I heard on the radio that David Halberstam died in a car crash yesterday. I’m not usually bothered by the deaths of people I don’t know (the Virginia Tech killings, for instance, mostly left me unaffected), but Halberstam’s death upsets me. His book on the planners of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, was formative for me — it shaped how I think about politics.
It’s also shaped how I think about the Iraq War over the last few years, though its lessons didn’t, ironically, penetrate deeply enough into my skull that I was able to avoid, in 2002-03, making precisely the conceptual error (delusion, really) that The Best and the Brightest was devoted to exploding — that we (America) could control the course of history, and the spread of democracy, through force and rational planning. I didn’t support the war, but I didn’t oppose it either. Maybe if I’d re-read Halberstam I would have known better.
Anyway, here’s a bit from the NY Times article on his death:
David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and tireless author of books on topics as varied as America’s military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was killed yesterday in a car crash south of San Francisco. He was 73, and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Halberstam was a passenger in a car making a turn in Menlo Park, Calif., when it was hit broadside by another car and knocked into a third vehicle, said the San Mateo County coroner. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
…Mr. Halberstam was killed doing what he had done his entire adult life: reporting. He was on his way to interview Y. A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts, considered by many to be the greatest football game ever played.
I didn’t, by the way, read any of Halberstam’s later books. They all seemed to have a mist of vaguely macho nostalgia wafting from them, as if he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the tide of cultural change which he helped unleash. And his book on foreign policy in the ‘90s, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals, even ended up making an overly optimistic case for the possibility of humane military intervention abroad.
Complicated man, in other words. But he wrote a great book.
UPDATE: I found this radio interview with Halberstam from March of 2003, a week after the war was launched. "I’m very uneasy with it. … We’re politically punching our hand into the largest hornet’s nest in the world," he says, and though he’s not certain that it’ll go wrong, he’s dead-on about all the ways it might go wrong. Worth a listen.
