Journo David Halberstam reported from Vietnam and the NBA, lived into his seventies, and wound up dying in a car crash on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle. His cardiologist brother was murdered by an escaped convict in 1980. Halberstam never wrote about or commented on the murder. Our Man Elli In Israel wrote Halberstam's profile in the Encyclopedia Judaica:
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Another take on David Halberstam
Journo David Halberstam reported from Vietnam and the NBA, lived into his seventies, and wound up dying in a car crash on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle. His cardiologist brother was murdered by an escaped convict in 1980. Halberstam never wrote about or commented on the murder. Our Man Elli In Israel wrote Halberstam's profile in the Encyclopedia Judaica:
HALBERSTAM, DAVID (1934- ), journalist, author, historian, biographer, sportswriter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Halberstam was the younger of two sons born in the Bronx to Charles, a military surgeon whose parents had immigrated from Poland, and Blanche (Levy), a schoolteacher whose parents had come from Lithuania. His father’s work took him to Winsted, Connecticut, El Paso and Austin, Texas, and Rochester, Minn. In 1951 Halberstam graduated Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, N.Y., where he wrote for the school newspaper, and then he attended Harvard College, where he became managing editor of the Crimson. Upon graduation in 1955, Halberstam chose to work in the South, his first job coming at The Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi, the state’s smallest daily newspaper, and seven months later he moved to The Tennessean in Nashville, where he covered the early Civil Rights movement. Halberstam joined the New York Times in 1960, working first in Washington before being assigned to the Congo, and then in September 1962 to the paper’s bureau in Saigon. It was there that Halberstam became a legend as one of a small group of reporters who began to question and speak out against the official administration version of the war in Vietnam, which led U.S. president John F. Kennedy to request that Halberstam be transferred to another bureau. Halberstam’s reporting earned him the George Polk Award in 1963 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1964, for international reporting. In January 1965 he was sent to Poland, where his reporting on the repressive and anti-Semitic policies of the Communist regime led to his being ordered to leave the country. Halberstam then reported from Paris, and in 1967 he left the Times to become a contributing editor for Harper's. He started writing books including The Making of A Quagmire: America and Vietnam During The Kennedy Era (1965), The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (1969); and Ho (1971), a biography of Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. But it was his best-selling book, The Best and the Brightest (1972), a critical history of America’s involvement in the Vietnamese conflict, which established Halberstam as an important commentator on American politics and power.
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Good Man, Elli. You mentioned DH's "The Making of a Quagmire..." first. Most Obits put "The Best and the Brightest" first and don't even mention "Quagmire."
If anyone wants to understand the connection between the failures in Vietnam and Iraq, read "Quagmire." It was published in '63 and told of corruption in the Vitenam government, and the lost cause of sending our troops there.
1963.
The US stayed in Vietnam until 1975.
JFK wanted DH fired from the NY Times for his reporting on the war. DH was excoriated as a Non-Patriot who was undermining the war effort.
Sound familiar?
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