Jewogle - David Halberstam

Biography:

David Halberstam (April 10, 1934 – April 23, 2007) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, business, media, American culture, and his later sports journalism.

Life and career:

Halberstam was of Eastern European-Jewish ancestry and after the family relocated numerous times, was raised in the Bronx, New York. Prior to that, the family had lived in Winsted, Connecticut (where he was a classmate of Ralph Nader). He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor of arts in 1955, and also served as managing editor of the University's daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. He started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, he covered the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement.

In the mid-1960s, Halberstam covered the Civil Rights Movement for The New York Times. In the spring of 1967, he traveled with Martin Luther King from New York City to Cleveland and then to Berkeley for a Harper's article "The Second Coming of Martin Luther King." While at the Times, he gathered material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. In 1963, he received a George Polk Award for his reporting at The New York Times, including his eyewitness account of the self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Ðức. At the age of 30, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war. He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War entitled In the Year of the Pig.

Halberstam next wrote about President John F. Kennedy's foreign policy decisions about the Vietnam War in The Best and the Brightest. Synthesizing material from dozens of books and many dozens of interviews, Halberstam's thesis was that those who crafted the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected and self-confident men in America—"the best and the brightest"—and yet those same men were unable to imagine and promote anything but a bloody and disastrous course in the Vietnam War.

After publication of The Best and the Brightest in 1972, Halberstam went to work on his next book, which became 1979's The Powers That Be, a book featuring profiles of media titans like William S. Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine and Phil Graham of The Washington Post.

In 1980 his brother, cardiologist Michael J. Halberstam, was murdered during a burglary. Halberstam never commented publicly on his brother's murder.

In 1991, Halberstam wrote The Next Century, in which he argued that, after the end of the Cold War, the United States was likely to fall behind economically to other countries such as Japan and Germany.

Later in his career, Halberstam turned to the subjects of sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at Bill Walton and the 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers basketball team; an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999 called Playing for Keeps; and on the baseball pennant race battle between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, called Summer of '49.

In 1997, Halberstam received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.

After publishing four books in the 1960s, including the novel "The Noblest Roman" as well as ""The Making of a Quagmire" and "The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy," Halberstam published three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He published four books in the 2000s and was en route to completing at least two others before his death. In the wake of the 9/11, Halberstam wrote a book about the attacks, Firehouse, which describes in detail 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.

Death:

Halberstam died April 23, 2007 in a traffic accident in Menlo Park, California near the Dumbarton Bridge. He was in town to give a talk at an event at UC Berkeley, and was on his way to Mountain View to interview Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle for a book about the 1958 NFL Championship. Halberstam's driver, a UC Berkeley Journalism School graduate student asked by the department to drive Halberstam to the interview, pleaded no contest to misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter charges in connection with the incident.

Criticism:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Korean War correspondent Marguerite Higgins was the most pro-Diem journalist in the Saigon press corps and she frequently clashed with her younger male colleagues such as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett and Halberstam. She derided them as "typewriter strategists" who were "seldom at the scenes of battle". She alleged that they had ulterior motives, claiming "Reporters here would like to see us lose the war to prove they're right."

Mark Moyar, an associate professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University and author of two revisionist histories of Vietnam, claimed in a National Review opinion piece that Halberstam, along with fellow Vietnam journalists Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow, helped to bring about the 1963 coup of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem by sending negative information on Diem to the U.S. government, in news articles and in private, because they decided Diem was unhelpful in the war effort. Moyar claims that much of this information was false or misleading. Historian Jeremy Kuzmarov disagrees, writing that Moyar's analysis underplays the fact that Diem was a corrupt, brutal and unpopular dictator, who tortured and executed opponents without trial. Kuzmarov says that while Moyar raises some valid criticisms about the methodologies of Halberstam and Sheehan, responsibility for the coup ultimately lies with Washington policymakers.

Newspaper editor Michael Young says Halberstam saw Vietnam as a moralistic tragedy, with America's pride deterministically bringing about its downfall. Young writes that Halberstam reduced everything to human will, turning his subjects into agents of broader historical forces and coming off like a Hollywood movie with a fated and formulaic climax. Young considers such portrayals of personalities to be both a gift and a flaw.

Bibliography:

(1961) The Noblest Roman. Houghton-Mifflin. ASIN: B0007DSNRM.
(1965) The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-555092-X.
(1967) One Very Hot Day. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. ASIN: B000HFUAT4.
(1968) The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy. Random House. ISBN 0-394-45025-6.
(1971) Ho. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-554223-4.
(1972) The Best and the Brightest. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-449-90870-4.
(1979) The Powers That Be. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06941-2.
(1981) The Breaks of the Game. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-29625-7.
(1985) The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-449-91003-2.
(1986) The Reckoning. Avon Books. ISBN 0-380-72147-3.
(1989) Summer of '49. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. ISBN 0-06-088426-6.
(1991) The Next Century. Random House. ISBN 0-517-09882-2.
(1993) The Fifties. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-449-90933-6.
(1994) October 1964. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-449-98367-6.
(1999) The Children. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-449-00439-2.
(1999) Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-0444-3.
(2001) War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. Scribner. ISBN 0-7432-2323-3.
(2002) Firehouse. ISBN 0-7868-8851-2.
(2003) The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship. Hyperion. ISBN 0-7868-8867-9.
(2005) The Education of a Coach. Hyperion. ISBN 1-4013-0879-1.
(2007) The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. Hyperion. ISBN 1401300529.