Author Uncloaked Vietnam Blunders

"Meeting by meeting, memo by memo, power-play by power-play," Halberstam traced what was described years later in The Washington Post's Book World as "the making of the Vietnam quagmire."

An icon of U.S. journalism, Halberstam wrote before and after Vietnam about the major movements and figures of his times. As a young reporter, he covered upheaval in Africa and the early days of the civil rights movement in the South. He returned to that era in one of his many books, called "The Children."

He later attributed his willingness to confront the establishment and to ask uncomfortable questions to inspiration he drew from the African American schoolchildren and civil rights demonstrators who faced an angry establishment in the early 1960s. "It made me braver," he once said.

The demonstrations, he later told a public radio interviewer, came to be "my first big story."

Of those days, he said, "I couldn't wait to go to work," although "it was often fairly dangerous" and became even more dangerous. "I had an intuitive sense that I was watching history . . . something noble."

David Halberstam was born April 10, 1934, in New York City. His father was a surgeon and his mother, a teacher. He was reared on military posts while his father was in the Army, in Connecticut and in Yonkers, N.Y., just north of New York City.

He attended Harvard University, where he became managing editor of the student newspaper, the Crimson. His first newspaper job after graduation in 1955 was at the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Miss. Recognizing the growing civil rights movement as the major story of that period, he said he believed that Mississippi would be a good place to learn reporting.

After a year in West Point, he joined the Tennessean in Nashville, and in 1960 he went to the Washington bureau of the New York Times. Soon he was sent to the Congo, where he covered the secession of the Katanga province and was wounded by shrapnel. In a later book, he recalled those times as "exciting and dangerous."

Vietnam followed, in September 1962, and his coverage brought both denunciations and praise. In an incident embedded in journalism annals, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger visited the White House in October 1963, where he heard from Kennedy about Halberstam's work.

The president, as the story is told, indicated to the publisher that Halberstam was possibly too deeply involved in the story and asked whether a transfer was being contemplated. Sulzberger said the Times felt that Halberstam was doing all right.

Back in New York in 1964, Halberstam covered the city for the Times. His first Vietnam book, "The Making of a Quagmire," appeared in 1965. By then he was assigned to Poland. Later came Paris. In 1967, he left the Times to spread his journalistic wings.

A torrent of books ensued. "The Reckoning" dealt with the competition between Japanese and American carmakers. "The Powers That Be" studied the media, including The Washington Post. "The Breaks of the Game" was on professional basketball, and a pennant race between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees was chronicled in "The Summer of '49." Critics lauded those and others as rich in anecdote and personal glimpses, but also as accounts of significant social change.

There were many prizes and a sheaf of honorary degrees. Halberstam kept working, telling interviewers of his lifelong love for journalism and its ability to offer practitioners an education while paying them to get it.

A brother was killed in 1980 in Washington by a would-be burglar at his home. A 1965 marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Jean, and a daughter, Julia, both of New York.