April 24, 2007
David Halberstam Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:05 AM EST I’m sure I join the other contributors and editors at American Heritage Magazine and AmericanHeritage.com in noting with sadness the passing of David Halberstam, who died yesterday at the age of 73. Halberstam, who wrote several fine features for American Heritage, was one of the most influential popular historians of his time. His works on the 1950s, baseball, the Vietnam War era, and the civil rights movement stand out for their crisp prose style, extensive research, and sheer ambition. A testament to his tireless work ethic, at the time of his death he was working on a new book about the 1958 championship football game between the Giants and the Colts. A native of New York City, Halberstam attended Harvard College, where he edited the student newspaper, and then built a distinguished career in journalism, covering the early civil rights movement for two Southern newspapers (the West Point Daily Times Leader, in Mississippi, and the Nashville Tennessean), and foreign affairs for The New York Times. It was his coverage of America’s involvement in Vietnam that ultimately won him a Pulitzer Prize. An early skeptic of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ policies in southeast Asia, Halberstam was the first to call the war a “quagmire.” He sounded an early warning that in the absence of real economic and governmental reform in South Vietnam, American military might would prove inadequate to the task. In 1972, as the ground war was winding down, he penned a widely influential book, The Best and the Brightest, which sought to explain how a group of presidential advisors who were arguably the most worldly and well-educated in American history could have led the country so tragically astray. By far my favorite of Halberstam’s books was The Fifties. Covering topics as far and wide as the Cold War, Playboy magazine, suburbanization, television, and Marilyn Monroe, Halberstam provided a great narrative sweep on what was, at the time, America’s most prosperous decade. He also advanced what was then a fresh argument. While most academic and popular historians widely regarded the fifties as a stale decade, Halberstam located tremendous innovation, social unrest, and political foment in the years between Harry Truman’s 1948 victory and John F. Kennedy’s ascent to power. He excerpted some of that work in American Heritage (unfortunately, it’s not available online). Six years ago I had the pleasure of meeting David Halberstam at a cocktail party in Providence, Rhode Island. He was gracious and engaging, mindful to ask me about my own research and writing, which was nowhere near as interesting as his own, and genuinely interested in how American history was being taught at Brown University. I stand about six-foot-one, so it’s rare that I find myself looking up at a conversation partner. But Halberstam was a tall man, easily six-four, and I had to stretch my neck to make eye contact. It’s a fitting metaphor. In life and in stature he was a giant, and while his writing will surely be missed, his influence will, I hope, endure.
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