Reston was born in Clydebank, Scotland, into a poor, devout Scottish Presbyterian family that emigrated to the United States in 1920. He sailed with his mother and sister to New York as steerage passengers on board SS Mobile, and they were inspected at Ellis Island on September 28, 1920.

The family settled in the Dayton, Ohio area, and Reston graduated from Oakwood High School. In 1927, he was a medalist in the first Ohio High School Golf Championship. He was Ohio Public Links champion in 1931 and in 1932 was a member of the University of Illinois’ Big Ten championship team.

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 leave of absence to establish a U.S. Office of War Information in London. Rejoining the Times in 1945, Reston was assigned to Washington, D.C., as national correspondent. In 1948, he was appointed diplomatic correspondent. (During the August 27, 1948, radio broadcast over which he presided, his title is Pulitzer Prize-winning bureau chief.) In 1953, he became bureau chief and columnist.

Reston married his wife, Sally (born Sarah Jane Fulton), on December 24, 1935, after meeting her at the University of Illinois. He also was a member of Sigma Pi fraternity’s Phi Chapter at 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 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 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 former New York Times copy boy 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 1986, he was one of twelve recipients of the Medal of Liberty. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986 and the Four Freedoms Award in 1991.

In the 1962 novel Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, the unnamed President of the United States refers to Reston during an impending nuclear crisis when he says that “someone will crack and start to call Scotty or one of the wire services or some damn thing.”

In July 1971, Reston suffered appendicitis while visiting China with his wife. After his appendix was removed through conventional surgery at the Anti-Imperialist Hospital in Beijing, his post-operative pain was “treated” by Li Chang-yuan with acupuncture that “sent ripples of pain racing through my limbs and, at least, had the effect of diverting my attention from the distress in my stomach.” The article he wrote for the Times describing his experience was the first time many Americans had heard of the traditional Chinese medical practice. Dr. Paul U. Unschuld, an academic translator of traditional Chinese medical texts, credits Reston’s article with the rise of traditional Chinese medicine in the body of alternative medicine of the West.