RIP David Halberstam

One technical question that I've often wondered about DH, and I'm curious if anyone has an answer to. A lot of bios about Halberstam say that he graduated from Harvard in 1955 with "a degree in journalism."

Did Harvard offer degrees in journalism back then? Because Harvard does not have a journalism school. It has the Neiman Foundation at Harvard, but it's not a journalism school, and it's not for students anyway. It's for professional journalists. Halberstam worked for the Daily Crimson, but I'm betting his actual degree was in something else.

It's a pretty good example, I think, of wikipedia being very wrong about something.

 

He wrote far more important books, but I really loved The Breaks of the Game about the Portland Trail Blazers.

I forget who it was, but I got into a spirited disagreement with someone on this board a few years ago about The Children, Halberstam's book about the early days of the civil-rights movement in Nashville. The other poster thought the book was bullshit and seemed to know enough about that era to make me have some doubts, so who really knows? I enjoyed the book, though. Bought it in a used-book store in Charleston and read a good chunk of it while we were vacationing in the South.

 

I last spoke with him the week I was one of two dozen sportswriters in San Francisco for the hearing on Fainaru-Wada and Williams. He spoke passionately in defense of the reporters. He made the classic case for a free press as a foundation of democracy. Every time I interviewed him, it was clear he thought of journalism as a high calling. We're all the better for having heard him speak and, more important, for having read his examples of that calling.

 

I own '49 and '64 and devoured both.

Good call on Breaks of the Game, Frank. My ex-roommate is a major Blazers fan, so I read it, and I feel it's perhaps his most unfairly overlooked work.

RIP.

 

I read "The Children" and found it to be incredibly informative. I don't remember that past SJ discussion, but have read many of the same types of stories in other books on the Civil Rights era. It seems like Halberstam's telling and Howell Raines' "My Soul is Rested" jibed pretty well against each other, if I recall correctly, although I made no academic study to factcheck.

RIP.

 

Moment of silence for one of the giants of this industry. He will be missed.

 

What read should one start with on Halberstam?

 

I loved The Best and the Brightest. Someone else mentioned The Fifties, which I also liked a lot.

 

Funny how the so-called defenders of democracy always need to be reminded of that. From the AP story:

As as young man in the Southeast Asian nation in the early 1960s, he was one of a small group of intrepid reporters who questioned the official Washington line that the United States was winning the war. The New York Times had to resist pressure from the Kennedy administration to take him out of the country, and he won the Pulitzer Prize at age 30.

His 1965 book "The Making of a Quagmire" described how the United States got involved in the war in 1961 and 1962 and helped link the word quagmire with the Vietnam War. In 1972 he wrote "The Best and The Brightest," which made the case the best minds in the U.S. government had engaged the country in an intractable and unwinnable war.

"Now that I look back on it, it was the beginning of the credibility gap," journalist Neil Sheehan, a close friend who worked closely with Halberstam in Vietnam, said in an interview. "It was the first time when the senior people were absolutely off the beam and the facts on the ground contradicted them."

Recently, he drew parallels between the current U.S. war in Iraq and the past failure in Vietnam.

Speaking to a journalism conference last year in Tennessee, he said government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminded him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.

"The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn't salute or play the game," he said. "And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around and they've used up their credibility."

Well put, Mr. Halberstam. RIP. :'(

 

This is devastating.

I read Summer of 49 when I was a child, maybe a teen. It was my first introduction to baseball's past. I must've read the book five or six times back to back. All I can remember is the spine tore up from reading it so much ... wow. This is really sad.

 

His brother, a DC heart surgeon, used to go around at night and hang nets on empty basketball rims all over the city. He got stabbed by a mugger one night.
I remember a great piece David wrote about that, but I'm damned if I remember where it ran.

UPDATE -- Sorry. I missed Simon's earlier post on this.

 

I've got nothing to add except a few tears.

Rest in peace, Mr. Halberstam.