David Halberstam

Author of 'The Best and the Brightest' Dies

David Halberstam, a dogged reporter who was regarded as among the leading journalists of his era and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the war in Vietnam was credited with helping change the nation's view of that conflict, died yesterday in California. He was 73.

Read More: Author Uncloaked Vietnam Blunders ( Post, April 24)

Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley was online Tuesday, April 24, at Noon ET to discuss the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's work and legacy.

A transcript follows.

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Jonathan Yardley: David Halberstam's sudden and shocking death was the second cruel reminder we've had in recent days -- the first being the murders at Virginia Tech -- of how evanescent human life really is. Twenty-four hours ago Dave was in California, probably having breakfast, getting ready to interview a famous old football player for a book he was researching. Now he's dead, and I'm sitting here trying to make sense of it.

David and I were friends for 45 years. We first met in early 1962. I was only a few months out of college, working in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times as intern to James Reston, the columnist and bureau chief. Dave had recently been hired by the Times. He was 6 years older than I and much further along in his career, but he treated me as an equal from the beginning and we remained friends ever since. I find it almost impossible to believe that I'll never see him again.

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Baltimore: I dreamed of Halberstam writing an updated version of THE POWERS THAT BE to illuminate the reality of today's media. What differences do you think he might have highlighted between the Chandler-Paley-Sultzberger era and today's media outlets?

Jonathan Yardley: I'm sure he was appalled, as I am, by the near-total disappearance of seriousness from the media and the rise of news as entertainment.

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Fairfax, Va.: Why is The Best and the Brightest considered so great?

Jonathan Yardley:"Great" is pretty strong for any work of journalism, but The Best and the Brightest opened the country's eyes to the machinations and delusions behind the American role in Vietnam, and did a great service in steering the nation away from reflexive support of that foolish and costly adventure.

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West Orange, N.J.: How on earth, in the mid 1950s, did Halberstam, a New Yorker out of Harvard, get a job with newspapers in Mississippi or Tennessee? Do any articles he wrote in that era survive? Did he cover civil rights stories and incur KKK threats, or stick to soft topics?

Jonathan Yardley: I have no idea -- he probably told me once, but I don't remember -- but once he got to the South he covered all the really hard stuff, and covered it very well.

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McLean, Va.: Jonathan:

I know much attention will be paid today to Halberstam's "serious" work on politics, government and the media, but virtually every book I've read of his was absolutely brilliant. This includes his sports books, starting with "The Breaks of the Game," probably the best book ever written about pro basketball. Another favorite was "The Fifties," a fascinating account of the many social, political, business and cultural changes took place in the supposedly sleepy 50's. Quite simply, no one's library is complete without a Halberstam collection. He will be greatly missed.

Jonathan Yardley: I agree completely. I vaguely recall telling Dave that I thought The Breaks of the Game was the best of all his books, and that pleased him a great deal.

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St. Simons Island, Ga. For those of my generation (age 55), Galbraith, Schlesinger and Halberstam were a huge influence. Economics, history, and current events (i.e., Viet Nam). That all three would die in so short a span makes the loss seem that much greater. Galbraith's optimism about using economics and economic policy to advance both the U.S. and third world countries and Schlesinger's optimism about history and the lessons to be learned from the study of it, contrast sharply with Halberstam's greatest achievement, "The Best and the Brightest." I cannot exagerate the influence of "The Best and the Brightest" when first published. It changed not only our view of Viet Nam but also of those who make policy, their skills, and their motives.

Jonathan Yardley: I must say that I shed few tears over Schlesinger, who ultimately was more interested in romancing the powerful and flitting through Society than in fulfilling his immense promise as a historian. I certainly agree about Galbraith. A framed letter from him is within arm's reach of me at this moment; he was a great man.

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Portland, Ore.: Although I enjoyed his books on other topics, it seems to me he will always be remembered as the Times reporter who blew the whistle on the Vietnam War.

How would you evaluate his non-Vietnam contributions?

I'd like to believe he made a lasting difference, but when I think of the Iraq War, the whole press corps bought the WMD argument and expressed little skepticism about reconstructing Iraqi society. Lessons forgotten?

Jonathan Yardley: As suggested above, I think his so-called "minor" books, most of them about sports, are exceptionally fine. I also liked The Powers That Be, but then like most journalists I have an apparently limitless appetite for gossip about.........other journalists.

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Detroit: As a Detroiter, I was particularly fond of "The Reckoning." Today I was thinking that Halberstam was a real renaissance man, confident in writing about history, politics, culture, sports, business. Can you talk a little about his writerly curiosity? What moved and interested him?

Jonathan Yardley:"Curiosity" is just the right word. All great reporters have it. David and J. Anthony Lukas were almost exact contemporaries and, in that bottomless curiosity, cut from the same cloth. They were at once good friends and intense rivals. I loved watching them toghether, because the tension was as thick as the affection. Dave gave a lovely little talk at the memorial service for Tony, who committed suicide ten years ago. Now they're both gone.

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Baltimore: Yes -- here's a quote I found last night -- I forget the venue but it was from an interview posted online:

"We're an entertainment society. We want to be entertained more than we want to think. It's a serious problem. We're the most powerful nation in the world, but our network broadcast is increasingly about celebrity, sex, and scandal. It's less about substance than it used to be. It's not as good as it should be. And it makes us a more volatile society." David Halberstam 6/04/2003

Jonathan Yardley: As the Brits say: Spot on.

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Washington, D.C.: What kind of a reporter was Halberstam? Did he have a lot of inside sources and did he schmooze with government leaders and other sorts in order to get the story?

Jonathan Yardley: No, David wasn't that kind of reporter. He often wrote about the powerful, but his real sympathies lay with ordinary people. He was very uncomfortable with bigfoot Washington journalism -- which tends to be the kind that you describe -- and I suspect he thought it was lazy and self-serving. I certainly do.

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Milwaukee, Wisc.: Thanks very much for hosting the chat. His passing is a great loss for journalism and America.

Jonathan Yardley: I'd say it's my pleasure, but this isn't a moment for pleasure. Yes, it's a real loss. But he did live for 73 years, and he did a great deal of very fine work. He was also, as his wife told one reporter last night, incredibly generous to younger journalists. I suspect he was influenced in that respect by James Reston, whose interest in young journalists -- young people, period -- was immense.

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Washington, D.C.: Do you think someone has written or will write a definitive work about Iraq and the war the way Halberstam did with Vietnam and The Best and the Brightest?

Jonathan Yardley: I have no idea. I have not read my colleague Tom Ricks's book "Fiasco," but it sounds to me as if he's done for this shabby foreign adventure what David did for that one. There have been a great many books about Iraq, and I gather that some of them are first-rate. Of course now everybody in journalism writes books. Four decades ago books like The Best and the Brightest were unusual; David started something.

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Bowie, Md.: I was a senior in college when I read "The Powers That Be," my first Halberstam book, and afterward I read anything he wrote as soon as it came out, regardless of topic. Seems to me he was the last of the real journalists who could write, and write well, about ... anything. Tom Wolfe seems less deep, and others seem aimed at a particular market. And at 73 still writing proves he wasn't in it for the money.

Jonathan Yardley: Your last remark is especially to the point. David kept on doing what he did because he loved it. One of the obituaries I read this morning quoted him as saying that he did journalism for the same reason the great Julius Irving did basketball: He loved doing it even when he was having a bad day.

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Bowie, Md.: Another thing about "Powers That Be" FWIW is that my then-girlfriend- now-wife would get angry becasue I read it at the beach and refsued to budge from my towel to swim or walk or anything else becasue the damned book was so engrossing.

Jonathan Yardley: But she married you anyway, huh? Lucky you.

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Portland, Ore.: I was in the audience when he spoke to the House Democratic Retreat -- nearly all House Democrats (and a few of us outsiders)gathered at the Greenbriar for a long weekend of seminars and relaxation. His book on the U.S.-Japanese automakers competition was new, and he spoke about the book and the forces at work illustrated by the book. He framed the issues in policy terms for this audience of House Members of Congress, but -- and here was what impressed me -- he did not lecture, he pushed no specific compelling arguments. Instead he spoke in a sardonic, almost laconic style. Many other speakers would have used this platform to lecture these powerful members of Congress, but he metely laid out the arguments. I hoped that the House Democrats would string together the points he made -- but they did not. Do you -- or do other readers -- ever recall him getting so worked up that he "lectured", rather than "taught" when he spoke? Mr Yardley, I am sorry for your personal loss -- he sounds like he was a great pal.

Jonathan Yardley: The last time I heard David talk was at the National Book Festival here in Washington a year or two ago. I can't remember what book he was talking about, but once he got wound up he couldn't -- or wouldn't -- stop. The next speaker was trembling with irritation and impatience, but David just kept on keeping on. It was immensely amusing.

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Washington, D.C.: What exactly was Halberstam's magic?

Why did his readers love him so?

And what was he better at: war? Or sports?

Jonathan Yardley: One of my pet theories is that readers have built-in BS detectors that enable them to recognize insincerity in writers. David was sincerity to the core. He believed in what he wrote, and that conviction conveyed itself to readers. That, I think, is the key.

I honestly think he was better at sports than anything else. He loved writing about it, but he had none of the arrested adolescence that afflicts so many professional sportwriters. He was a grownup writing about grownups.

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Washington, D.C.: We can only guess at this point, but what paralells would David have drawn between the Iraq war and the Vietnam conflict? Do you think he was ready to undertake another book about the similar "quagmire"?

Jonathan Yardley: I honestly don't know. But you don't have to be Dave Halberstam to see that the American role in both conflicts is characterized by arrogance, ignorance and self-delusion at the highest levels of government.

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St. Simons Island, Ga.: Halberstam popularized the term "hubris" in "The Best and the Brightest," a term he used to describe the architects of the Viet Nam war. How fitting is that term today for the architects of the fiasco in Iraq.

Jonathan Yardley: Exactly.

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Virginia: Was he more of a book writer than a journalist?

Jonathan Yardley: It's actually possible to be both at the same time, but there's no question that David was more comfortable working in the space that books afford. He did have a long-winded streak -- his friends often joked about it -- and some of those big fat books could have used a bit more trimming than they got, but his miniatures are lovely.

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Charlottesville, Va.: In reading the Halberstam coverage I notice he spent some time doing discussions on washingtonpost.com readers -- particularly when Mrs. Graham died and after the 9/11 attacks.

My favorite quote, from the 9/11 discussion:

"I think the American people will respond the way their government asks them to. I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people. One of the things about totalitarian groups -- and I would include the terrorists in this -- going back to Germany in 1941, Japan in 1941, the Soviets in the Cold War and Slobodan Milosevic, is the tendency to see democracies as being weak and decadent. They don't understand that we have other things on our agenda, and we didn't get to be this strong by being decadent. The people who built those buildings are not decadent. The people who built New York are not decadent. The people who go to work every day in this terrible time and work hard every day are not decadent. And the firemen who rushed into that building on Tuesday even as everyone else was fleeing are not decadent. I think they underestimate how strong this country is, but it takes a long time to gear that up."

Attacks on U.S. Soil ( Live Online, Sept. 124, 2001)

What an amazing guy.

Jonathan Yardley: Thanks very much. That's really very eloquent, especially for being written off the top of the head.

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New York: David Halberstam's untimely death is a blow to all who cherished his books on both sports and politics.

Perhpas the most moving book I ever read was his "The Children," a fantastic review of the Civil Rights movement. The writing is extraordinary, much like Halberstam's writing in "The Fifties." The book demonstrates how children can change the world and reminds us of all the good that was done in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. It is a must read for anybody who wants to understand the timeline from Nashville to Selma and the role played by Dr. King and a cast of thousands.

We can only hope that somebody will come along and carry the mantle.

Jonathan Yardley: You're absolutely right. Your comment goes to the point I made above, that David's real interest lay in ordinary people, the ones we don't read about in headlines.

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College Station, Tex.: No one has yet mentioned "The Making of A Quagmire," which pointed out the Vietnam war's futility at a point where most Americans either hadn't turned their attention to the war or embraced the simplistic domino theory. How is it that David could see the morass at a time that others were so myopic?

Jonathan Yardley: Yes. I remember that vividly. I can't remember whether Quagmire was David's first or second book -- he also wrote a novel when he was young -- but I remember reading it with great admiration. David made "quagmire" the universal buzz word for Vietnam.

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Virginia: Who was David's closet friend in Vietnam? Neil Sheehan or Peter Arnett?

Jonathan Yardley: I have no idea. He admired both of them and was very close to them. Don't forget Malcolm Browne.

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Baltimore: Do you have any idea how far along Mr. Halberstam was in his work on the '58 Colts-Giants game? I just hope it can be published, even in unfinished form, because that is a true matching of a magisterial writer with a magisterial subject. (Especially for Baltimoreans.)

Jonathan Yardley: I didn't know until this morning (I was outof the country from November until two weeks ago) that David was writing about that game. Yes, it's a terrific subject. Tom Callahan writes very well about it in the book he published last fall about John Unitas.

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Ibiza, Spain: Dr. Halberstam was a role model for Paul Wolfowitz. It`s too bad he didn`t stick to his principles.

Jonathan Yardley: That's news to me. I assume you mean Michael Halberstam. His death, too, was sudden and shocking. I only met him once or twice and never really talked to him, but people who knew him well described him as an extraordinary man.

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New York City: David was very talented, but he definitely had a liberal slant on his historical writings about the 50's and 60's. I have not heard about his focus (not bias, but focus) towards leftist interpretation of historical events in America in the 50's and 60's.

Jonathan Yardley: Oh, I think "leftist" is a little strong and a lot oversimplified. David believed in the most rights and opportunities for as many people as possible, and he hated foolish, wasteful wars. If that made him a leftist, then count me as one too.

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Washington, D.C.: Who is/was the conservative answer to the left's Halberstam?

Jonathan Yardley: See above.

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Virginia: Did he really wrote only one book on the military? The rest were cultural and economic.

Jonathan Yardley: Well, he wrote two books on Vietnam, and the military was a recurrent theme in much of his other work.

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Portland, Ore.: I loved "Once Upon A Distant War." Are there other good books about reporters at war or at work?

Jonathan Yardley: No book about reporters at war comes to mind, but Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus, about the press corps during the 1972 presidential campaign, is as good as they get. It's very smart and very, very funny.

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New York, N.Y.: In "The Fifties" D.H. gave short thrift to those investigating Soviet spies. Whereasa Sen. McCarthy became everyone's punching bag, there were serious breaches in national security by Soviet spies and sympathizers as we know now from the Venona cables and other former Soviet documents. Why was David seemingly blind to the real threat of communists in gov't like Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, etc?

Jonathan Yardley: I haven't read The Fifties and thus can't speak intelligently about the point you make. But it sounds to me as if you're grinding an ideological axe, and that's not what we're here for today.

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Bowie, Md.: So, Jonathan, who was that next speaker, trembling with impatience?

Jonathan Yardley: I honestly can't remember.

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Jonathan Yardley: Time's up. Thanks to all of you for joining me.

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