- He attended Oxford University during his junior year of college.
- Earned his B.A. in philosophy in 1963 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill while on a Morehead Scholarship.
- Attended the St. Albans School in Washington, D.C.
- At UNC, he was an All-South soccer player and still retains the single-game scoring record for the university-five goals against North Carolina State University on October 18, 1962.
- Maternal grandfather, William J. Fulton, served two terms as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois.
- Father James "Scotty" Reston was an editor of the New York Times. Mother, Sarah Jane "Sally" Fulton, was a journalist, photographer, writer, and publisher who joined her husband on foreign assignments in Europe and Asia during World War II.
- From 1971 to 1981, he was a lecturer in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Was an assistant to and speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall from 1964 to 1965.
- Was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News from 1964 to 1965.
- From 1965 to 1968, he and served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer and sergeant.
- From 1976 to 1977, he was a fiction reviewer for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Reston's articles have appeared in American Heritage, 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.
- From 1976 to 1977, Reston was David Frost's Watergate adviser for the historic Nixon interviews.
- In 1985 he 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.
- Was a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., from October 2002 to December 2022.
- Was a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. from 1994 to 1995.
- Was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
- In 2011 he was a resident scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
- Has three children, Maeve, Hillary and Devin.
- In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he wrote numerous pieces about amnesty for Vietnam deserters, people who had left the United States rather than serving in the war. This led to two books, a collection of essays, "When Can I Come Home", in 1972 and "The Amnesty of John David Herndon" in 1973.
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