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Sympathy to his family- how sad.
RIP. He wrote The Breaks of the Game, which, while not as good as Loose Balls, is one of the best basketball books of all time and had a bunch of good ABA stories and a couple of good bits on George Gervin.
Link
SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam has died in a car accident in Menlo Park, California, near San Francisco, the San Mateo County coroner's office said Monday.
In 1964 Halberstam, then with The New York Times, shared a Pulitzer for international reporting for his coverage of the early years of the Vietnam War, including the 1963 overthrow of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem.
The accident happened at about 10:30 a.m. (1:30 p.m. ET), and the driver of the car carrying Halberstam identified him as the victim, according to the Associated Press.
The driver is a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where Halberstam had spoken Saturday about the craft of journalism, the Associated Press reported.
The student was taken to Stanford Medical Center, the AP said, and two others involved in the crash were injured.
Orville Sc , the dean of Berkeley's journalism school, said Halberstam was in the Bay Area working on a book on NFL hall of famer Y.A. tle. He said tle, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, now lives in Palo Alto, California, near the scene of the wreck.
After attending Harvard University, Halberstam launched his career in 1955 at the Daily Times Leader, a small daily newspaper in Mississippi. By age 30 he had won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Vietnam War for the New York Times.
He quit daily journalism in 1967 and wrote 21 books covering such diverse topics as the Vietnam War, civil rights, the auto industry and a baseball pennant race. His 2002 best-seller, "War in a Time of Peace," was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
His 1972 book, "The Best and the Brightest," do ented the Kennedy administration's early steps during the war.
Halberstam lived in New York.
Authorities say the accident is still under investigation.
Sympathy to his family- how sad.
What a shame! David was a legitimate superstar. He was not only articulate and interesting within the printed page...he was a fascinating story-teller, with a wide range of knowledge and experiences. Even his voice was a gift from God.
He will be remembered and appreciated for generations.
The irony of a journalist being killed by journalism student.
That's got to suck for that kid.
he wrote a great book about Bill Belichick too.
RIP to one of the greats.
he made denver writers look like babies
I got to meet him when he came to speak at SMU about 5 years ago. The Best and the Brightest is probably my favorite non-fiction book. He was a courageous truthteller. RIP David.
You do that.
Author Uncloaked Vietnam Blunders
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 an automobile collision in Menlo Park, Calif., south of San Francisco. He was 73.
A spokesman for the family said he died while being driven to an interview with Y.A. tle, retired New York Giants quarterback, for a forthcoming book.
Persistent, inquisitive and prolific, Halberstam subjected the ins utions, myths and legends of American society to his 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.
Fame began to come to him after he was sent by the New York Times to cover the fighting in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, a time when opposition to the Vietnam War was relatively low key and narrowly based.
Often describing himself in interviews as one who went to Vietnam as a supporter of his nation's involvement, 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."
Along with a handful of other American reporters, he became known for sending back dispatches that often varied sharply from the optimistic versions dispensed by the government. His accounts troubled many readers and proved a severe irritant to the White House.
His reports 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 in The Washington Post's Book World years later as "the making of the Vietnam quagmire."
An icon of U.S. journalism, Halberstam wrote both 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.
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.
Their actions, 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. Part of his upbringing came on military posts while his father was in the Army. As a boy, he also lived 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 day, 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, where his coverage brought denunciations, praise and prizes. In an incident that has formed part of the annals of contemporary journalism, 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 told the president that the Times thought he 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 beyond the confines of daily news.
There flowed from him a torrent of books, covering politics, industry, baseball and football. There were many prizes and a sheaf of honorary degrees. He kept working, telling interviewers of his lifelong love for journalism and its ability to offer prac ioners an education while paying them to get it.
A 1965 marriage ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife, Jean, and a daughter, Julia, both of New York.
====================
It's a shame, and a disaster, the current generation of corporate-emasculated newspeople didn't have the balls to follow DH's VN example, to resist the bullying and intimidation, to challenge the Repugs' lies on Iraq.
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