David Halberstam, a journalist- historian whose reporting on the Vietnam War won a Pulitzer Prize, died in a car crash. He was 73.
He was killed Monday when three vehicles collided in an intersection in Menlo Park, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. He was a passenger in a car driven by a journalism student that was broad-sided. Halberstam was wearing a seat belt, the San Jose Mercury News reported today, citing Harold Schapelhouman, chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District.
Halberstam, who was honored by the Denver Press Club in 2002 with the Damon Runyon Award given annually to the nation’s most influential journalist, chronicled the latter half of the 20th century, from darker moments, such as racism in the U.S. South during the civil-rights movement, to lighter fare, including lifelong friendships among aging baseball icons. He wrote 21 books over four decades after working for the New York Times.
“The world lost a wonderful man and a great journalist,” New York Times Co. Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said today at the company’s annual meeting in New York.
“David, you will be sorely missed.” Halberstam won the Pulitzer in 1964 for his coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times. Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press also won for his Vietnam reporting that year. Writing from the paper’s Saigon bureau, Halberstam filed stories that contradicted the official U.S. government stance that the war was being won.
‘Kept the Faith’ “He didn’t sit around and wait for communiqués,” said George Esper, a visiting professor of journalism at West Virginia University in Morgantown and a correspondent with the Associated Press for 42 years, including two stints in Vietnam, before retiring in 2000. “He went to the field to see for himself.
“He didn’t accept the word of generals and admirals. He stayed the course and kept the faith in the people’s right to know,” Esper said in a phone interview. “He was more honest with the American public than the government.” Halberstam didn’t shy away from challenging authority or picking fights with the powerful. Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist who gained fame while broadcasting for Cable News Network from Baghdad during the first Gulf War, became friends with Halberstam as a war correspondent in Vietnam.
Severe Beating Arnett said Halberstam saved him from a severe beating at the hands of the Saigon security police during a Buddhist demonstration against the government in 1963.
“Others will praise his consistent writing and interview skills, and I do too,” Arnett said in an e-mail from Shantou, China, where he is on a lecture tour. “But to me, it is the figure of David Halberstam towering over me and my bloodied face in Saigon and holding off attacking police. That is the image of him I will most remember.” In another incident, Halberstam and other journalists wanted a flight to cover a bad defeat by the South Vietnamese, so they called the commanding general at home. The next day U.S. officials gave a briefing where they scolded the journalists for disturbing the general.
“All of a sudden, David’s arms shot out,” said close friend Neil Sheehan, author of the Vietnam War history “A Bright Shining Lie.” “He said, ‘General, you don’t understand. We are not corporals, we don’t work for you. We will disturb the commanding general at home any time we need to do our job.”‘ “He had tremendous moral and physical courage, enormous energy,” Sheehan said. “He never showed fatigue, in field or in town, covering riots.” Early Years David Halberstam was born on April 10, 1934, in New York to a surgeon and teacher. He moved around frequently as a child, according to the Encyclopedia of World Biography.
He attended high school in Yonkers, New York, and graduated from Harvard University in 1955 with a concentration in history. At Harvard, he was editor of the Crimson, the university’s newspaper.
In 1957, Halberstam became a reporter on the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi.
He then joined the Nashville Tennessean, where he covered civil-rights demonstrations. His book “The Children” (1998), tapped those reportorial experiences, and chronicled the lives of student activists who took part in sit-ins.
One reviewer, Mary Carroll, said the book was “a sterling example of the genre with which Halberstam is most closely identified: collective biography.” Halberstam said his books “are about society, history and culture.” They also were exhaustively researched, crammed with anecdotes and written in a gripping narrative style.
‘Became an Expert’ His breakthrough book was “The Best and the Brightest” (1972), a profile of the Ivy League overachievers who advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and were architects of the unsuccessful U.S. policy in Vietnam.
In “The Powers That Be” (1979), Halberstam told the story of four U.S. media dynasties and the families that built them: William Paley and CBS, the Grahams and the Washington Post, the Chandlers and the Los Angeles Times, and Henry Luce and Time Inc.
“He became an expert on what he wrote about, and he was able to do this across a surprisingly wide spectrum of subjects,” said Ben Bagdikian, a former assistant managing editor at the Washington Post and Halberstam’s friend for more than 40 years.
‘Perfect Title’ Seymour Hersh, a writer at New Yorker magazine who also won a Pulitzer for Vietnam coverage, knew Halberstam for 38 years. He said Halberstam helped him name his book about Henry Kissinger.
“David had read a couple chapters in advance and called me up,” Hersh recalled in a phone interview. “He said, ‘I have the perfect title for you: “The Price of Power.” That was the name we used on the book. David was just one of those guys.” Halberstam’s work wasn’t confined to the world of government and politics. He wrote about baseball in “The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship” and “Summer of ’49,” and he profiled football coach Bill Belichick in “The Education of a Coach.” His approach to reporting and interviewing was “very different from the quick, Internet-age way of today,” said Hideko Takayama, who worked with Halberstam on “The Reckoning” (1986), a book about the auto industry in the U.S. and Japan.
“He used to tell me how important it is to continue meeting and talking with the people to have them remember, remember the kind of things they thought unimportant,” said Takayama, a reporter with Newsweek in Tokyo for 20 years, who now works for Bloomberg.
‘Work Harder’ Two days before his death, Halberstam gave a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, titled “Turning Journalism into History.” “Insofar as journalists do have an ability to change the course of governments and history, I think David was right up there,” Orville Schell, dean of the university’s Graduate School of Journalism, said in an interview.
Halberstam was on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, for a book he was writing about the 1958 National Football League championship game, according to the New York Times.
He is survived by his wife, Jean, and his daughter, Julia.
“He always said, ‘I’m not as talented as other people, so I have to work harder,”‘ Jean Halberstam said yesterday in a telephone interview from their home in New York.
