David Halberstam

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David Halberstam (April 10, 1934 – April 23, 2007) was an American journalist and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, and later, sports journalism.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964.

Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007, while doing research for a book.

Early life and education

Halberstam was born in New York City, the son of Blanche (Levy) and Charles A. Halberstam, schoolteacher and Army surgeon. His family was Jewish. He was raised in Winsted, Connecticut, where he was a classmate of Ralph Nader. He moved to Yonkers, New York, and graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1951. In 1955 he graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. degree after serving as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson. Halberstam had a rebellious streak and as editor of the Harvard Crimson engaged in a competition to see which columnist could most offend readers.

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Career

Halberstam's journalism career began with the Daily News Leader in West Point, Mississippi, Mississippi's smallest daily newspaper. In Nashville, he covered the inception of the Civil Rights Movement for The Tennessean. Halberstam, according to John Lewis, was the only journalist in Nashville to cover the Nashville sit-ins, which Halberstam referred to in his 1998 book The Children. Halberstam's fiery, rebellious streak began when covering the civil rights movement first emerged as he protested against the government's lies, portraying the civil rights protesters as violent and risky.

In August 1961, the New York Times sent Halberstam to Congo to report on the Congo's conflict. Initially eager to cover the events in the region, over time, he became more jaded about the demanding working conditions and the difficulty in treating Congolese officials' lack of transparency. For The New York Times, he jumped at the chance to go to Vietnam to cover the Vietnam War in July 1962.

Halberstam arrived in Vietnam in the middle of 1962. He was a tall and well-built man with a strong sense of self-confidence, and the American embassy accepted him at first. However, Halberstam was susceptible to fits of rage when confronted with lies and soon came into conflict with American officials. Halberstam fell into a rage when he was told to announce the operation as a triumph by American pilots landing a battalion of South Vietnamese infantry to assault a Viet Cong base while excluding the media. Halberstam, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, wrote about the reasons for the media blackout in a letter sent to Frederick Nolting, the American ambassador to South Vietnam: "The reason given is safety." This is, of course, ignorant, naive, and even insulting to every American newspaperman's patriotism and intelligence, as well as every American newspaper represented here." Halberstam argued that the operation might not have been the success that Harkins had predicted as the Viet Cong had seen the helicopters arriving and then retreated as guerrillas do when confronted with greater power. "You can bet the V.C. I knew what was going on. You can bet that Hanoi knew what was going on. Only American journalists and American readers were kept informed."

Halberstam, as well as colleague Neil Sheehan of UPI and Malcolm Brown of the AP, challenged the upbeat reporting of the United States mission in South Vietnam with the support of military sources such as John Paul Vann, an active service officer in Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). At the first big battle of the Vietnam War known as the Battle of Ap Bac, they announced the defeat of government troops at the first big battle of the Vietnam War. President John F. Kennedy attempted to convince Halberstam to be replaced by a more impartial journalist. The Times denied. Like several other US journalists covering Vietnam, he considered information from LIFE magazine reporter Phuân Xuân, who was later identified as an intelligence agent for the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.

Halberstam and Neil Sheehan debunked the belief by the Divy regime that the Army of Vietnam regular forces perpetrated the violent attacks on Buddhist temples, as the American authorities suspected, but that the Special Forces, loyal to Di'm's brother and strategist Nhu, did so to arrest the army generals. He was also involved in a brawl with Nhu's clandestine police after they punched fellow journalist Peter Arnett while the news men were covering a Buddhist rally. Halberstam rushed to his rescue after seeing Arnett lying on the ground being punched and kicked by policemen: "Go back, get back your sons of bitches, or I'll beat the shit out of you!" says the screamer. The policemen did not know him as Halberstam spoke in English, but the sight of him running at them, red-faced and fright, was enough to cause them to run away.

Halberstam's reporting sparked a contest between journalists Marguerite Higgins, Joseph Alsop, and Henry Luce, who all favoured the Diem regime. All three of them were strongly committed to the Kuomintang regime and believed that the only reason the Kuomintang lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949 was because a select number of American officials and journalists had chosen to "betray" Chiang Kai-shek, who otherwise would have deposed the Communists. The "China Lobby" tended to accept Diem for the same reasons that they approved of Chiang, seeing both as pro-Western, modernizing Christian leaders who made their respective countries into models of the United States. "Chinese" portrayed Chiang as China's Christian savior and as someone who would likely convert the majority of the Chinese to Christianity, and the Vietnamese savior, who would convert the Vietnamese to Christianity in the same manner as the Vietnamese convertion. Both Higgins and Luce had been born in China to Protestant missionary parents and were attracted to the prospect of converting all of the Chinese to Christianity for a single day; presumably, the Christian Chiang's demise in 1949 brought them great resentment. Halberstam's critique of Diem sounded very similar to American journalists' criticism of Chiang in the 1940s, and for many of the "China Lobby" members, South Vietnam served as a sort of consolation prize for the "loss of China" in 1949. The prospect of "losing" South Vietnam, according to the 'China Lobby's, would bring more salt to their wounds, contributing to their tumultuous attacks on Halberstam.

Higgins was briefed by Marine General Victor "Brute" Krulak about what line she was going to take before heading to South Vietnam. "Reporters here want to see us lose the war to show that they're correct," Higgins said in her first column from Saigon. "I told Halberstam that I should resign, repeat resign, and I mean it." Halberstam's reaction to Alsop's friendship with the Kennedy brothers was more concerning to him. Alsop's columns referred to a young reporter from The New York Times who had never reported the good news from "Vietnam's conflict front" but "defeatist" who never mentioned the good news from "Vietnam's combat front." Halberstam dismissed Alsop's comment on the "fighting front" as indicating ignorance of someone who did not know guerrilla warfare, where there was no "front" in the sense that Alsop had used the word.

Halberstam travelled to North Vietnam for the first time. Halberstam asked Mieczysaw Maneli, the Polish Commissioner to the International Control Commission, if he'd be able to arrange a trip to North Vietnam. However, Maneli had to remind him that Premier Ph.M.'s call was that "We are not concerned with raising the reputation of American journalists." Maneli was suspicious of the fact that refusing Halberstam admission to North Vietnam was motivated by the North Vietnamese's suspicion that he might be an American spy.

In 1963, Halberstam received the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, as well as his reporting for The New York Times, which included his eyewitness account of the 'immolation of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thch Quang c.

Halberstam left Vietnam at the age of 30, and that year was given the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In the Year of the Pig, he is interviewed in a 1968 documentary film about the Vietnam War.

Halberstam for The New York Times covered the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s. He was sent to Poland, where he quickly became "an attraction from behind the Iron Curtain" to Warsaw's cultural boheme. The result of this fascination was a 12-year marriage to Elbieta Czyewska, one of the most well-known young actresses of the time, on June 13, 1965.

He was initially loved by the communist regime but was barred from the country two years later for releasing an article in The New York Times criticizing the Polish government. Czyewska followed him, becoming an outcast herself; that change ended her career in a world where she was adored by millions. Halberstam travelled from New York City to Cleveland and then to Berkeley, California, for a Harper's story "Martin Luther King Jr.'s Second Coming." When at the Times, he assembled information for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy period (which spawned the Quagmire theory).

In In The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam followed President John F. Kennedy's international-policy remark on the Vietnam War. Halberstam began to work on his next book, The Powers That Be, which was released in 1979 and featuring profiles of media titans including William S. Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, and Washington Post correspondent Phil Graham.

Michael J. Halberstam, a cardiologist and prolific burglar, was shot and killed during a home invasion by escaped convict and prolific burglar Bernard C. Welch Jr.'s only public comment about his brother's murder came when he and Michael's widow chastised Life magazine, which later published monthly for $9,000 to pose in jail for color photographs that appeared on inside pages of Life's February 1981 editions.

Halberstam wrote The Next Century in 1991, in which he argued that after the Cold War's end, the United States is likely to fall behind economically to other nations such as Japan and Germany.

Halberstam's career continued in sports; The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at Bill Walton's 1979-80 Boston Red Sox's baseball team; and The Education of a Coach, an outstanding book about New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, focusing on the 1940 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals; The protagonists and the times they lived in inform the writing, as well as the games themselves.

Halberstam's image depicted the 1949 Yankees and Red Sox as representatives of a nobler period, when blue-collar athletes struggled to advance and enter the middle class rather than making millions and defying their owners and reporting back to the media. Halberstam earned the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award in 1997 as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.

He wrote three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s, including The Noblest Roman, The Making of a Quagmire, and Robert Kennedy's Unfinished Odyssey. In the 2000s, he wrote four more books and was consulting on at least two others at the time of his death.

In the aftermath of 9/11 Halberstam's book, Firehouse in New York City, chronicles the lives of the men from 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.

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Awards and honors

• 2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Distinguished Journalism
• 1994: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Neil Sheehan
• 1964: Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, Malcolm W. Browne and Halberstam