David Halberstam

David Halberstam (1934 - 2007) was an American journalist, writer and historian. He is best remembered for his reporting on the Vietnam War, but his work also covered politics, civil rights, business, the media, American culture, the Korean War and, later in his career, sports. He wrote in English, and his accounts of Vietnam remain among the most cited for understanding how the war was reported from the inside.

He grew up in Winsted, Connecticut, and later in Yonkers, New York. He graduated from Harvard College in 1955 after serving as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, where he already showed a taste for provoking his readers. His first jobs took him to Mississippi and Nashville, where he covered the early days of the civil rights movement for The Tennessean. There he stood out for challenging official statements that portrayed protesters as violent and dangerous.

In 1961 The New York Times sent him to the Congo, where he soon grew disillusioned with the difficult working conditions and with the lack of candor from local officials. In 1962 he accepted a move to Vietnam. There he clashed with the American military command, which barred him from reporting directly on a helicopter operation that was presented as a victory. Working with Neil Sheehan and Malcolm Browne, Halberstam set the official account against what was happening on the ground, most notably at the Battle of Ap Bac. President Kennedy tried to have the Times replace him, but the paper refused.

His style was direct and skeptical of official briefings. His dispatches earned him the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, and also bitter feuds with journalists such as Marguerite Higgins and Joseph Alsop, who supported the Diem regime. In later years he wrote long books on American politics and society that blended reporting with history. He died in 2007 in a car crash while researching a new book.

His legacy lies in the model of critical, independent journalism he championed and in the influence of his books on Vietnam, whose interpretations historians still debate.