Tips on Book Writing from David Halberstam

David Halberstam is a 1964 Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the war in Vietnam for the New York Times and best-selling author of The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, The Children and many other works of non-fiction.

The Best and the Brightest

How you develop a book? How you report a book? I think The Best and the Brightest started in 1969. I knew the war was not going to be won, and I wanted to know why it had happened. How could the Kennedy people, who were supposed to be the ablest people in this century to go into government, end up with the worst tragedy since the Civil War? It was a detective story. I started with a question. And then had to figure who could help answer it.

I remembered a guy I'd known in college who I'd given a briefing when he first went to Vietnam—I'd come back, he was on his way over—a guy named Daniel Ellsberg. I spent three days with him in California and came back to type my notes. I had 22 pages of single-spaced notes, which four years later I realized was a concentrate of the Pentagon Papers. This became a guideline for how to find people who are more amenable to talk, and then you work up—anti-hierarchically. Start at the bottom, almost like an artillery man, bracketing in. Getting closer. So that the higher the person, the better your question.

The Powers That Be

Then came The Powers That Be. As I thought about Watergate, it was clear the conflict was not between the Democrats and the Republicans, not between the President and the Congress, but between the media and the Presidency. How could that be and why? And it was obviously that television had fed both of them and made both more powerful. So how did that happen? That was the question I was trying to answer for myself.

The Reckoning

Then one day I was on a book tour and I kept noticing that Chrysler was almost gone, Ford was in trouble, all these great American companies were [gone]. And who was beating them? Japan, which I had last seen when we had, in Winston Churchill's phrase in 1945, “grounded to powder.” And the Japanese were taking cars, which was an American signature, and doing better at them. I didn't see it as a business story. I saw it as a social cultural story. How could this have happened? So, that question became The Reckoning. It was the hardest book I ever did. I think in many ways it's my best book, because I was like a team playing on an away game. It was alien—I was not comfortable with it. The first three years were almost re-tooling myself. And Japan is a very difficult country to do work in. It's hard for Japanese reporters, and it's very hard on American reporters.

But the question was, “How did this happen and what does it teach us about Japan? What does it teach us about ourselves?” It was a very big story.

In fact, I think the best reporting I've ever done in my life is in that book. It's the story of a strike at the Nissan plant in the early ‘50s and the company crushing it and installing a union made of management people. Which gives you a chance to understand how Japan works in modern society. It was very hard…there's a Japanese intellectual who when he refers to Japan in terms of communication, he says, “It is the black hole of the universe.” A very positive value is placed on the extracting of information and no value at all is placed on the giving of it.

I had problem because I was representing myself. And this is a very hierarchical society and very institutionally driven. They knew I'd once worked for the New York Times. But I wasn't working for the New York Times now and I kept saying to the people at Nissan, “Gentlemen, what I'm going to do is going to be more important to you then a Time magazine cover story, believe me.” There they were selling 300,000 cars a year in America, but their then public relations guy just wasn't going to do it.

Then I sort of learned. I found a great interpreter, and she found somebody who'd been in the strike. And I found something that was very interesting about Japan. Once someone sees you, you're passed along. “X sees you, oh, that's okay, I'll see you.” And suddenly people would say, “Oh, you've seen them, but you haven't seen me.” I broke the code, but it took a long time. It was the hardest work I've ever done in my life.

The Fifties

I thought, my daughter was about seven or eight years old, and I didn't want to be on the road, I wanted to be around for about five or six years while she was growing up. So I took a book that was done more out of libraries. I think it’s a mistake to deputize research in a work…I don't think you can deputize. When I go to a library, I like to read the stuff myself, because it triggers my brain, and I see things – “Oh!” It enhances. And I had fun doing it, and it kept me home which was very happy for me and for my family.

I tried to look at the things today that were changed that came out of the Fifties. Because I'm a child of the Fifties – I graduated from high school in ‘51, college in ‘55. Well, the sexual change, for example, is self-evident. The change in transportation. The Cold War, clearly. But also the coming of television…profound. The other thing you wanted to do to some degree was go against the contemporary nostalgia for the Fifties, the idea that is was this wonderful time. It was not a wonderful time – it was a very arid time. It was oppressive covertly and overtly to women, to gays. It was a time when the power of the state over the rights of the individual was inordinately imbalanced.

The Children

And the book on The Children I've always wanted to do. It's just always been there. I think one of the reasons the American economy is so dynamic is because the energy that got unlocked in the Sixties – unlocked by the changes in the Supreme Court, the rise in individual – I think that's across the board. I think today is infinitely more diverse and vital and exciting because of those days. I mean all these things are factoring, and I'm trying to get television changes in. The rising force of Martin King and the rising force of national television. And I'm sitting with Jack Chancellor [renowned TV journalist] and he starts telling me about being at Little Rock. I thought, “Oh, I've got it. Bingo.” John Chancellor telling the nation what he's seen.

And my friend Will Campbell, who is this very interesting guy that we've known forever, calls his bosses, to tell them what's happened when the nine kids have been beaten up, [and] the guy says, “Well, there's really no need to tell me, I've seen it.” And Will says, “Chancellor might as well be saying, ‘This is a sin, this is a sin, this is a sin.’” So the civil rights movement and television. So you get the idea and then how do you define it so a reader can see it, say, “Oh, yeah, I can see that marriage happening.”

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