Joe Galloway: David Halberstam spoke truth to power

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http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/17143693.htm

Posted on Fri, Apr. 27, 2007

JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
David Halberstam spoke truth to power
By Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers

He was the stuff of legend, and it is nothing less than a national tragedy that so great a voice was silenced by a car crash this week, just when it's needed more than ever.

David Halberstam's work and influence as reporter and author spanned half a century. He covered the most important stories of our time, from the civil rights struggle in the South during the 1950s to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s and into a new century and a new war, one that eerily reminded him of the mistakes of the one of his youth.

Along the way, he wrote hard-hitting stories that sounded an early warning against a rush to war in Vietnam. Those stories earned him the enmity of two American presidents and a Pulitzer Prize when he was 30 years old.

Halberstam left daily journalism before he was 40 and wrote more than 20 books, wonderfully researched and written histories of the times in which he and we lived. He shined a bright light on topics large and small, from war to sports.

His Vietnam books, "The Making of a Quagmire" and "The Best and the Brightest," a landmark study of the politicians and academics who led us blindly into that quagmire, should have been read and remembered by those who led us into the newest quagmire in Iraq.

A friend of mine asked Halberstam recently if he'd been afraid when he went on combat operations with the troops. "Oh no," he answered. "I could always sleep at night out with soldiers. Fear is being a 27-year-old Jew working for The New York Times covering the civil rights struggle in Mississippi."

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