Scottish-American author, journalist, columnist, correspondent and Executive Director of The New York Times. In a career spanning five decades, he was the Washington Bureau Chief of the New Times from 1953-1964 and a two time Pulitzer Prize winner. Reston helped to create the nation’s first Op-Ed page in 1970, reserving a page across from newspaper editorials as a page for columnist’s opinion pieces. He is the author of “The Artillery of the Press,” 1967, “The Amnesty of John David Herndon,” 1973 and “Deadline,” 1991.
Reston emigrated to America at age 11 with his parents. Beginning his career as a reporter on the Springfield, Ohio Daily News, he then worked in 1932 as a sportswriter for the Associated Press in New York and London. Hired by the New York Times as a reporter in 1938, he won his first Pulitzer in 1944 after obtaining the Allies’ secret proposal at the 1944 Dumbarton Oakes conference in planning the United Nations. Writing in later years in his memoirs “Deadline,” he stated he cinched the award after an ex-Times news aide from the Nationalist Chinese delegation slipped him the Dumbarton Oaks proposals.
After his promotion to Washington Bureau Chief, “Scotty” Reston then won his second Pulitzer for his outstanding coverage of the 1956 presidential election. His “Washington” column, which ran in the Times for 25 years, was a must-read for politicians and fellow journalists. He was once said to be “the greatest journalist of his generation,” who “recruited two generations of journalists at the Times and elsewhere.” Following his outstanding success as Washington Bureau Chief, he became the Times’ Executive Editor. He served in this position only a short time, then devoted his time to writing columns, with his last one published in 1987. He retired two years later.
Appalled at political corruption and despite his first hand accounts of the abuse of power by top government officials, he remained an optimist about his adopted country. “In the 50 years I’ve been working here, there is no country in the history of the world that has done so much for the human family as this country has.”
Reston died of cancer at his home in Reston, Virginia on December 6, 1995 (Jim Gorham quotes social secuirty death index for December 7, 1995 in Washington, DC; PT notes that the New York Times obituary of December 7 says he “died tonight at his home here. He was 86.”).
Link to Wikipedia biography