By Martin Weil and Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, April 24, 2007; A01
David Halberstam, a dogged reporter who was regarded as among the leading journalists of his era and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the war in Vietnam was credited with helping change the nation's view of that conflict, died yesterday in California. He was 73.
A family spokesman said he died in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, in a crash while being driven to an interview with Y.A. Tittle, a retired New York Giants quarterback, for a forthcoming book.
Persistent, inquisitive and prolific, Halberstam subjected the institutions, myths and legends of American society to intense scrutiny, publishing almost two dozen nonfiction books that gave his readers a vivid behind-the-scenes portrayal of the history of their times.
Placed under his reportorial microscope were the nation's great media empires, its policymaking apparatus, its automobile industry, its sports stars and their teams, and the New York firefighters who showed their heroism on Sept. 11, 2001.
Attention first came his way after the New York Times sent him to cover the fighting in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s, when opposition to the Vietnam War was relatively low key.
Often describing himself as one who began as a supporter of his nation's involvement in the war, Halberstam grew skeptical of official accounts. He placed a premium on seeing for himself and went, he said, "to the boondocks, to isolated posts, to strategic hamlets."
With a handful of other American reporters, he became known for sending back dispatches that often varied sharply from the government's optimistic versions. His accounts troubled many readers and proved a severe irritant to the White House.
His work ultimately prompted a suggestion that he be recalled. He was not, and he shared the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964.
Later, Halberstam wrote a best-selling book about the war and how it was conceived and directed. "The Best and the Brightest," which appeared in 1972, is often regarded as a landmark in turning many against the war.
In the book, with its overriding mood of folly and tragedy, Halberstam offered vivid descriptions of personality and incident in the account of how good intentions went astray.
"Every nonfiction book should be written to answer a question," he once told an interviewer. Calling President Lyndon B. Johnson's advisers, who had originally counseled President John F. Kennedy, "ostensibly the ablest group ever to serve in American government," he said that Vietnam "was the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War."
"How," he asked, "could this happen?"
"Meeting by meeting, memo by memo, power-play by power-play," Halberstam traced what was described years later in The Washington Post's Book World as "the making of the Vietnam quagmire."
An icon of U.S. journalism, Halberstam wrote before and after Vietnam about the major movements and figures of his times. As a young reporter, he covered upheaval in Africa and the early days of the civil rights movement in the South. He returned to that era in one of his many books, called "The Children."
He later attributed his willingness to confront the establishment and to ask uncomfortable questions to inspiration he drew from the African American schoolchildren and civil rights demonstrators who faced an angry establishment in the early 1960s. "It made me braver," he once said.
The demonstrations, he later told a public radio interviewer, came to be "my first big story."
Of those days, he said, "I couldn't wait to go to work," although "it was often fairly dangerous" and became even more dangerous. "I had an intuitive sense that I was watching history . . . something noble."
David Halberstam was born April 10, 1934, in New York City. His father was a surgeon and his mother, a teacher. He was reared on military posts while his father was in the Army, in Connecticut and in Yonkers, N.Y., just north of New York City.
He attended Harvard University, where he became managing editor of the student newspaper, the Crimson. His first newspaper job after graduation in 1955 was at the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Miss. Recognizing the growing civil rights movement as the major story of that period, he said he believed that Mississippi would be a good place to learn reporting.
After a year in West Point, he joined the Tennessean in Nashville, and in 1960 he went to the Washington bureau of the New York Times. Soon he was sent to the Congo, where he covered the secession of the Katanga province and was wounded by shrapnel. In a later book, he recalled those times as "exciting and dangerous."
Vietnam followed, in September 1962, and his coverage brought both denunciations and praise. In an incident embedded in journalism annals, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger visited the White House in October 1963, where he heard from Kennedy about Halberstam's work.
The president, as the story is told, indicated to the publisher that Halberstam was possibly too deeply involved in the story and asked whether a transfer was being contemplated. Sulzberger said the Times felt that Halberstam was doing all right.
Back in New York in 1964, Halberstam covered the city for the Times. His first Vietnam book, "The Making of a Quagmire," appeared in 1965. By then he was assigned to Poland. Later came Paris. In 1967, he left the Times to spread his journalistic wings.
A torrent of books ensued. "The Reckoning" dealt with the competition between Japanese and American carmakers. "The Powers That Be" studied the media, including The Washington Post. "The Breaks of the Game" was on professional basketball, and a pennant race between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees was chronicled in "The Summer of '49." Critics lauded those and others as rich in anecdote and personal glimpses, but also as accounts of significant social change.
There were many prizes and a sheaf of honorary degrees. Halberstam kept working, telling interviewers of his lifelong love for journalism and its ability to offer practitioners an education while paying them to get it.
A brother was killed in 1980 in Washington by a would-be burglar at his home. A 1965 marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Jean, and a daughter, Julia, both of New York.
【明報記者廖錦清報道】25歲的韓裔趙大衛(David Cho)昨(28)日清晨近6時，疑酒醉駕車在皇后區法拉盛的布斯紀念大道(Booth Memorial )闖紅燈左轉164街，被正在下坡行駛的65號公車攔腰撞上，造成19人受傷﹐其中坐在趙大衛車內駕駛員副座的29歲華裔男子傷勢嚴重﹐生命垂危。警方已依酒醉駕車及違反交通號誌等罪名，將趙大衛逮捕。
車禍發生後，轄區市警109分局立即封鎖現場，同時開始拖吊嚴重損毀的公車與轎車。據一名朱姓民眾表示，車禍造成一向空曠的布斯紀念大道及164街交通頓時「大打結」，路口無法行走外，兩條道路一直封鎖到上午10點才重開。前來凱辛娜公園高爾夫球區打球的道格拉斯(Doulous B Porter)也說，費了很大的勁才輾轉走到車禍現場旁的高爾夫球區，據觀察，車禍現場直到上午11時才清理完畢。
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