DAVID HALBERSTAM, GOD LOVE HIM
FROM A FORMER STUDENT, STEPHEN JOHNS, WHO FEELS ABOUT HALBERSTAM THE WAY I DO. WE’VE LOST A GIANT TODAY, A MAN WHOSE REACH WAS AS LONG AND BROAD AS ANY JOURNALIST I HAVE READ. THERE WILL BE MANY MORE COMMENTS TO COME; HERE, SUFFICE IT TO SAY, EVERY BOOK HALBERSTAM WROTE HELPED ME AS A PROFESSOR AND TEACHER AND WRITER. THE MAN WAS AMAZING IN SO MANY WAYS. AND AS A PERSON HE KEPT HIMSELF A HUMBLE OBSERVER OF OUR TIMES…..YES, WE SHALL MISS HIM, TERRIBLY…………MORE TO COME……….
Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam killed in car crash
ESPN.com news services
SAN FRANCISCO — David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who chronicled the Washington press corps, the Vietnam War generation and a wide range of sports, was killed in a car crash Monday, a coroner said. He was 73.
Halberstam, who lived in New York and Nantucket, Mass., was a passenger in a car that was broadsided by another vehicle in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said. He said the cause of death had not been determined but appeared to be internal injuries.
The accident occurred around 10:30 a.m., and Halberstam was declared dead at the scene, Menlo Park Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman said.
The driver of the car carrying Halberstam and the person driving the car that crashed into his were injured.
After years of daily journalism, Halberstam turned his attention to America’s fascination with sports later in his career.
His classic baseball book, “Summer of ‘49,” was published in 1989 and chronicled the famed pennant race between the Red Sox and Yankees. The 1999 book “Playing for Keeps” looked at Michael Jordan phenomenon. His most recent work, 2001’s “The Education of a Coach” provides an inside look into Patriots coach Bill Belichick.
Halberstam took his perspective to the Internet in recent years, contributing to ESPN.com’s Page 2 from 2001-02. The prolific writer always seemed to have a project going, having just finished a book on the Korean War.
“There’s a great quote by Julius Irving that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them,’” Halberstam said in a March interview with NY1 News.
Halberstam perservered, writing 21 books in his career, despite personal tragedy. In 1980, Halberstam’s brother Michael, a cardiologist, was killed by an escaped convict in a robbery.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Halberstam said in the NY1 interview. “You have to get on, and you have to get on with life, and get on with the living.”
On Monday, Halberstam was being driven by a graduate journalism student from the University of California, Berkeley, which had hosted a speech by the author Saturday night about the craft of journalism and what it means to turn reporting into a work of history.
His wife, Jean Halberstam, said she would remember him most for his “unending, bottomless generosity to young journalists.”
“For someone who obviously was so competitive with himself, the generosity with other writers was incredible,” she said by telephone from their New York home.
Jean Halberstam said her husband was being driven to an interview he had scheduled with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle. Halberstam was working on a new book, “The Game,” about the 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, often called the greatest game ever played, she said.
Halberstam was born April 10, 1934, in New York City to a surgeon father and teacher mother. His father was in the military, and Halberstam moved around the country during his childhood, spending time in Texas, Minnesota and Connecticut.
Books by Halberstam
• The Noblest Roman (1961)
• The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert F. Kennedy (1965)
• The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy era (1965)
• One Very Hot Day (1967)
• Ho (1971)
• The Best and the Brightest (1972)
• The Powers That Be (1979)
• The Breaks of the Game (1981)
• The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal (1985)
• The Reckoning (1986)
• Summer of ‘49 (1989)
• The Next Century (1991)
• The Fifties (1993)
• October 1964 (1994)
• The Children (1999)
• Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (1999)
• War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (2001)
• Firehouse (2002)
• The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship (2003)
• Bill Belichick: The Education of a Coach (2005)
• The Coldest Winter (due in fall 2007)
Halberstam attended Harvard University, where he was managing editor of the Harvard Crimson newspaper.
After graduating in 1955, he launched his career at the Daily Times Leader, a small paper in West Point, Miss. He went on to The Tennessean, in Nashville, where he covered the civil rights struggle, and then The New York Times, which sent him to Vietnam in 1962 to cover the growing crisis there.
In 1964, at age 30, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam.
He later said he initially supported the U.S. action there but became disillusioned. That was apparent in Halberstam’s 1972 best-seller, “The Best and the Brightest,” a critical account of U.S. involvement in the region.
He quit daily journalism in 1967 and wrote 21 books covering such topics as Vietnam, civil rights, the auto industry and sports. His 2002 best-seller, “War in a Time of Peace,” was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.
Speaking to a journalism conference last year in Tennessee, he said government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminded him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.
“The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn’t salute or play the game,” he said. “And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around, and they’ve used up their credibility.”
As word of Halberstam’s death spread through the news industry, tributes and remembrances poured in.
“He was a brilliant journalist who set the standard during the war in Vietnam for courageous and accurate reporting,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a Vietnam veteran who knew Halberstam from Nantucket, where both had vacation homes. “He was wonderful company, and I always learned something when I talked with him. I’m very sad to hear we’ve lost him.”
George Esper spent 10 years as Saigon bureau chief for The Associated Press.
“The thing about David Halberstam was that he stayed the course and he kept the faith in the belief in the people’s right to know,” Esper said “In the end, and I think we can all be very proud of this, he was proven right. The bottom line was that David was more honest with the American public than their own government.”
Author Gay Talese, who was at the Halberstams’ home Monday night, said he had known Halberstam since the early 1960s, was best man at his wedding and shared Thanksgiving dinner in Paris last year.
“He was a dear friend,” Talese said.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
UPDATE FROM SAN MATEO COUNTY TIMES, MY HOMETOWN PAPER
UPDATE: Author David Halberstam killed in Menlo Park crash
By Connie Skipitares and S.L. Wykes - MEDIANEWS GROUP
Article Launched: 04/23/2007 03:59:47 PM PDT
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author David Halberstam was killed in a three-car accident this morning in Menlo Park near the Dumbarton Bridge, the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office announced.
Halberstam, author of 15 bestsellers, died at the scene after the car in which he was a front-seat passenger was broadsided by another vehicle. The coroner’s office said he died of massive internal injuries.
Halberstam, 73, was a passenger in a red Toyota Camry driven by UC-Berkeley student Kevin Jones. There were no other passengers in the vehicle.
According to Harold Schappelhouman, chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, the car was apparently struck at a high rate of speed by a green late-model Infiniti, with Halberstam’s side of the car bearing the brunt of the hit. Jones was attempting to make a left-hand turn at the intersection of Bayfront Expressway and Willow Road when his car was broadsided.
The impact of the crash forced the two cars into a third vehicle.
The fire chief, who assisted at the scene, said the force of the crash caused a 2-foot indentation on Halberstam’s side of the car, pinning his legs. As firefighters tried to free him, the car’s engine began to smoke, then caught fire.
Rescuers extricated Halberstam, who was wearing a seat belt, then tried to rescusitate him, but they could not find a pulse, Schappelhouman said.
Jones was able to exit the driver’s side of the car, the chief said. Jones and the driver of one of the
cars were taken by ambulance to Stanford Hospital. Both drivers are in good condition, said Nicole Acker, spokeswoman for the Menlo Park Police Department. The third driver was not injured.
Acker would not release further details of the accident. She said it has not been determined if any of the drivers will be cited.
Halberstam had spoken Saturday night at UC-Berkeley on “Turning Journalism into History.”
Orville Schell, the dean of Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism, said in an e-mail this afternoon that Halberstam was on his way to an interview for his next book, about the Korean War, at the time of the accident.
“I have spoken with David’s wife in New York City, extended the condolences of the whole school and have offered to do everything that we can in this difficult time for her and their family,” Schell said in his e-mail.
Schell said he told Halberstam’s wife that he “had given a truly inspired talk here at Berkeley.”
In an interview, Schell said that after the Berkeley speech, he, his wife, Liu Baifang; “New Yorker” staff writer Mark Danner; and NPR documentarian Sandy Tolan, joined Halberstam at Chez Panisse, where the five closed down the restaurant discussing the similarities between the Vietnam War and the current quagmire in Iraq. “No one wanted to leave,” Schell recalled late this afternoon. `It was kind of like the last supper.”
When asked how he felt about Halberstam’s sudden death, Schell replied, “What can one say? The fragility of life sometimes just intrudes with a kind of savageness that we normally don’t pay much attention to.”
A first-year graduate student, Kevin Jones, was in the car with Halberstam and sustained a punctured lung in the accident and was taken to the Stanford Medical Center, Schell said.
Jones is believed to have been the driver.
Halberstam graduated from Harvard University, where he excelled as editor of the school newspaper, the Crimsom. But in a 1993 interview with the Mercury News, he admitted he didn’t do nearly as well in the classroom.
“I was a terrible student,” Halberstam said to former Mercury News columnist Murry Frymer. “Sometimes when I talk to students now, I ask, `Who here is in the bottom third of the class?’ When they raise their hands, I say, `Well, you are being addressed by another one.’”
Halberstam began his journalism career at the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Miss., at a time when race was the major story in the South. His first employer was “the smallest daily in Mississippi” at the time, with a circulation of 4,000. He was a one-person reporting staff for an editor who didn’t like the well-bred Jewish kid from Harvard, according to the Frymer story.
“But I was the most productive reporter he had ever had. Still, after I wrote a piece for the (now-defunct) Reporter magazine on the civil rights sit-ins in Yazoo City, instead of praise, I got fired. He told me, `It’s time for you to go. Go spread your wings somewhere else.’”
Halberstam moved to the Nashville Tennessean and then the New York Times in 1960. Within three years, Halberstam was reporting on the Vietnam War. His reporting on the war angered President Kennedy, who asked the New York Times to transfer him to another bureau. Halberstam would win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Vietnam.
Halberstam also covered Poland, where he was expelled after problems with censorship in the communist country. After six years at the Times, Halberstam said he felt stifled.
But he embarked as an equally distinguished career as an author. Halberstam wrote 15 bestsellers, including “The Best and the Brightest” on the Vietnam War, “Summer of `49″ on the 1949 pennant race between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Box and his latest book, “The Education of a Coach” on New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.
His next book “The Coldest Winter” was to be an account of a battle of the Korean War.
Halberstam lived in New York next a fire station. He wrote another bestseller, “Firehouse,” on that local fire station, which lost 12 men in the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.
In his 1993 interview with the Mercury News, Halberstam expressed his worries about journalism.
“The public perceives us as being too powerful and too arrogant. We give a jarring perception of reality to people,” Halberstam said.
“I think the press is more predatory now, maybe because we have gone into celebrity journalism in a big way. That leads to more gossip and a press corps that is more interested in extraneous things, maybe a disproportion of coverage of things that are titillating.”
But Halberstam had no complaints about his own career.
“It’s been a wonderful life,” he said. “Actually, when I think about my career I am sometimes stunned. I’m stunned by the richness of it. It gave me all the things I ever wanted. I loved being a reporter.”
San Mateo County Times reporter Michael Manekin contributed to this report. Contact Connie Skipitares at cskipitares@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5647.
UPDATE 24 APRIL 2007
DAVID HALBERSTAM: 1934-2007
Car crash ends award-winning writer’s life
Oscar Villalon, Chronicle Book Editor
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
One of the greatest careers in American journalism — full of professional accolades and best-selling success — came to an abrupt end Monday when an auto crash claimed the life of author David Halberstam, 73.
The man who wrote the book “The Best and the Brightest” was only days before, in an appearance in Berkeley, radiating the vitality and the insight that made him an icon for journalists and historians alike, say people who saw him.
Appearing as the keynote speaker at a UC Berkeley event on how journalists can make the transition to becoming historians, Halberstam, according to witnesses, spoke on Saturday about how he had just finished his 21st book, “The Coldest Winter,” a history of the Korean War. Not only that, but he had signed a contract for two more books.
“I think he was a model for us all,” said award-winning historian Adam Hochschild. By “all,” he said, he meant “people who are trying to do serious journalism about things that matter.
“I know for me he was significant because of the way he bridged the worlds of newspapers and books” and how he sought “continuity between trying to tell the truth in both realms,” Hochschild said.
Halberstam’s long career as a writer shuttling between both forms announced itself in 1964, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Vietnam War. At Berkeley over the weekend, he talked about how after receiving the prize he still felt he had not uncovered the answer for how the U.S. got mired in the war. He would resign from the New York Times to chase the answer and the book resulting from his reporting, “The Best and the Brightest” (1972), would become the first of many well-received works.
“The amazing thing was how much he realized he was writing the same story and how it all interlocked,” said Jason Roberts, the author of “A Sense of the World,” a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Book Award, and one of about 200 people in the audience Saturday night. In 1979, he explored the relationship between the press and the presidency in “The Powers that Be.”
His other books looked at the era of TV (”The Fifties”), the young people of the civil rights movement (”The Children”), and in 2001 his book “War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals” looked at how the Vietnam War affected modern U.S. foreign policy. It was a runner-up for the Pulitzer.
Halberstam, however, also was known for what was lighter fare in topic, though just as carefully reported and written as his other titles: his sports books. In “October 1964,” he wrote about the World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals, and in “Summer of ‘49″ he wrote about the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. He also wrote about rowers (”The Amateurs”), basketball (”The Breaks of the Game” and “Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made”), and most recently, football (”The Education of a Coach,” about the New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.)
According to Jean Halberstam, his wife, he was being driven to an interview with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle when the accident occurred. Halberstam was working on a new book, “The Game,” about the 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, often called the greatest game ever played, she said.
“That says a great deal about the great zest and energy — and hard work and discipline — he brought to a life of writing,” Hochschild said.
“He started out writing journalism that was barely history to going to where he was writing about what was history,” Roberts said.
“Here was someone who forged a synthesis of the two disciplines. He could write with the same degree of insight and dimensionality about immediate things” — such as his book “Firehouse,” about a group of firefighters and 9/11 — “and then take the same techniques and write about older topics,” such as his book on the Korean War, his last, and according to Halberstam that night, his best yet.
On Saturday, Halberstam talked about the importance of craft, advising the audience at one point that if they wanted to learn storytelling, they should read mysteries, where it was paramount to build suspense and keep the reader interested. And he pointed out what were to him obvious patterns between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq.
“I thought he gave a very brilliant talk on Saturday night,” Hochschild said, “where what interested me was he was talking about not just journalism but the history the U.S. is going through.”
He also noted that the media, especially newspapers, were in a turbulent and transitional period because of economic and technological changes, and that the media was struggling to find its place in the future. But he said he had great faith in young people and their innate curiosity and idealism, and in their thirst for information about how the world works.
“I came home that night,” Roberts said, “and was so excited by his address that I woke up my wife. Sometimes the writing of history is seen as a retirement for cutting-edge journalists, but (Halberstam) was writing cutting-edge history. He was simultaneously a journalist and historian. That is very, very rare.”
So was Halberstam, the man. Though “he was the premier journalist of his generation,” said Anthony Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who also worked at the New York Times, he was nonetheless “a kind, funny, generous human being. I never saw him do a mean thing. He had a core integrity that gave him weight, whether he was writing about sports or Vietnam.”