David Halberstam

Journalist

• Born: April 10, 1934
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: April 23, 2007
• Place of death: Menlo Park, California

Halberstam was a globetrotting journalist whose reporting on the Vietnam War helped shape negative American popular opinion about the conflict and won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. His 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, blamed the American political elite for this unpopular war.

Early Life

David Halberstam (HAL-bur-stam) was in 1934 in were chosen. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe , who arrived in America around 1890. His father, Charles Halberstam, served as a combat medic in World War I and graduated from medical school afterward, setting up practice in New York City before becoming an Army surgeon. His mother, Blanche Levy, held a postgraduate degree in education from Boston University and worked as a schoolteacher.

When David Halberstam and his older brother Michael were boys, the Halberstams moved to Army bases all over the United States. Their homes ranged from El Paso, Texas, to Winsted, Connecticut, where Halberstam was a classmate of consumer advocate Ralph Nader. To fit in with the local boys, the brothers became tenacious fighters, brash and independent. In addition to getting good grades in school, they were involved heavily in team sports, such as football, basketball, and baseball. After World War II, the family moved to Yonkers in Westchester County, New York. Halberstam graduated from high school in 1951, one year after his father died in 1950.

Halberstam was admitted to Harvard, where, as a Jew, he felt accepted academically but not socially. He became managing editor of the university newspaper, The Crimson, and relished work with tight deadlines. In 1955, he earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism, then an exotic choice, while Michael studied medicine.

Attracted to the controversial, Halberstam covered the Civil Rights movement for a tiny Mississippi paper, The Daily Times Leader of West Point, for ten months in 1955 and 1956 before being fired for his progressive ideas. He got a job with The Nashville Tennessean in April, 1956. In relatively sophisticated Nashville, Halberstam spent four happy years at the newspaper he called his graduate school. In November, 1960, upon invitation by James Reston, the bureau chief, Halberstam joined the Washington, D.C., bureau of The New York Times.

Halberstam was bored in Washington and did poorly. From 1961 to 1962, Reston assigned him as foreign correspondent in the Congo, and Halberstam thrived. In September, 1962, Halberstam was assigned to Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam.

Life’s Work

Arriving in Saigon, Halberstam was eager to report on America’s support for President Ngo Dinh Diem fighting a bitter guerrilla war against Communists from North Vietnam. Halberstam accompanied U.S. troops on fifty combat missions. What he saw in the field starkly contrasted with the rosy versions of the conflict offered to the media by senior American officials. Halberstam was enraged with official lies, and his reporting became antagonistic.

In the aftermath of Diem’s clash with extreme Buddhists beginning on May 8, 1963, Halberstam became convinced that Diem had to be removed from office. Together with his reporter colleagues Stanley Karnow and Neil Sheehan, he wrote articles highlighting the problems of Diem’s regime. Their reporting became more urgent after the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc fatally set himself on fire in public protest on June 11, 1963. President John F. Kennedy asked Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, then publisher of The New York Times, to replace Halberstam in Saigon, but Sulzberger refused to remove Halberstam.

After Diem was killed in an American-approved coup on November 2, 1963, the war deteriorated. Halberstam left Saigon. In 1964, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his work in Vietnam.

During his next assignment, in Warsaw, Halberstam married Polish actor Elżbieta Czyżewska on June 13, 1965. He also published his first nonfiction book, The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era, in 1965. After an assignment in Paris in 1966, Halberstam angrily left The New York Times in 1967 for Harper’s magazine until 1971. Halberstam wrote two more nonfiction books before the great success of his 1972 best seller, The Best and the Brightest, which charged that elite American statesmen created a disaster in Vietnam.

In 1977, Halberstam and Czyżewska were divorced. In 1979, Halberstam’s The Powers That Be looked at the power of the media in American politics. On June 29, 1979, Halberstam married Jean Sandness Butler, who was born in 1947 and was a Lutheran. Their daughter Julia was born in 1980. Halberstam agreed that his fellow reporter A. J. “Jack” Langguth become Julia’s godfather in the Christian tradition.

In the 1980’s, Halberstam began writing sports books. The Breaks of the Game (1981) looked at professional basketball. The Amateurs (1985) concerned four American athletes’ quest for Olympic gold medals. In The Reckoning (1986), Halberstam looked at competition between Japanese and American car companies. Summer of ’49 (1989), Halberstam’s chronicle of the 1949 baseball pennant race, became a popular book. He continued to write, producing ten more books about sports or politics, his last being The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (2007).

With rare exceptions, Halberstam’s books did not mention his Jewish identity. However, as shown by the last call he made to his friend Jim Wooten, in private, Halberstam felt deeply Jewish American. In the call, he gently mocked Wooten for playing golf at a club where Jews still did not feel fully welcome and ended with greetings to the few Jews on these greens. On April 23, 2007, Halberstam died in a car accident, a broken rib puncturing his heart, in Menlo Park, California.

Significance

Halberstam established his reputation as a brilliant if controversial writer with his reporting from Saigon in 1962 and 1963. Marguerite Higgins, a fellow journalist there, charged Halberstam, Karnow, and Sheehan with deliberately undermining America’s war effort by focusing exclusively on the negative and refusing to see their manipulation by the extremist Buddhist monk Thich Tri Quang. Halberstam’s reporting indubitably helped shift the mood in Washington toward an acceptance, if not outright promotion, of the coup against Diem. After the coup things got much worse instead of better as hoped by Halberstam and others. Historian Mark Moyar even called the three writers the most harmful journalists in American history, which other historians consider an exaggeration.

After the success of The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam quickly became one of America’s most well-read nonfiction writers. He gained a large and loyal readership with his trademark focus on telling anecdote and detail, his dedication to progressive social values, and his tendency to personalize history.

Bibliography

Dygert, James H. The Investigative Journalist: Folk Heroes of a New Era. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. This older book is still valuable to illustrate original impact and popular appeal of journalists such as Halberstam. Places Halberstam in the context of post-Watergate American disillusionment with government.

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Revisionist history with extremely critical evaluation of Halberstam’s reporting from Vietnam. Author sees Halberstam as tendentious, often false and misleading, and damaging to American policy. Includes notes and index.

Prochnau, William W. Once upon a Distant War. New York: Times Books, 1995. Sympathetically chronicles how Halberstam and other journalists became infuriated by official lies in Vietnam and gradually turned from idealistic supporters to staunch opponents of America’s war effort. Great detail and attention to Halberstam’s Jewish heritage in sections devoted to him. Includes index.

Wooten, Jim. “The Halberstam You Didn’t Know.” Columbia Journalism Review 46, no. 2 (July/August, 2007): 16-20. Sympathetic review of Halberstam as private man and friend. Records Halberstam’s last phone call to the author on the day of his death, confirming Halberstam’s lifelong identification with his Jewish heritage.