The Amnesty of John David Herndon
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xxii, 146 pages. James "Jim" Reston Jr. (born March 8, 1941) is an American journalist, documentarian and author of political and historical fiction and nonfiction. He has written about the Vietnam war, the Jonestown Massacre, civil rights, the impeachment of Richard Nixon and 9/11. Reston was an assistant and speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall from 1964 to 1965.[ He 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 1971 and 1981, he was a lecturer in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1976 to 1977, he was a regular fiction reviewer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reston 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. Reston said, "Now as a veteran against the war, I gravitated to the issue of amnesty for Vietnam war resisters, no doubt because emotionally I sympathized deeply with their plight and their decision in contrast to my own course." In 1976–1977, Reston was David Frost's Watergate adviser for the historic Nixon interviews. Reston's book about the interviews, The Conviction of Richard Nixon, was the inspiration for Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, in which the character Jim Reston is the narrator. More