Why you should care about David Halberstam

Editor's note: Mike Sweeney is head of the department of journalism and communication at Utah State University.

By Michael S. Sweeney

April 24, 2007 | I was listening to Bob Dylan's 1965 classic Desolation Row when I heard the news that David Halberstam had died Monday morning in a car crash in California.

What an appropriate juxtaposition, I thought.

Halberstam and Dylan had much in common: Great writing skills, status inside and outside the establishment, and the skill of tweaking the noses of those in power.

Dylan wrote eight-minute songs; Halberstam wrote 800-page books.

Halberstam's seminal book on the Vietnam War, The Making of a Quagmire, appeared in print about the same time as the release of Dylan's equally seminal album Highway 61 Revisited, which included Like a Rolling Stone and these lyrics from Desolation Row:

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do.

After reporting on the civil war in the Congo, Halberstam went to South Vietnam in the early 1960s on behalf of his employer, The New York Times. His factual reporting on the unpleasant facts of that guerrilla war enraged President John F. Kennedy. JFK tried to pressure the Times to bring Halberstam home and replace him with a more pliable substitute; the paper politely refused. Kennedy also had the intelligence community examine Halberstam's stories for errors and evidence of bias. The study found none.

Telling the news straight, for the good of the public, was what Halberstam did.

Along with reporters Malcolm Browne (AP, then the Times), Peter Arnett (AP), Neil Sheehan (UPI) and Charles Mohr (Time magazine), Halberstam helped illuminate the flaws of strategy and tactics in the Vietnam War. He also exposed the emperor's lack of proper clothing. When he reported on a battle against the Viet Cong early in the war, his account varied so wildly from the official Pentagon account that the New York Times threw up its hands and printed both versions on the front page, side by side. A few days later, the Pentagon acknowledged that Halberstam got it right.

I have been a fan of Halberstam's since reading The Powers That Be, one of the many books that poured out of him like sweat off a prizefighter. I felt honored -- no, thrilled -- when he agreed to write the foreword to my first book for the National Geographic Press, From the Front: The Story of War.

He was most gracious and wise. He praised the book, yes, but he also used his platform to extol the virtues of and the need for clear-eyed combat journalists, without ever suggesting that he was a leader of that close-knit fraternity of "exceptional people taking uncommon risks."

Wartime journalism, he wrote, "is about a larger purpose and a belief that where there is violence and suffering, the rest of the world needs to know."

I met David Halberstam in November 2006 at an academic conference at Middle Tennessee State University. I sat 10 feet from him as he reiterated the old message about the crucial role of the fourth estate in wartime. Then I got caught up in his new message, drawing comparisons between the White House's information policies of the Vietnam War and those of the most recent conflict in Iraq.

There is no new thing under the sun, he said. Journalists whose reporting exposes unpleasant truths bring down the wrath of those in power who are embarrassed by such truths. But they do it for the good of the country. They believe that in a democracy, the public must rule. And in order to do that, it must have information it trusts.

The speech was a tour de force. Halberstam was a giant -- literally, at 6-foot-4, he towered over everyone, and figuratively, as he held court over a new generation of journalists.

Tuesday morning, his obituary appeared inside the sports section of our local, daily newspaper. That makes sense only if you know that Halberstam wrote extensively about baseball, and served as an expert contributor to Ken Burns' Baseball documentary.

Yes, Halberstam knew about baseball, and about the Yankees and Red Sox in particular. But he deserved a much bigger sendoff. His life nudged the world.

Journalism misses him. America needs his kind.

MS
MS