James "Scotty" Barrett Reston (November 3, 1909 – December 6, 1995) was an American journalist whose career spanned the mid-1930s to the early 1990s.

Reston was born in Clydebank, Scotland, into a poor, devout Scottish Presbyterian family that emigrated to the United States in 1920.

In September 1920, Reston sailed with his mother and sister to New York City as steerage passengers on board the SS Mobile, and arrived and were inspected at Ellis Island.

He interviewed President John F. Kennedy immediately after the 1961 Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev on the heels of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

[7] 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 U.S. State Department;[8] and Richard, the retired publisher of the Vineyard Gazette, a newspaper on Martha's Vineyard purchased by the elder Reston in 1968.

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.

[9][10] 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".

They document Reston volunteering to approach fellow Times columnist Anthony Lewis to ask him to moderate his anti-Kissinger texts and offering to plant a question in a press conference for the secretary.

Nothing in his experience in Washington, Reston says over and over in these memoirs, "was ever quite as good or as bad as the fashionable opinion of the day", and he thinks of Kissinger as a prime example of this.

[...] But in praising Kissinger, Reston is praising a man who regularly misled him, who wiretapped NSC staff members to determine who was leaking to reporters when they revealed his unconstitutional maneuverings, and who urged Nixon to prosecute Reston's newspaper for its constitutionally protected publication of the Pentagon Papers.

[17]Reston also displayed his affinity for the powerful when Edward Kennedy drove his car off the bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

Summering at nearby Martha's Vineyard, Reston filed the first account of the incident for The New York Times; his opening paragraph began "Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family."

[22] 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."