Career
Reston was an assistant to and speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall from 1964 to 1965. [1] He was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News from 1964 to 1965. [1] [2] From 1965 to 1968, he served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer and sergeant. [1] [6] [2] From 1971 to 1981, he was a lecturer in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [9] [1] [2] From 1976 to 1977, he was a fiction reviewer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. [1]
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. [10] [11] 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. [9] 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." [11]
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Presentation by Reston on The Conviction of Richard Nixon, July 12, 2007, C-SPAN |
From 1976 to 1977, Reston was David Frost's Watergate adviser for the historic Nixon interviews. [8] 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. [8] It was made into a film in 2008, also called Frost/Nixon. [2]
Reston's articles appeared in American Heritage , [12] 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 . [1] [8]
His works of both fiction and non-fiction cover a wide range of historical and political topics. [7] In 1985, Reston was the Newsweek , PBS, and BBC candidate to be the first writer in space on the NASA space shuttle. [3] That program was scrapped after the Challenger accident in January 1986. [3] On May 23, 1994, Time magazine published his cover story on the impact of the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet into Jupiter. [3]
Reston wrote four plays which were all stage adaptations of his books [13] —Sherman the Peacemaker premiered at the Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1979, and was an outgrowth of his book, Sherman's March and Vietnam; [13] Jonestown Express, based on his 1981 book Our Father Who Art in Hell, premiered with the Trinity Square Repertory Company in 1982; Galileo's Torch was adapted from his biography of Galileo and Galileo: A Life was staged in seven separate productions between 2014 and 2017; [14] and Luther's Trumpet is an adaptation of his 2016 book, Luther's Fortress, and premiered in September 2018. [13]
In 2005, Reston tried to stop production of Ridley Scott's film Kingdom of Heaven, claiming half of the script was based on the first part of his book Warriors of God. [15] Reston's book was previously optioned by Phoenix Pictures, who had unsuccessfully pitched the concept to Scott as a potential project. [16] Reston said, "They have built this film on the back of my intellectual property. They just read the first hundred pages and saw it has these great characters and a fantastic battle." [16]
In 2016, Reston's 1977 book, The Innocence of Joan Little: A Southern Mystery, was optioned by Paulist Productions to possibly develop as a limited series. [17]
Reston was a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., from 1994 to 1995, and a Global Fellow from October 2002 to December 2022. [18] He was also fellow at the American Academy in Rome. [8] In 2011, he was a resident scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. [8]
