On Monday the prizewinning journalist and author David Halberstam died in a car crash in Menlo Park, California. He was 73.
David Halberstam first came to my attention in the early 1990's. I was going through a JFK phase, perhaps initiated by the recent emergence of another charming, handsome young Democrat on the national stage, and I was looking for a good book on the 35th president. What I found was The Best And The Brightest. It wasn't quite what I'd been looking for, but what it was was so much more. Fresh out of high school, full of pith and vinegar, I thought I knew all I needed to know about the Vietnam era from watching "Full Metal Jacket" and "The Wonder Years." God, what I didn't know. Halberstam's writing opened my eyes, and showed me how even the most accomplished and intelligent people were able, with the best of intentions, to lead the country headlong into a disaster, all the time convinced of the rightness of their beliefs and supremely confident of their ability to pull it off. Halberstam layed it all out in detail that was meticulous but never tedious, sympathetic but never apologetic, analytical but never judgmental. He wrote with the conversational confidence of a teacher who not only knew his subject, but had lived it; yet he never injected himself into the narrative, never yielded to the temptation to make it personal.
I loved The Best And The Brightest so much that when I was finished I immediately dashed back to the bookstore to find other works by Halberstam. The only one they had was The Fifties, which was disappointing, because that was one decade that held little interest to me. Ike, the Commies, and the status quo -- that was how I pictured it. What more did I need to know? But I bought the book anyway, because, hell, I had to read something. Turns out that once again, I didn't know what I didn't know. Far from the culturally stagnant, emotionally repressed era I imagined, the 1950's as seen through Halberstam's eyes turned out to be a time of simmering tensions and growth that would ultimately explode into the cultural and social revolutions of the next decade. There was even more to Ike than met the eye (his farewell address to the nation seems almost chillingly prophetic now). Joseph McCarthy, the birth of television, the coming of rock & roll, the Red Scare -- how in the world had I ever thought the 50's were dull? For the second time, Halberstam had helped me to see.
And he continued to do so for scores of readers. On subjects as varied as old baseball players to the American auto industry to daily life in a fire house, Halberstam had the ability to take a subject that may have seemed small at first glance, and make it large by his prose. He was the chronicler of the American Century, the Herodotus of the Jet Age. I will miss him.