David Halberstam

Halberstam grew up in Winsted, Connecticut, the son of an Army surgeon and a schoolteacher, in a Jewish family that later moved him to Yonkers, New York. He ran the Harvard Crimson as managing editor and graduated in 1955, then took the least glamorous job he could find: reporter at the Daily Times Leader, a small paper in West Point, Mississippi, where the executive editor also ran the linotype machine. He moved up to The Tennessean in Nashville and covered the civil rights movement from the ground, close enough to the sit-ins and Freedom Rides that local segregationists knew his name. By 1960 The New York Times had noticed him too.

The Times sent him to the Congo in 1961 and to Vietnam in 1962, where his dispatches on a war the government insisted was going well contradicted the official line so directly that the Kennedy administration lobbied the paper's publisher to have him reassigned. Halberstam stayed, and in 1964 shared the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The Best and the Brightest, his 1972 account of how brilliant men talked the country into Vietnam, became the standard text on the subject. The Powers That Be examined media power, The Children returned to the civil rights years he had covered as a reporter, and a run of sports books — Summer of '49, October 1964, Playing for Keeps — applied the same instincts to baseball and basketball. He was working on a book about the 1958 NFL championship game when he died.

His own reporting cost him a marriage before it cost him his life. He met the Polish film star Elzbieta Czyzewska while covering Warsaw for the Times in the mid-1960s, married her in 1965, and then published an article critical of the communist government sharp enough that Poland expelled him as persona non grata. Czyzewska followed him into American exile rather than stay behind, and lost the stardom she had built in Poland doing it, never finding an equivalent career in the country he brought her to. The marriage lasted twelve years. His habits did not soften after Vietnam either: colleagues described him as combative, certain of his own read on institutions, and unwilling to let officials define the terms of a story, a trait that made him plenty of enemies among the powerful men he covered.

He died on April 23, 2007, in a car outside Menlo Park, California, on his way to interview the former Giants quarterback Y. A. Tittle for the unfinished 1958 book, when the journalism student driving him turned illegally into oncoming traffic. The Coldest Winter, his account of the Korean War, was already at the printer and appeared posthumously later that year to strong reviews. Obituary writers across the political spectrum, including some he had sparred with for decades, credited him with proving that a young, unconnected reporter could out-report an entire government press operation — the same lesson newsrooms still invoke when they defend independent coverage of a war against official pushback.

David Halberstam's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Making of a Quagmire book
  His first book, on the early Vietnam War 1965
• The Best and the Brightest book
  The standard account of how the U.S. entered the Vietnam War 1972
• The Powers That Be book
  On the rise of American media power 1979
• The Children book
  On the Nashville sit-ins he had once covered as a young reporter 1998
• The Coldest Winter book
  On the Korean War, published after his death 2007

• 1955 aged ~21 Graduates from Harvard College, having run the Harvard Crimson
• 1960 aged ~26 Joins The Tennessean in Nashville and covers the civil rights movement
• 1961 aged ~27 The New York Times sends him to the Congo
• 1962 aged ~28 The Times reassigns him to Vietnam
• 1964 aged ~30 Shares the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting
• June 13, 1965 aged 31 Marries the Polish film star Elzbieta Czyzewska
• 1972 aged ~38 Publishes The Best and the Brightest
• April 23, 2007 aged 73 Dies in a car crash near Menlo Park, California

• Robert McNamara 1916–2009
  Secretary of Defense who applied systems analysis to the Pentagon and escalated the Vietnam War. subject of his best-known critique
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. administration sought his removal
• Walter Cronkite 1916–2009
  CBS Evening News anchor known as the most trusted man in America during a pivotal era of broadcast journalism. fellow Vietnam-era journalist
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. covered his campaigns as a young reporter