Halberstam 'Personified Passion for Reporting'

Hedrick Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and editor and Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent. He is a member of CCJ's Executive Board.

If telling truth to power and to the American public is the touchstone of journalistic independence and integrity, David Halberstam embodied that standard in living color. As a reporter and writer, he was tenacious, uncompromising, trenchant, a force to reckon with by those whom David once wryly called, in a book title, “The Powers That Be.”

In person, David was an imposing 6-4 - square-jawed, thunder-voiced and bristling with energy. He personified passion for reporting, the love of the chase, the insistence on being there to see, hear and record events for himself, the relentless drive for the all-too-often unpleasant truth.

For half a century Halberstam loped through America’s big stories – the challenging idealism of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, the demoralizing quagmire of war in Vietnam, the arrogant insularity of American political leaders seeking to impose their vision on the world-at-large and mechanistically measuring progress in body counts without understanding foreign cultures, and the corrupting danger of concentrated power in the media.

When I first met David in Nashville, Tenn., in 1960, he was reporting for The Tennessean, not too many years out of Harvard. I was with UPI and the two of us were covering the Negro sit-ins at drug counters and department stores in Nashville and the Freedom Riders who traveled through the Mid-South desegregating hotels and restaurants as they went.

The demonstrations cut against the grain of the prevailing attitudes in Tennessee at the time, which only served to motivate Halberstam all the more. David was all over the story, bursting with boyish reportorial zeal, like a team of six – arms, legs, notebook, hands, going in every direction – at times, smack against the lunch counter next to the demonstrators to catch the angry epithets of segregationists; at other times, removed at a distance, watching, gauging the opposing forces, assessing which way events were trending. For we knew then that we were witnessing the prelude to the grander assault on more rigid barriers of segregation in the Deep South.

A few years later, after reporting for The New York Times in the Congo, Halberstam went to Vietnam, which turned him brooding and combative.

At the time, America was gripped in pro-war sentiment and the Kennedy administration was confident that Americans could do what the French had failed to do – defeat the native Vietnamese nationalists, the Viet Minh in the North and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam.

Out in the Mekong River Delta, Halberstam talked with the young American Army captains and lieutenants advising the South Vietnamese Army. Unlike the generals in Saigon who told Washington policy-makers what they wanted to hear, these young American officers saw the American war effort going off track. They told Halberstam their story and he reported it, only to come under fire from the U.S. command in Saigon and Vietnam war hawks in the press corps, such as the veteran New York Herald Tribune reporter Marguerite Higgins.

Halberstam gruffly brushed off their criticism, cursed the Times foreign desk for pestering him with questions based on Higgins’ reports, but wore the criticism as a badge of honor and spur for him to dig deeper into the growing morass.

Halberstam’s coverage of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in protest against the Catholic-dominated regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem so angered Diem and his brother Nho Dinh Nhu, who ran the secret police, that friends feared for Halberstam’s life. For safety’s sake, he slept in different homes every night. The Times, worried for his life, prepared to pull Halberstam out of Vietnam. Since I had been covering the Vietnam policy story in Washington, I was tapped to succeed David in Saigon.

But then the White House intervened. Halberstam’s reporting had so angered President Kennedy and his brain trust of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that the President, meeting at the White House in the summer of 1963 with Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Washington Bureau Chief Scotty Reston, urged The Times to remove Halberstam from Vietnam.

That only caused The Times to resist. I remember Reston coming back from the meeting saying The Times obviously could not proceed with its own plans to end Halberstam’s Saigon assignment. It could not bow to a sitting President on what reporters the newspaper should assign to war coverage. So Halberstam was kept on in Vietnam for a few more months, and only removed in November 1963, shortly before President Kennedy was assassinated.

As I went to Saigon in his place, Halberstam came home to write The Making of a Quagmire, a book that helped awaken public opinion to realities on the ground in Vietnam. Several years later, Halberstam, who had turned full-time to book writing, delved deeply into the misguided strategy and decision-making in Washington in his brilliant book, The Best and the Brightest, a work worthy of re-examination today.

Over five decades, David Halberstam not only produced a string of important and probing books, but devoted himself to honoring other journalists of quality and integrity. He served for years on the selection committee for the John Chancellor Award, honoring such outstanding and previously under-recognized reporters as John Herbers and John Kifner of The New York Times and Paul Duke of PBS’s Washington Week in Review.

When J. Anthony Lukas, a friend and fellow Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter for The New York Times, died in 1997 before his last book, Big Trouble, could be published, David Halberstam generously took on a nationwide book tour on Lukas’ behalf. Halberstam was also one of the founding members of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

Hedrick Smith
April 24, 2007

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