to history” worthy of the name, James Reston Jr. surely deserves that title. His close-up-and-personal account of the process that drove an American president from office is impossible to put down. To read it is to live it."

In 1989 Reston published his first full length biography, The Lone Star: the Life of John Connally. An excerpt of the biography was published in a Time Magazine cover story on November 28, 1988 entitled "Who Was the Real Target in Dallas." Reston's 2013 work, The Accidental Victim, extended the author's controversial argument that it was Texas Governor John Connally, not President John F. Kennedy who was Lee Harvey Oswald's intended target. In the books and in an earlier opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times (November 22, 2004) Reston also argued that President Kennedy would have survived Oswald's first bullet that passed through his neck, but the tight girdle the president wore to support his bad back held him upright in the presidential limousine for the assassin's fatal second shot.

The author has remarked in an interview with the Georgia Review (summer 2019) that the two hardest books he wrote were the book about the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide entitled Our Father Who Art in Hell: the Life and Death of the Reverend Jim Jones (1981) and the book about his handicapped daughter, Hillary called Fragile Innocence (2006). About the emotional difficulties of a writer dealing with difficult material, Reston wrote an essay, also in the 2018 summer issue of the Georgia Review, entitled: "The Novelist's Event: Fact, Fiction, and a Writer's Search for a Universal Subject."

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.

The author was the creator of four public television documentaries: "88 Seconds in Greensboro" (1984) was an inside look into the killings of civil rights protesters by Ku Klux Klansmen in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1983. It won the Ohio State Award for excellence in broadcasting; "The Real Stuff" (1985) about the risk astronauts face on the space shuttle; "The Mission of Discovery"(1988) was a WETA-BBC co-production about the preparations for first space shuttle mission after the Challenger disaster; and "Betting on the Lottery" 1990) on the state lottery phenomenon.

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's four plays are: "Sherman the Peacemaker" which premiered at the Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C. in 1979; "Jonestown Express" premiered at the Trinity Square Repertory Company in 1982; "Galileo's Torch", which adapted from his biography of Galileo, 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.

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.

Personal life

Reston is married, has three children, and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland. His eldest daughter, Maeve Reston, is a television journalist.[4] His 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.

Legacy

Reston is depicted in the 2008 film Frost/Nixon, portrayed by Sam Rockwell.[5]

Bibliography

Books
  • To Defend, To Destroy, a novel, 1971
  • The Amnesty of John David Herndon, 1973
  • The Knock at Midnight, a novel, 1975
  • The Innocence of Joan Little, 1977
  • Sherman, the Peacemaker, a play, 1979
  • Our Father Who Art in Hell, The Life and Death of Jim Jones, 1981
  • Jonestown Express, a play, 1984
  • Sherman's March and Vietnam, 1985
  • The Lone Star: the Life of John Connally, 1989
  • Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti, 1991
  • Galileo: A Life, 1994
  • The Last Apocalypse: Europe in the Year 1000 A.D., 1998
  • Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade, 2001
  • Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors, 2005
  • Fragile Innocence: A Father's Memoir of His Daughter's Courageous Journey, 2006[6]
  • The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews, 2007
  • Defenders of the Faith: Charles V, Suleyman the Magnificent, and the Battle for Europe, 1520–1536, 2009
  • The Accidental Victim, 2013
  • Luther's Fortress: Martin Luther and His Reformation Under Siege, 2015
  • A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial, 2017
  • The Impeachment Diary: Eyewitness to the Removal of a President, 2019.

Articles

Reston, James Jr. (28 January 1985). "A Reporter at Large: You Cannot Refine It". The New Yorker. 60 (50): 35–71. General William Tecumseh Sherman.

Papers

The papers of James Reston, Jr., Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina,

References
  1. "Reston, James B. Jr. 1941–". Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series. Cengage. Retrieved May 19, 2020.
  2. "The Author". The La Crosse Tribune. Wisconsin, La Crosse. January 21, 1973. p. 28. Retrieved March 31, 2017 – via Newspapers.com.
  3. James Reston Jr, Wilson Center Experts, Wilson Center
  4. "Maeve Reston". CNN. Archived from the original on 1 April 2017. Retrieved 1 April 2017.
  5. Manohla Dargis (2008-12-05). "Mr. Frost, Meet Mr. Nixon". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-02-04.
  6. Polly Morrice (2006-03-26). "What Not to Expect". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-02-04.
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