James Barrett Reston was the American journalist, editor of The New York Times.
Background
He was born November 3, 1909, in Clydebank, Scotland, was the second child of James and Johanna Reston. His family emigrated to the United States in 1920 and settled in Dayton, Ohio. Raised in a strict Presbyterian home, Reston thought seriously of becoming a preacher. He also considered a career as a professional golfer.
Education
In 1932 he graduated from the University of Illinois.
Career
After graduation Reston took a job as a sportswriter for the Springfield (Ohio) Daily News. He then worked for the Ohio State University sports publicity office and as a press secretary for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. In 1934 he accepted a position with Associated Press in New York writing sports features and a column, "A New Yorker at Large. "
He was sent to London in 1937 to cover international sporting events and the British foreign office. In 1939 Scotty Reston was hired by the New York Times to work in its London bureau. In 1941 he was covering the State Department in Washington, D. C. After publishing the book Prelude to Victory (1942), in which he stressed that the war effort must be a national crusade, he went to London to help organize the U. S. Office of War Information.
He returned to Washington, D. C. , as the Times' diplomatic correspondent in 1944. While covering the Dumbarton Oaks conference which organized the United Nations, he obtained a full set of top-secret Allied position papers from an unhappy Chinese delegation.
A successful and valued reporter, Reston was named Washington bureau chief in 1953. He recruited a team of interns and young writers who formed an enterprising and powerful staff and developed into leading national journalists. While supervising the office he still managed to write about 5, 000 words a week. In 1957 he received a second Pulitzer Prize for a series on America's lack of national purpose.
In March 1960 Reston began the thrice-weekly political column which solidified his stature as one of Washington's most influential journalists. In the introduction to a collection of his essays, Sketches in the Sand (1967), he observed that columns are motivated by a wide range of objectives, from ideological interpretation to investigation. He saw his own purpose as if he were writing an informative letter to a thoughtful friend.
In 1960 Reston cautioned the Times not to print advance information it held about the imminent Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1965 Reston toured South Vietnam to take a personal look at the war. In 1967 he delivered a series of lectures which were published as The Artillery of the Press: Its Influence on American Foreign Policy in which he advocated a more skeptical and less nationalistic role for the press. In 1971 he recommended that the Times publish the secret study of the Vietnam War, The Pentagon Papers. Later that year, at the height of his influence, he visited the People's Republic of China and conducted the first indepth interview of Premier Chou En-lai.
In 1964 Reston gave up his position as Washington bureau chief in order to become associate editor and devote more time to his column. In 1968 he served briefly as executive editor in New York before returning to Washington as vice president in charge of news production. After 1974 Reston was a director of the New York Times Company while continuing to write his column.
In 1987 he gave up his regular column and retired except for writing a piece only now and then. In 1991, he wrote Deadline, a memoir of his life.
Achievements
Views
Coming from a poor immigrant background, Reston saw America as a land of opportunity. Expecting its leaders to act in an exemplary manner, he was deeply disappointed after the bombings of Cambodia and the Watergate affair.
Personality
He was a stocky man with a square, reddish face. Reston had the ability to cultivate powerful political figures such as Henry Kissinger. Yet, a conservative man with traditional values, he was optimistic about the country's future.
Quotes from others about the person
Featured in a Time magazine cover story in early 1960, he was called "a crack reporter, a good writer, a thoughtful columnist and an able administrator of the biggest bureau in Washington. "
According to one journalist, Reston "is not so much a man of the left or right as he is a man of the Times. "
Life magazine described it as "a highly intelligent summary of what policy makers are thinking and worrying about; Reston does not so much argue for or against their policies as clarify them with a readable prose style and stamp them with his own healthy point of view. "
Connections
Reston married his wife, Sally (born Sarah Jane Fulton), on December 24, 1935, after meeting her at the University of 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 publisher of the Vineyard Gazette, a newspaper on Martha's Vineyard from 1998 to 2003.