Tuesday, April 24, 2007
David Halberstam 1934-2007
David Halberstam, an extraordinary writer and journalist, died yesterday in a car crash in California. Halberstam was a leader in the generation of journalists who penetrated the fog of the Vietnam War for Americans and, in pursuing the truth of that terrible mistake, helped generate respect for the values of a free press and democracy around the world. He will be greatly missed.
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Many years ago, when I was on my way to graduate school, I had the chance of sharing lunch with David Halberstam when I caught up with him in an airport cafeteria. We had just come from a conference on journalism and the Vietnam War in which he had participated. He was very open and friendly. I remember he spoke of reading through the thousands of Vietcong interviews/interrogations on “motivation” conducted by the Rand Corporation through one of their Defense Department contracts designed to determine what made “the other side tick.” The Rand studies would later find their way into the Pentagon papers and Halberstam’s own Best and Brightest. He described reading them as “eating salted peanuts.”
I subsequently worked in the Indochina Archives, then housed at UC Berkeley, where Doug Pike had brought his own set. I then too read through them, the occasional piece of shrapnel dropping out. They had been through the Tet offensive.
Some things change, some things remain the same. The US government and society still have a short attention span, lack deep appreciation of other cultures and are impatient for solutions on the cheap. We still outsource big projects, including intelligence gathering, but don’t know what to make of we have at hand.
What is irreplaceable is the attention and passion David Halberstam brought to his research and coverage. Few can compare. Seymour Hersh continues the tradition. I hope he drives safely.
Susan
If you get HBO, and watch to Bill Mahrer, there was an interesting exchange at the top of the show between Mahrer and Bill Moyers-- this was taped before Halberstam died.
Moyers was press secretary for Lyndon Johnson and a contemporary of Halberstam, whose reporting brought the reality of the Vietnam War to Americans.
But Americans don't read history, and the Bush White House doesn't either: Moyers makes the point of his sadness that so many mistakes being made by our government--especially the miscalculation of foreign threats in order to satisfy the ego of leaders insulated from the consequences of their actions--are so similar to the ones being made in Iraq.
Vietnam is a valued trading partner, today, of the United States. What was all that loss about?
As to the point of this blog, the built landscape of Florida is also a story of loss, of repetitive mistakes unremarked, for the most part, by the mainstream media.
We're still waiting for the Miami Herald to find its voice, without much optimism. We know the reporters are there and willing, and we are disconsolate at the culture that prevents them from writing what they could.
Halberstam had that opportunity, he seized it and made a difference.
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