Former Crimson Editor Halberstam Takes on Vietnam With His Pen

David L. Halberstam ’55 is quick to admit that he was far from the model student in his Harvard days.

Then a history concentrator, Halberstam says he had difficulty focusing on his schoolwork, and graduated without honors. Finishing in the bottom half of his class, Halberstam would have been hard-pressed to believe that he could ever be a member of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honors society.

Yet 50 years later, the self-described “terrible student” has been nominated for an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa to commend his impressive career as a journalist, including his coverage of the early years of the Vietnam War for the New York Times and his 19 subsequent books.

“I turned out okay,” jokes Halberstam. “For 50 years, I’ve been paid to go out and ask questions and learn things in the center of some extraordinary historical events. It has been a very rich career.”

These events have included some of the defining moments in American history—including the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the burgeoning civil rights movements in the Deep South. And he has investigated aspects of American culture more broadly, including the cultures surrounding baseball and other sports.

His work has been well-received not merely by Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society. Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his incisive reporting on Vietnam, and his 1972 book “The Best and the Brightest” has since been deemed the definitive account of why and how the U.S. intervened in Vietnam.

BRONX TO THE BAND

Born in the Bronx, N.Y. in 1934, Halberstam says that his childhood was shaped by World War II. His father had served as a doctor in World War I, and returned to the service when Halberstam was seven or eight years old.

As a result of his father’s military assignments, Halberstam moved repeatedly during the war, spending time in Winsted, Conn. and El Paso, Texas, among other places.

After the war, Halberstam’s family returned to New York. He then attended Roosevelt High School in Westchester County.

Even at that age, Halberstam says that journalism piqued his curiosity. He worked for his high school newspaper, but says that he was unable to reach a top leadership position because “the advisor was this quite unpleasant woman” who favored female students.

In high school, Halberstam says that he found the decision to come to Harvard an easy one. His brother was already an undergraduate there, as well as an editor at The Crimson, and had given Halberstam the chance to experience the variegated life of Cambridge.

The fact that Harvard did not have a dominant fraternity culture was one big draw for Halberstam, giving him the impression that each student could pursue his individual interests.

He recalls one moment when, visiting his brother, he first encountered the Harvard band’s lack of synchrony.

“I went up for a football weekend, and there was a Harvard band marching through the Square,” he says. “Everybody was sort of out of step....I liked the fact that you didn’t have this lock-step strut.”

THE HARVARD EXPERIENCE

Arriving at Harvard in 1951, Halberstam quickly found that he had trouble focusing on his classes.

“I was not a good student,” he says. “I think I’m ADD. My wife certainly thinks I am.”

While he struggled in the classroom, Halberstam quickly found his niche outside of academics. He excelled as a writer at The Crimson, where he rose to the rank of managing editor in his junior year.

“The Crimson was really the one thing I was good at,” he says. “[It] was the center of my life when I was there.”

Halberstam found it to be a competitive and consuming environment.

“Those of us who were there were very driven....You were judged by how many original [stories] you got,” he says. “You had to have a certain edginess to you.”

“It was a very good testing ground for what kind of world journalism was,” he adds.

According to Arthur J. Langguth, Jr. ’55, who was president of The Crimson when Halberstam was managing editor, Halberstam was as hard-nosed as anyone else on staff, and was not afraid to step on some toes, even as a young reporter.

“David and I used to have a competition to see who had offended more people with The Crimson in the past week,” Langguth says.

“He made the life of the others almost easy because he was so hard-working,” adds Langguth. “He just dug in. He was at the editors’ desk every night.”

Aside from his own personal drive, Halberstam says that the environment surrounding journalism in the 1950s was stimulating, and that it was beginning to engage more and more educated young men. The four top executives of The Crimson that year all ended up working for the New York Times during their careers.

“Journalism was just beginning to come of age,” he says. “We would all be sitting around and talking about journalism...[asking] could it be a respectable profession? Could you make enough money?”

Halberstam says that this lively discussion of newspaper reporting was reflective of a larger trend in American journalism, namely the move towards using journalism as a critical lens for examining issues about American cultural history and international relations.

THE BEGINNING OF A CAREER

Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Halberstam moved to Mississippi in order to cover the incipient civil rights movement and the desegregation of schools in the South.

He took a job at the Daily Times Leader of West Point, Miss., one of the state’s smallest papers, but moved to Nashville after a year to work for the Tennessean.

At the Tennessean, Halberstam focused on honing his skills as a reporter.

“I could recognize a story, [but] I needed to work on my legwork,” he says. “I really concentrated on that during my four years in Nashville.”

In 1960, the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, Scotty Reston, hired Halberstam, bringing him out of the South again.

After arriving at the New York Times, Halberstam says that he found himself among a “harem” of talented young reporters, and immediately began to look for ways to distinguish himself.

He seized the opportunity to report on conflict in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which was granted independence from Belgium in 1960 and quickly devolved into civil war. At the time, Halberstam says that the Times didn’t have many reporters who were willing to take that risk, but as a “young, single, and extremely ambitious” reporter, he was more than willing to go.

And so in 1961, Halberstam arrived in the Congo. It was one of the first trips overseas he had ever taken, and it provided a new depth of learning experience for him.

“It was the big story that year,” he says. “There was constant fighting. It was a very dangerous place.”

Halberstam says that had to learn to handle the frightening prospect of covering combat, and he remembers wondering if the risk was worth it.

“I was scared, but I wanted it badly enough,” he says. “I had very good people who taught me....I just followed around with them and learned how to do it.”

MAKING A NAME IN VIETNAM

After gaining valuable experience covering combat in the Congo, Halberstam requested a transfer to Saigon.

“It became clear to me that the new great story was going to be Vietnam,” he says.

The Times approved his request, and in 1962 Halberstam became one of the first full-time Western newspaper journalists working in the country.

Halberstam quickly became known for his dispatches, which often contradicted the optimistic progress reports provided by the military.

“It was a surprisingly confrontational assignment,” he says. “The government started lying....The government said we were winning the war. We were not winning the war, we were losing it.”

It was so confrontational, in fact, that John F. Kennedy ’40 personally asked Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, to remove Halberstam from his post. Sulzberger did not heed the request.

“I had never gone into this confrontation to be liked,” Halberstam says.

Halberstam’s coverage of the war and the overthrow of the Diem government won him the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He shared that prize with Malcolm W. Browne of the Associated Press.

Vietnam was “a defining story,” according to Halberstam, and one which demanded a new determination from the press. “The policy was bad....Being a reporter became very important,” he says.

A MOVE TO BOOKS

Halberstam left Vietnam in 1964, and quickly got pulled back to covering the escalating racial violence in the South. He remembers being told by his editors at the Times, “Get your ass down to Mississippi, they’ve killed three kids” in reference to the June 21 murders of three civil rights activists who were registering black voters.

Halberstam went, and began reporting on the small towns where the FBI did not have a strong presence and racial tensions often overflowed into violence.

Halberstam says that he felt as insecure there as he did while covering combat abroad.

“Mississippi in 1964 was as dangerous as anything I’ve ever been a part of,” he says. “In 1964...the last five years of my life were about being in dangerous places. I was beginning to wonder if I was always going to be scared.”

He continued to work at the Times until 1967, though not exclusively covering events in the South. He moved around both the U.S. and Europe.

Halberstam at this time began to write his first books— “The Making of a Quagmire” about Vietnam and “The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy” about fractious domestic politics—often waking up early in the morning to write before he had to go to work.

By the late 1960s, he decided it was time to change his focus and to devote his energy to longer pieces.

“I did 12 years in the infantry. I did 12 years breaking news. I went all over the world and I did it under very difficult conditions,” he says. “I wanted to take more time on the stories.”

“I told [my editor at The New York Times] that the things that interested me, interested me much more than 600 words worth,” he says.

He moved to Vanity Fair, but left in 1971 in order to expand one of his pieces about America’s involvement in the Vietnam War into the seminal book “The Best and the Brightest.” The book quickly became a best-seller.

“The great thing about ‘The Best and the Brightest’ was that I was working full-time on it,” he says. “That’s been essentially true ever since....My energy is 80-85 percent into books.”

A PROLIFIC WRITER

Since completing “The Best and the Brightest” in 1972, Halberstam has continued to write, completing a total of 19 books over the past 40 years.

He has written about a broad scope of topics. American sports have become a major focus, with works including a book on the 1964 World Series between the Yankees and the Cardinals and another on four rowers’ attempt to qualify for the 1984 Olympics. Writing about sports, according to Halberstam, is “a great way to learn about the country.”

While dedicating significant time to his career as a writer in the past few decades, Halberstam has also devoted himself to his family. He married in 1979 and has one daughter, who graduated from Brown University in 2002.

Halberstam is currently working on a new book­—a chronicle of the Chinese entrance into the Korean War and the ambush of American troops at the Chongchong River.

“It’s one of the worst defeats in modern American military history,” he says. “I’ve wanted to write this book for a very long time.”

He expects the book—tentatively titled “The Coldest Winter”—to be released in late 2006.

And though he is 71, Halberstam says that this book is far from his last, and that retirement is not yet on the horizon.

Even while continuing to work on his book about the Korean War, he has begun to write another book about sports.

“I love it,” he says. “I think I’m doing the best books of my life....I’d like to keep on going for a few years.”

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.