Interview with James Reston Jr. - Iconic Author and Playwright

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).^[1] Reston is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C.^[2] 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 17 books, three plays, and numerous articles in national magazines. His works of both fiction and non-fiction cover a wide range of historical and political topics. Five of his 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.

 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.) His book on the historic interviews, The Conviction of Richard Nixon, is the basis for the hit 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 5 Academy Award nominations. Reston's 2013 work, The Accidental Victim, is a non-fiction book about John F. Kennedy's assassination which argues that Texas Governor John Connallywas Lee Harvey Oswald's intended victim.^[3]

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.

Reston's three 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.

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.r 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.

Source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Reston_Jr.