Dispatches from the Front

In Memory of David Halberstam -- Witness, Journalist, Historian

By Roger Morris

April 24, 2007

There
will be an outpouring of tributes to David Halberstam, the renowned
American writer who died at 73 Monday in an automobile accident near San Francisco. But no eulogy can match the sheer memorial of his work. Halberstam
was, in every sense, a complete journalist -- truth-teller as artist
-- and his legacy leaves a lasting chance of redemption for a media
whose decay his standard always silhouetted so starkly.

He will not be easy going, of course, for the new virtual readership of the twenty-first century. Halberstam did not write in blog-size sentences, books, histories, ideas. As witness and reporter, he was intent on tapestries, ironies, maddening ambiguities, the irreducible complexities otherwise known as life. His bewitching gift, at necessary length, was to make even that simple -- simply fascinating, moving, haunting.

I was in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, not far from some of the men he wrote about, when I first read pages of The Best and the Brightest. His inspiration has since been so powerful, his example
so emulated, if never quite equaled, that it seems hard now to recall
what a revolution, and revelation, he embodied in writing about power
and the powerful.

There is one of those inimitable Halberstam opening scenes. It’s
just after the 1960 election and former Secretary of Defense and
Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett, foreign policy establishment demigod, has come to John Kennedy’s graceful townhouse on old cobblestone N Street in Georgetown to tell the new President-elect who to put in his administration. The moment on the page reeks of innocence and promise, and unseen portent, as America did, as Halberstam the portraitist and landscape painter as reporter always seemed to capture. Lovett the worldly elder statesman guiding a callow
young politician in thrall to his World War II elders, the same at root
tragically unworldly Lovett who as a lean magnetic young Wall Street
financier in the 1930's regaled weekend guests at his shady Long Island estate with hilarious mimicry of the world’s funny people, the Russians and Asians and Arabs.

Intelligence
and status without sensibility, without authentic knowledge and
sophistication, Halberstam shows us again and again, are almost
invariably lethal in government as anywhere else. When Bob
Lovett is through with Kennedy, we have Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara,
a cast of men in similar molds, the Vietnam War, and ultimately the
fate of generations. No one had ever told it all so vividly and unmistakably as David Halberstam did -- and no one has since. Knowing some of the men, left with their policy, I sat in the White House reading the pages, too aware of how uniquely real it all was, and wept for my country.

It was hardly the first time Halberstam evoked a cry. He
had been a thorn to arrogant, overrated Harvard as student editor of
the Crimson in the 1950's, a fearless chronicler of official racism in
southern papers, and then, to the abhorrence of
the U.S. Government, the conscience of the New York Times and the
nation in his courageous coverage -- earning a Pulitzer Prize at 30 --
of the grand and petty folly of the war in Southeast Asia.

He went on after The Best and the Brightest
to write twenty-one books on themes as sweeping and penetrating -- the
media, the auto industry, civil rights, baseball, and not least his
2002 War in a Time of Peace, aptly depicting his nation’s continuing agony.

Through it all, he was the ultimate war correspondent, his dispatches from the front of a civilization reporting America at war with itself, with what it once was, had become, might yet be.

It was
somehow fitting that he died while on a trip to lecture journalism
students. The young Halberstam who never seemed to have enough time to
report his world had aged into his own elder statesman who always found time to pass on his art.

He had incomparable lore and trade craft to give the young. But
nothing he said could be more important than the gritty example of his
rigor and utter seriousness, the sheer intellectual respect he had for a profession of journalism that has so abandoned intellect. He understood above all the defining distinction in journalism between technique and art, method and substance. Drenching himself in the subject
of his next article, book, interview, he knew not only what questions
to ask, but how to judge the answers in every dimension. He knew that authentic journalism can make no compromise with knowledge. He
gave an interview not long before his death in which he said he was
honored to be considered "a historian" when he had thought of himself
as "only a journalist." David Halberstam's example as journalist did honor to every pursuit of the mind.

He
would be skeptical of the tributes and even iconography that will now
surround him, though more in nostalgic spirit than in the practicing
letter of a journalism that is losing, has lost, most of the very attributes -- knowledge, independence, sensibility -- he thought essential to reporters and editors no less than officials.

# # # #

________

"There are a few things I would like to pass on to you as I come near to the end of my career..."

Halberstam's words to the Columbia Journalism School graduates in 2005:

"One
of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better
you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less
popular you are likely to be. (So, if you seek popularity, this is
probably not the profession for you.) ...

One:
It's not about fame. By and large, the more famous you are, the less of
a journalist you are. Besides, fame does not last. At its best, it is
about being paid to learn. For fifty years, I have been paid to go out
and ask questions. What a great privilege to be a free reporter in a
free society, to be someone whose job is a search for knowledge. What a
rare chance to grow as a person …

I want
to leave you today with one bit of advice: never, never, never, let
them intimidate you. People are always going to try in all kinds of
ways. Sheriffs, generals, presidents of universities, presidents of
countries, secretaries of defense. Don't let them do it....

Probably
the moment I am proudest of in my career is this: By the fall of 1963,
I was one of a small group of reporters in Saigon -- we had enraged Washington and Saigon by filing pessimistic dispatches on the war. In particular, my young colleague, Neil Sheehan, and I were considered the enemy. The president of the United States, JFK, had already asked the publisher to pull me.

On day
that fall, there was a major battle in the Delta (the Americans were
not yet in a full combat role; they were in an advising and support
role). MACV -- the American military command -- tried to keep out all
reporters so they could control the information. Neil and I spent the
day pushing hard to get there -- calling everyone, including Ambassador
Henry Cabot Lodge and General Paul Harkins.

With no luck, of course.

In
those days, the military had a daily late afternoon briefing given by a
major or a Captain, called the Five O'clock Follies, because of the
generally low value of the information.

On
this particular day, the briefing was different, given not by a Major
but by a Major General, Dick Stilwell, the smoothest young general in Saigon.
It was in a different room and every general and every bird Colonel in
the country was there. Picture if you will rather small room, about the
size of a classroom, with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center
of the room. And in the back, and outside, some 40 military officers,
all of them big time brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.

General
Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began by
saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador
Lodge and other VIPs, and we were not to do it again.

Period.

And I
stood up, my heart beating wildly -- and told him that we were not his
corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP and
AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.

I said
that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150 American
soldiers had gone into battle, and the American people had a right to
know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to press to
go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins, but he
could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we were
being too aggressive, and were pushing much too hard to go into battle.
That was certainly his right.

So: If
someone tries, do me a favor and work just a little harder on your
story. Do two or three more interviews. Make your story a little
better."