At a rum-fueled lunch, Lodge and his high Brahmin wife, Emily, informed me that they had been influenced not by Harriman, who was at the time assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, but by a young newspaper reporter named David Halberstam. When the Lodges arrived in Saigon in the early summer of ‘63, they suspected that all the diplomats and generals in the American embassy were either in denial or deceiving themselves and their masters in Washington. The only person who told the truth about what was really going on in Saigon was the 29-year-old correspondent from the New York Times.
Halberstam, who died yesterday in a car crash in California in between lecturing journalism students and reporting for a new book, had a way of cutting to the truth—and letting you know about it. Tall, angular, deep-voiced, he sucked information and sometimes, it seemed, the oxygen out of every room he entered. He would not have hesitated to tell the new ambassador that the Diem regime was corrupt and the American effort in Vietnam was weak and had stalled. He routinely accused generals of lying. He was such a thorn in the side of the Kennedy administration that President Kennedy tried to get the newspaper to transfer Halberstam from Saigon. (The Times refused, and Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage in 1964.)
Halberstam went on to write a score of books, alternating between big subjects like the collapse of the American car industry (The Reckoning) and the rise of the mainstream media (The Powers That Be) and sporting events (The Summer of ‘64). His books had a Shakespearean sweep; they were full of drama and hubris and passion. And they had a way of boring in to discover deeper truths.
About five years ago, I was thinking about revisiting the subject explored by “The Best and the Brightest,” and looking again at how the foreign policy establishment had become drawn into the Vietnam quagmire. After all, I figured, after 30 years, new archives had opened, and the time had come for a fresh look. I went to ask Richard Holbrooke, who as a diplomat and policy maven has been a kind of heir to the Wise Men, to ask him what he thought. “Don’t bother,” said Holbrooke. “Halberstam said it all.” I went back and re-read “The Best and the Brightest.” The book was written based largely on Halberstam’s reporting and not much documentary evidence, but Holbrooke was right. Halberstam was a truth teller. His judgments could be harsh and a little melodramatic, but he had a way of getting to the truth and making people listen.
title: “Dickey Halberstam S Lessons About Quagmires” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “Carol Wilson”
In a way, the education of David Halberstam began in a hot courtroom in Sumner, Miss., where two white men were tried for the brutal murder of young Till, who had committed the sin of whistling at a white woman. Till’s open casket, and the photographs of his beaten, bloated body, captured the moral crisis of the segregated South. Halberstam was young himself, but he already demonstrated a gift for sensing the nuances of influence. Watching the national reporters roll into Sumner to cover the trial, Halberstam later wrote, he knew something was afoot. “The editors of the nation’s most important newspapers were men in their fifties, who by and large held traditional views of race but who, because of the Brown decision, were going to pay more attention to the race issue,” Halberstam wrote. “Their reporters were different. They were younger men in their thirties, often Southern by birth, more often than not men who had fought in World War II and who thought segregation odious. Moreover, they thought World War II was, among other things, about changing America and the South, where things like this could happen. They had long been ready to cover the South. Now they had their chance. The educational process had begun: the murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of murdering him became the first great media event of the civil-rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what happened.”
As it was in the beginning, so it was down the decades: Halberstam, who died on Monday in a car crash in northern California at age 73, was always present at the creation, reporting, watching, thinking, and writing about the unfolding drama of what Henry Luce called the American Century. The Harvard graduate who went from Cambridge to Mississippi to cover the great domestic story of the time became one of the earliest and most important journalists to chronicle the great foreign story of the age: Vietnam, where, in the pages of The New York Times, Halberstam insisted on reporting what he saw happening, not what the government said was happening. The difference was essential, even epochal, and Halberstam achieved something few journalists ever do. He changed history, for he helped change how America saw not only the war in Vietnam but the ways of Washington. It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that Halberstam’s reporting, and his epic book, The Best and the Brightest, were crucial elements in Americans’ growing, and justified, distrust of their government.
But Halberstam was no cynic; far from it. He loved the country and had high hopes for it-hopes that were unshaken and unshakeable from Vietnam to September 11. As a young reporter he grew restless at The Times, and struck out to write for Willie Morris’s Harper’s magazine and to “do books,” as he would say. His interests were rich and varied, ranging from the media establishment (“The Powers That Be”) to the American auto industry (“The Reckoning”) to baseball (“The Summer of ‘49”). He relished immersing himself in new worlds, to emerge from two or three years of deep reading and tireless reporting to produce big, often bold tales. To him, each book was a university education, and he tended to alternate between big books and smaller ones—though the latter were often smaller only in length, not in importance: his book on his local New York firehouse after 9/11 is a wonderful work.
Halberstam was a generous man, always kind to those coming along. He read manuscripts, encouraged writers to turn articles that he liked into books, cared deeply about education, about the disadvantaged, and about the life of his native city. Over drinks and at dinner, he would dispense avuncular counsel in a deep and resonant voice that, I think, put John Houseman and Charlton Heston to shame. Halberstam so adored his life with his wife, Jean, and his daughter, Julia, that a standard sermon to younger journalists in New York revolved around the wonders—even the necessity—of raising one’s family in the city. “It’s so important,” he would say, and he sounded so sure, so certain, so Godlike that you found yourself wondering how you could even have considered anything else, even if you never had.
A few years ago, less than a month after the attacks of September 11, he and I were together in Sewanee, Tenn., at The University of the South, where Halberstam was receiving an honorary degree. From his days in Mississippi (and later, in Nashville) he had always loved the South, and he savored audiences, especially audiences of young people. In that grim season of terror, he took a moment from his more formal remarks on the nature of the new war and said, “I would like to add a word for the students here. You are going to be fine.” His hope endured; his confidence in the country he loved and served so long with the power of his pen and the acuity of his vision was undiminished. His generation, he said, had overcome Pearl Harbor; the one coming up would survive and thrive in the face of a different global threat.
His was a hope born of experience. Back in the 50s, Halberstam had begun watching America, painfully but surely, cast off the burdens of segregation. Since then, from the American South to Southeast Asia, he bore witness to the conviction that for all our sins and shortcomings, we would, painfully but surely, move toward Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mountaintop. It is a mark of Halberstam’s greatness that his work has long helped us see how we might get there, and always will.
title: “Dickey Halberstam S Lessons About Quagmires” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Warren Johnson”
I suspect Halberstam never regarded the yarn as little more than a trifle, even by the standards of his sports books, let alone his brilliant examinations of war and power in this country. It apparently stemmed from his affection for Williams, an extraordinary character by any standards, and his pals, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr and Vince DiMaggio. Halberstam had interviewed Williams back in 1988 for his excellent “Summer of ‘49,” a chronicle of the down-to-the-wire pennant race between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees, lost in the final days by Boston. Since that book was, inevitably, Yankee-centric, some excellent Teddy Ballgame remembrances were left on the cutting-room floor.
“Teammates” remedied that. But the occasional great anecdote didn’t make for a great—or even very good—book. And while I cloaked my criticism in admiration for the author, it was hard to find much in the book to excite my easily excitable Boston-baseball passions. Now with the death of Halberstam in a traffic accident at age 73, I am left considering the strange irony that the only thing I ever wrote about this great reporter was essentially a pan.
It is a particularly strange irony, given that there was probably no reporter whose career I admired any more than his. It was the reporting of Halberstam and others from Vietnam in the ’60s that helped propel me away from a path to law school and into this strange business. And eventually his work probably had something to do with why I wound up covering small wars in strange, exotic places. I am not trying to suggest my career in any way rivaled Halberstam’s, just that there were some similar patterns.
We were both fascinated by sports. He wrote a half dozen sports books and was, at the time of his death, working on a book about the 1958 NFL Championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, a game still regarded by many as the best ever and what launched the NFL on its way to American sports supremacy. Halberstam’s books were, by and large, very good, and some of them were superb—most notably, “The Breaks of the Game,” about Bill Walton’s Portland Trailblazers, and “The Amateurs,” about four scullers and their Olympic dreams.
Halberstam said that his sports books were sort of his version of vacations. Still, he brought to those books the same fascinations that drove his reporting on the most serious issues of our time. He was intrigued with how you attain greatness—he wrote books about Michael Jordan and Bill Belichick—and how you exercise power within the framework of a team. And he was interested in where sports fit in the fabric of a community and a nation. “The Summer of ‘49” was as much about postwar America as it was about a pennant race and was a fitting prequel for his exhaustive “The Fifties” that was published four years later.
I am sure Halberstam didn’t lose a moment’s sleep over my review of “The Teammates.” And now the tributes are pouring in from the journalism and literary community, leaving no question about his standing at the pinnacle of his profession. So I guess then that this effort is mostly for me. I grew up with Ted Williams as my hero. But in his way, Halberstam was every bit as much of one for young reporters like me. I just want to take this last chance to try and even the score.
