James "Scotty" Barrett Reston (November 3, 1909 – December 6, 1995) 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 in Clydebank, Scotland, into a poor, devout Scottish Presbyterian family. In September 1920, Reston emigrated with his mother and sister to New York City as steerage passengers on board the SS Mobile, and arrived and were inspected at Ellis Island.
The family settled in the Dayton, Ohio area, and Reston graduated from Oakwood High School in Oakwood, Ohio. In 1927, he was a medalist in the first Ohio High School Golf Championship. He was the Ohio Public Links champion in 1931, and in 1932 was a member of the University of Illinois' Big Ten championship team.
While at Illinois, he was a member of Sigma Pi fraternity and was a roommate of John C. Evans, a Sigma Pi brother.
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 a leave of absence to establish a U.S. Office of War Information in London. In 1945, following the end of World War II, he rejoined The New York Times as a national correspondent in Washington, D.C..
In 1948, he was appointed diplomatic correspondent. In 1953, he became bureau chief and columnist.
Reston served as associate editor of The New York 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 U.S. president Richard Nixon's list of political opponents.
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.
In 1989, Reston retired from The New York Times.
In his 2013 book, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, Stephen Kinzer portrayed Reston as a key contact for Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles, alleging that he collaborated with the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, in which the agency sought to influence global reporting and journalism.
Reston married 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 U.S. State Department; and Richard, the retired publisher of the Vineyard Gazette, a newspaper on Martha's Vineyard purchased by the elder Reston in 1968.
Reston died on December 6, 1995, in Washington, D.C., at age 86.
The Artillery of the Press: Its Influence on American Foreign Policy (1967)
Deadline: A Memoir (1991) (memoir)
Reston won the Pulitzer Prize twice. The first was in 1945, for his coverage of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, particularly an exclusive series that detailed how the delegates planned to set up the United Nations. Decades later, he revealed that his source was a copy boy with The New York Times who was a member of the Chinese delegation. He received the second award in 1957 for his national correspondence, especially "his five-part analysis of the effect of President Eisenhower's illness on the functioning of the executive branch of the federal government".
In 1955, he was given the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.