Halberstam: the Best and the Brightest

By DOLPH HONICKER

David Halberstam, three years younger than I, already was an established reporter on The Nashville Tennessean when I arrived in late 1959 as a copy editor.

Hearing on CNN that my old friend was killed Monday, April 22, in a car crash south of San Francisco came as a palpable shock. Dave, like his book about the leaders who dragged us into the Vietnam War, was indeed The Best and the Brightest in the true sense.

I knew him during an era when reporters wrote their stories on paper cut from rolls of newsprint on Royal Upright typewriters that clacked away with the sound of a freight car running over cracks in the rails. Copy editors' tools were pencils and paste pots. It seemed that everyone above the age of puberty smoked in the newsroom. I once had three cigarettes going at the same time and quit cold turkey that very night.

I’ll always remember the first story of Dave that I had to edit. This guy, I told myself, is the absolute worst typist I’ve ever seen -- words xxxxed out, words on top of words. Then I read what he’d written and told myself, this guy is one hell of a writer.

Of course, he went on to prove it by writing 21 books and winning a Pulitzer Prize. He later went to The New York Times where he covered the Congo and then later the Vietnam War where his dispatches outraged generals and the powers that be back in Washington but won him the respect of the grunts on the ground.

Instead of attending the 5 o’clock follies, Halberstam hitched rides on helicopters and rode into the war.

Speaking to a journalism conference in Tennessee last year, according to ESPN, he said government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminded him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.

“The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn’t salute or play the game,” he said. “And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around, and they’ve used up their credibility.”

Neill Sheehan, who was Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said: “We were in Vietnam at a time when we were being denounced by those on high. There was tremendous pressure. David never buckled under it at all. He was capable of standing up to it. You could not intimidate David.”

Sheehan recalled how Halberstam once called a general at home for permission to fly to a site of a U.S. defeat. At a briefing the next day, a brigadier general scolded “pitiful, lowly young reporters” for having the temerity to call a general at home.

“General, you do not understand,” Halberstam responded, according to Sheehan, “we are not corporals. We do not work for you. ... We will call a commanding general any time at home to get our job done.”

Despite living a charmed life, tragedy struck in 1980 when an escaped convict killed his brother, Michael Halberstam, a cardiologist, during a robbery.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Dave said in an interview. “You have to get on, and you have to get on with life, and get on with living.”

The one story that set Dave above others while on The Tennessean was one he dug out of a funeral. This couple lived in abject poverty not knowing where their next meal would come from when the husband died. While mourning for him and wondering if she’d have to bury him in potters’ field, she turned over the mattress and found $10,000.

Did she use this money to set her life on a new course? No, she paid the undertaker $10,000 to give hubby a grand exit.

Dave, I’m just one of the tens of thousands of journalists and retired newspapermen and women who’ll miss you.

ESPN had a wonderful quote that you gleaned from the basketball star Julius Irving. It sums up your philosophy:

“Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

{Honicker is a semi-retired newspaperman. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report}.