24 Facts About David Halberstam

David Halberstam was an American writer, journalist, and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, Korean War, and later, sports journalism.

David Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964.

David Halberstam was raised in Winsted, Connecticut, where he was a classmate of Ralph Nader.

David Halberstam moved to Yonkers, New York, and graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1951.

David Halberstam had a rebellious streak and as editor of the Harvard Crimson engaged in a competition to see which columnist could most offend readers.

David Halberstam covered the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement for The Tennessean in Nashville.

John Lewis later stated that David Halberstam was the only journalist in Nashville who would cover the Nashville sit-ins, organized by the Nashville Student Movement which David Halberstam focused on in his 1998 book The Children.

However, David Halberstam was openly hostile to any hint of deception, and he soon came into conflict with American officials.

David Halberstam was enraged by this media control, as he expressed in a letter to Frederick Nolting, the American ambassador to South Vietnam.

David Halberstam was involved in a scuffle with Nhu's secret police after they punched fellow journalist Peter Arnett while the news men were covering a Buddhist protest.

David Halberstam's reporting led to a feud with journalists Marguerite Higgins and Joseph Alsop, and TIME Magazine publisher Henry Luce, who all championed the Diem regime.

David Halberstam left Vietnam in 1964, at age 30, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting that year.

David Halberstam is interviewed in the 1968 documentary film on the Vietnam War, titled In the Year of the Pig.

David Halberstam was sent on assignment to Poland, where he soon became "an attraction from behind the Iron Curtain" to the artistic boheme in Warsaw.

In 1972 Halberstam went to work on his next book, The Powers That Be, published in 1979 and featuring profiles of media titans like William S Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, and Phil Graham of The Washington Post.

In 1991 David Halberstam wrote The Next Century, in which he argued that, after the end of the Cold War, the United States was likely to fall behind economically to other countries such as Japan and Germany.

In particular, David Halberstam depicted the 1949 Yankees and Red Sox as symbols of a nobler era, when blue-collar athletes modestly strove to succeed and enter the middle class rather than making millions and defying their owners and talking back to the press.

In 1997, David Halberstam received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.

David Halberstam wrote four more books in the 2000s, and was working on at least two others at the time of his death.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, the last book David Halberstam completed, was published posthumously in September 2007.

David Halberstam died in a traffic collision on April 23,2007, in Menlo Park, California, at the age of 73.

David Halberstam was en route to an interview with former San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants quarterback Y A Tittle for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts, when the journalism student driving Halberstam to the interview illegally turned into oncoming traffic.

Newspaper opinion editor Michael Young posits that David Halberstam saw Vietnam as a moral tragedy, with America's hubris bringing about its downfall.

Young writes that David Halberstam reduced everything to human will, turning his subjects into agents of broader historical forces and coming off like a Hollywood movie with a fated and formulaic climax.