David Halberstam Popular Books

David Halberstam Biography & Facts

David Halberstam (April 10, 1934 – April 23, 2007) was an American writer, journalist, and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, Korean War, and later, sports journalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007, while doing research for a book. Early life and education Halberstam was born in New York City, the son of Blanche (Levy) and Charles A. Halberstam, schoolteacher and Army surgeon. His family was Jewish. He was raised in Winsted, Connecticut, where he was a classmate of Ralph Nader. He moved to Yonkers, New York, and graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1951. In 1955 he graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. degree after serving as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson. Halberstam had a rebellious streak and as editor of the Harvard Crimson engaged in a competition to see which columnist could most offend readers. Career Halberstam's journalism career began at the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi, the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi. He covered the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement for The Tennessean in Nashville. John Lewis later stated that Halberstam was the only journalist in Nashville who would cover the Nashville sit-ins, organized by the Nashville Student Movement which Halberstam focused on in his 1998 book The Children. Halberstam's fiery, rebellious streak first came out when covering the civil rights movement as he protested against the lies of the authorities who portrayed the civil rights protesters as violent and dangerous. Republic of the Congo In August 1961 The New York Times dispatched Halberstam to the Republic of the Congo to report on the Congo Crisis. Although initially eager to cover the events in the country, over time he grew jaded over the demanding working conditions and the difficulty in handling Congolese officials' lack of truthfulness. In July 1962 he quickly accepted an opportunity to move to Vietnam to report on the Vietnam War for The New York Times. Vietnam Halberstam arrived in Vietnam in the middle of 1962. A tall and well built man, he conveyed much self-confidence and initially the American embassy approved of him. However, Halberstam was openly hostile to any hint of deception, and he soon came into conflict with American officials. When the chief American officer in South Vietnam, General Paul D. Harkins, launched an operation with 45 helicopters flown by American pilots landing a battalion of South Vietnamese infantry to attack a Viet Cong base, Halberstam was forbidden from doing any direct reporting; he was simply told to report the operation as a victory. Halberstam was enraged by this media control, as he expressed in a letter to Frederick Nolting, the American ambassador to South Vietnam. Halberstam wrote about the media blackout: "The reason given is security. This is, of course, stupid, naive and indeed insulting to the patriotism and intelligence of every American newspaperman, and every American newspaper represented here." Halberstam argued that the operation could not have been the victory that Harkins had claimed as the Viet Cong must have heard the helicopters coming and accordingly retreated as guerrillas normally do when faced with superior force, leading him to write: "You can bet the V.C. knew what was happening. You can bet Hanoi knew what was happening. Only American reporters and American readers were kept ignorant."With the help of military sources like John Paul Vann, an active duty officer in Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), Halberstam, along with colleagues Neil Sheehan of UPI and Malcolm Brown of the AP, challenged the upbeat reporting of the United States mission in South Vietnam. They reported the defeat of government troops at the first major battle of the Vietnam War known as the Battle of Ap Bac. President John F. Kennedy tried to get The New York Times to replace Halberstam with a more compliant journalist. The Times refused.During the Buddhist crisis in 1963, Halberstam and Neil Sheehan debunked the claim by the Diệm regime that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam regular forces had perpetrated the brutal raids on Buddhist temples, which the American authorities had initially believed, but that the Special Forces, loyal to Diệm's brother and strategist Nhu, had done so to frame the army generals. He was also involved in a scuffle with Nhu's secret police after they punched fellow journalist Peter Arnett while the news men were covering a Buddhist protest. Seeing Arnett lying on the ground being punched and kicked by policemen, Halberstam ran to his rescue, shouting in fury: "Go back, get back you sons of bitches or I'll beat the shit out of you!" As Halberstam spoke in English, the policemen did not understand him, but as he was much taller than the diminutive Vietnamese, the sight of him running at them, red-faced and furious, was enough to cause them to run away.Halberstam's reporting led to a feud with journalists Marguerite Higgins and Joseph Alsop, and TIME Magazine publisher Henry Luce, who all championed the Diem regime. All three had been members of the "China Lobby", who had been, in the 1930s and 1940s, passionately committed to supporting the Kuomintang regime and believed that the only reason the Kuomintang lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949 was because a few American officials and journalists had chosen to "betray" Chiang Kai-shek, who otherwise would have defeated the Communists. Reporters like Theodore White, who saw and exposed Chiang's corruption and indifference to China's peasants, were – to the China Lobby – defeatists and traitors. (White's insistence on covering the Chiang regime as he saw it would eventually destroy his relationship with Luce, who had been his patron and a close friend.)The China Lobby tended to approve of Diem for the same reasons that they approved of Chiang, seeing both as pro-Western, modernizing Christian leaders who made their respective nations into copies of the United States. In the same way the China Lobby portrayed Chiang as China's Christian savior because of his conversion to Methodism, and as someone who would presumably convert the rest of the Chinese to Christianity, they saw the Catholic Diem as Vietnam's Christian savior who likewise would convert the Vietnamese to Christianity. Both Higgins and Luce had been born in China to Protestant missionary parents and were very attracted to the idea of one day converting all of the Chinese to Christianity; Chiang's defeat in 1949 had caused them much bitterness. For many members of the China Lobby, South Vietnam was a sort of consolation prize for the "loss of China" in 1949. Halberstam's criticism of Diem sounded very similar to American journalists' criticism of Chiang in the 1940s, and it threatened the possibility of “losing” South Vietnam. This led to their furious atta.... Discover the David Halberstam popular books. Find the top 100 most popular David Halberstam books.