David Halberstam is Gone
23 April 2007 4:39 pm by Taylor Marsh
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Halberstam was killed today
in a car crash. What a very mean month April
has been.
Here’s a link to a brief excerpt from one
of his very best books. He, too, was indeed one of our best and brightest war reporters in the age before terrorism struck.
In 1965, fresh from winning a Pulitzer for his stint in Saigon as a correspondent for the New York Times, the young David Halberstam published a book about the war in Vietnam. The Making of a Quagmire was an exceptional piece of reporting-vivid, concise, hard-hitting, and entirely without pretense. By contrasting developments in the villages and rice paddies far from Saigon with the illusions nursed by senior American officials back in the South Vietnamese capital, it told important truths about how the U.S. government was even then plunging heedlessly into a conflict that it fundamentally failed to understand.
Halberstam followed up this achievement with an even more spectacular success: In 1972 he published The Best and the Brightest, a huge bestseller, still in print nearly 30 years after it first appeared. Basing his work on extensive interviews, Halberstam offered-or purported to offer-the inside story of a vast tragedy in the making, the book’s very title capturing one of the war’s central ironies. The book itself was compulsively readable, its signature feature being a series of finely honed and devastating portraits of senior U.S. officials: Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Taylor, Westmoreland, and all the rest whose brilliant careers cracked up on the rocks of a misguided war.
Halberstam tangled with John F. Kennedy several times. In fact, Kennedy tried to talk the New York Times into pulling Halberstam from Vietnam, because his reporting was a bit too accurate for Kennedy’s comfort. It illustrates that the very best journalists seldom have a comfortable relationship with power. If one thing has changed since Halberstam’s golden days it is that journalists now vie for friendship and access over doing their job.
UPDATE (4.24.07): Glenn Greenwald has a terrific post up on Halberstam.
