Like a Tahitian pearl diver, the world of entry level newspaper jobs was his oyster when David Halberstam graduated from Harvard in 1955 after spending his senior year as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson.

But unlike many of his peers who quickly grabbed offers in New York and Washington, David went South, Deep South, to the smallest paper in Mississippi. It was the kind of decision that always set him apart from other journalists.

We all eventually came to recognize it, even envy it, as a particular characteristic of David’s: he didn’t just crave to report stories he hungered to figure out where stories were going and what they were doing to us; where they were taking us. While his peers were laying groundwork for careers at important organizations where someday they might cover a big story, he determined how America confronted race – the biggest story of our generation. He wanted to dive as deeply into that story as anyone.

As it turned out the paper he chose in West Point, Mississippi, was too wed to the social structure as it was and didn’t want anyone muddying the waters. So he left there and hitch-hiked to Nashville, Tennessee where Coleman Harwell, the editor of The Tennessean, put him to work on the story he craved.

By the time I met him his name was being heard even in the hills of East Tennessee. At one point he so angered Governor Buford Ellington with stories about mistreatment of state prisoners, including removing religious literature from the cells of black inmates, that the governor threw a Bible at him at a news conference called specifically to denounce David.

I met David when we were both covering the 1960 Senate race pitting Sen. Estes Kefauver against the segregation’s hope – Andrew T. (Tip) Taylor – and we traveled together sharing expenses for several weeks. Although 18 months his senior and although I had grown up in the South and he was an outsider, David quickly became the mentor and I the student on matters of race. Certainly I knew about race. I had lived race. But David had studied race. He had spent years at Harvard trying to understand why race was, how it was, what it meant and, more importantly, where it was taking American society. As we drove the dusty roads of West Tennessee cotton country he gave me a tutorial on Gunner Myrdal’s watershed study of race in America.

On one of those days I recognized David’s unique grasp of a story I had lived. We were in Brownsville, a segregationist stronghold hard by the Mississippi border that Senator Kefauver was visiting against the strong objections of his advisors. He would get no votes in Brownsville they argued, why waste your time there? The argument made sense to me and I hardly took notes as we toured shops in the town square. Kefauver entered every shop despite the icy, sullen reception he received in each of them.

The visit got a brief mention in the story I filed that day. David turned his into a story of a man putting his career on the line. A metaphor of the courage of a public official facing the most important issue of the day and forcing reluctant citizens to confront it by confronting him. What I saw was expected, and so I was uninterested. David noticed that in each case Senator Kefauver had held out his hand to each shop owner and refused to leave until they grasped it. “I’m Senator Estes Kefauver, your Senator in Washington” he announced unnecessarily for they all knew who he was and they knew what he stood for, David had written. By making them confront him and acknowledge his position he was leaving no room for doubt about what was at stake in the election. David saw this episode as a profile in the kind of courage that would determine whether or not Tennesseans would be able to begin to move toward solving the dilemma of race.

Later when I went to work at The Tennessean after he had gone to The New York Times there were reminders of those few weeks we spent together everywhere. Developing a story on vote fraud in the 2^nd Ward in Nashville I found a story in the clips on the previous ward heeler – a man called Good Jelly Jones – that David had written. He had been working on the story at night while covering the Kefauver race. When I went to see Gene (Little Evil) Jacobs, Good Jelly’s successor, off to jail as a result of the stories we reported, he paid me a high compliment when he said, “You’ve sent me to jail but you never told no lies about me.”

But he paid me a higher compliment when he said “You’re just like that damned Slobberstream or whatever his name was.”

For a number of years after that David and I stayed in touch but only sporadically. We would meet from time to time and pick up a dialogue that we had begun in 1960 about current affairs and how American society was tending. It was never necessary to fill in gaps – we simply updated the characters and events and issues we discussed.

When I became curator of the Nieman Journalism Fellowships at Harvard in 1990 we reestablished a regular contact. I was finally able to help David share his passion for reporting. Every year for the next 10 years David spent hours with each Nieman class to share his insights into how to see where the events bound one to the other and where they were leading us as a society.

And in 1997 he joined the group Tom Rosenstiel and I convened at Harvard to discuss the state of contemporary journalism. David was there. His deep commitment and values helped shape the statement we issued and informed the work that led to the creation of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

Bill Kovach
April 24, 2007

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