David Halberstam (April 10, 1934 – April 23, 2007) was an
American Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist and
author known for his early work on the
Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, business, media, American culture, and his later
sports journalism.
Life and career
Halberstam was of
Jewish ancestry and, after the family relocated numerous times, was raised in
Yonkers, New York. Prior to that, the family had lived in
Winsted, Connecticut (where he was a classmate of
Ralph Nader). He graduated from
Harvard University with a bachelor of arts in 1955, and also served as managing editor of the University's daily newspaper,
The Harvard Crimson. He started his career writing for the
Daily Times Leader in
West Point,
Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for
The Tennessean in
Nashville,
Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the
American Civil Rights Movement.
In the mid-1960s, Halberstam covered the
Civil Rights Movement for
The New York Times. In the spring of 1967, he traveled with Martin Luther King from New York City to Cleveland and then to Berkeley for a
Harper's article "The Second Coming of Martin Luther King." While at the
Times, he gathered material for his book
The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a
George Polk Award for his reporting at
The New York Times, including his
eyewitness account of the
self-immolation of Vietnamese
Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Ðức. At the age of 30, he won a
Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled
In the Year of the Pig.
Halberstam next wrote about President
John F. Kennedy's foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War in
The Best and the Brightest. Synthesizing material from dozens of books and many dozens of interviews, Halberstam found what he saw as a strange paradox at the heart of the Vietnam War: that those who crafted the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, best-connected men in America —- "the best and the brightest" -— but that those same brilliant men could not conduct or even imagine anything but a bloody, disastrous course in the Vietnam War.
After publication of
The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam went to work on his next book, which became 1979's
The Powers That Be, a book featuring profiles of media titans like
William S. Paley of
CBS,
Henry Luce of
Time magazine and
Phil Graham of
The Washington Post.
In 1980 his brother,
cardiologist Michael J. Halberstam, was murdered during a burglary.
[Lyons, Richard D. (December 8, 1980). Slaying Suspect A Puzzle to Neighbors; House Was Toured Periods Away From Home Control of Handguns Sought. The New York Times] Halberstam never commented publicly on his brother's murder.
In 1991, Halberstam wrote
The Next Century, in which he argued that, after the end of the
Cold War, the United States was likely to fall behind economically to other countries such as
Japan and
Germany.
Later in his career, Halberstam turned to sports, publishing
The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at
Bill Walton and the 1979-80
Portland Trail Blazers basketball team; an ambitious book on
Michael Jordan in
1999 called
Playing for Keeps; and on the baseball pennant race battle between the
New York Yankees and
Boston Red Sox, called
Summer of '49.
In 1997, Halberstam received the
Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary
Doctor of Laws degree from
Colby College.
After publishing four books in the 1960s, including the novel
The Noblest Roman as well as
The Making of a Quagmire and
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy, Halberstam published three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was en route to completing at least two others before his death. In the wake of the
9/11, Halberstam wrote a book about the attacks,
Firehouse, which describes in detail Engine 40, Ladder 35 of the
New York City Fire Department.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, Halberstam's last book, was published posthumously in September 2007.
Death
Halberstam died on
April 23 2007 in a traffic crash in
Menlo Park, California near the
Dumbarton Bridge.
He was in the area to give a talk at an event at UC Berkeley and was on his way to
Mountain View to interview Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback
Y.A. Tittle for a book about the
1958 NFL Championship. Halberstam's driver Kevin Jones, a graduate student at the
UC Berkeley Journalism School who was given the opportunity to drive Halberstam to the interview by the department, pleaded
no contest to
misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter charges. He was sentenced to 5 days in jail and 200 hours of community service.
After Halberstam's death, the book project was taken over by
Frank Gifford, who played for the losing
New York Giants in the 1958 championship game, and was published by HarperCollins in October 2008 with an introduction dedicated to Halberstam.
Mentor to Other Authors
Halberstam was generous with his time and advice to other authors. To cite just one instance, author
Howard Bryant in the Acknowledgments section of "Juicing the Game", his 2005 book about steroids in baseball, said of Halberstam's assistance: "He provided me with a succinct road map and the proper mind-set." Bryant went on to quote Halberstam on how to tackle a controversial non-fiction subject:`Think about three or four moments that you believe to be the most important during your time frame. Then think about what the leadership did about it. It doesn't have to be complicated. What happened, and what did the leaders do about it? That's your book."
Criticism
The
Pulitzer Prize-winning
Korean War correspondent
Marguerite Higgins was the most pro-Diem journalist in the Saigon press corps and she frequently clashed with her younger male colleagues such as
Neil Sheehan,
Peter Arnett and Halberstam. She derided them as "typewriter strategists" who were "seldom at the scenes of battle". She alleged that they had ulterior motives, claiming "Reporters here would like to see us lose the war to prove they're right."
Mark Moyar, a revisionist historian, claimed that Halberstam, along with fellow Vietnam journalists
Neil Sheehan and
Stanley Karnow, helped to bring about the
1963 South Vietnamese coup against President
Ngo Dinh Diem by sending negative information on Diem to the U.S. government, in news articles and in private, because they decided Diem was unhelpful in the war effort. Moyar claims that much of this information was false or misleading. Historian Jeremy Kuzmarov disagrees, writing that Moyar's analysis underplays the fact that Diem was a corrupt, brutal and unpopular dictator, who tortured and executed opponents without trial. Kuzmarov says that while Moyar raises some valid criticisms about the methodologies of Halberstam and Sheehan, responsibility for the coup ultimately lies with Washington policymakers. Sheehan, Karnow, and Halberstam all won Pulitzer Prizes for their post-war works on the war.
Newspaper editor Michael Young says Halberstam saw Vietnam as a moralistic tragedy, with America's pride deterministically bringing about its downfall. Young writes that Halberstam reduced everything to
human will, turning his subjects into agents of broader historical forces and coming off like a Hollywood movie with a fated and formulaic climax. Young considers such portrayals of personalities to be both a gift and a flaw.
List of books
