As a reporter I held him in awe. We all did. He was the standard bearer to which we all aspired.
Where’s the action? You’ll find David Halberstam there. What’s the truth? Read Halberstam’s article or book to find out.
Whether it was the early days of the civil rights movement, the collapse of the car industry, how the East Coast establishment determined foreign policy or the culture of the 1950s, Halberstam reported what Bill Moyers calls “the verifiable truth,” and he was often the first to do so.
Jon Meacham wrote today, “He changed history, for he helped change how America saw not only the war in Vietnam but the ways of Washington.”
Apparently Halberstam was in a car on the way to interview Y.A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, when his car was broadsided near the Dunbarton Bridge in the S.F. Bay Area. For once, the action literally came to him. It was the last way I’d see him dying.
There wasn’t a lazy bone in his body,” said Ted Kopple this morning in an NPR interview.
“He was just raw energy, you just saw the man in constant motion. I picture him at one or two in the morning looking over the last proofs of the paper before they went to print,” said Arthur J. Langguth, Jr., who was president of The Crimson when Halberstam was managing editor.
Speaking truth to power, Halberstam led that new breed of reporters in the 1960s to write as eyewitnesses. “He is likely to be most remembered for an unquenchable desire to describe what he saw in war,” writes Roy Peter Clark, Senior Scholar, Poynter Institute.
Clark reminds us of Halberstam’s view of that new role in a 1965 article in Commentary magazine:
"No one becomes a reporter to make friends, but neither is it pleasant in a situation like the war in Vietnam to find yourself completely at odds with the views of the highest officials of your country. The pessimism of the Saigon press corps was of the most reluctant kind: many of us came to love Vietnam, we saw our friends dying all around us, and we would have liked nothing better than to believe the war was going well and that it would eventually be won. But it was impossible for us to believe those things without denying the evidence of our own senses.... And so we had no alternative but to report the truth...."
His books often defined an era or the subject about which he was writing – and his book titles often labeled those topics. He was, for example, the first to label the Vietnam war as hopeless with his 1965 book (increasingly referred to these day when discussing Iraq) “The Making of a Quagmire.” I write this as soldiers are speaking up about the hopelessness of the war in Iraq, where one anonymous soldier who is interviewed refers to Halberstam as a source of inspiration. Bet it would make David grin, knowing that this soldier was probably not born when David was covering Vietnam.
"Because, in a world where too many of us use our mouths, David used his mind. In a world where fast and ignorant are celebrated, David was slow and cerebral," writes Mitch Albom.
