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Hyperion could have just released The Coldest Winter, but Halberstam’s peers held him in such high esteem that they assembled a murderer’s row for an authorless book tour. The group included investigative icons (Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward), writing masters (Joan Didion, Anna Quindlen), a future U.N. ambassador (Samantha Power) and even the curly-haired, Grateful Dead-loving basketball legend Bill Walton.
Hersh downplayed the purpose of the tour beyond promoting a book.
“Listen, ain’t nothing like David,” he said. “You don’t need this to keep David alive.”
Except here we are, a decade after his death at the age of 73, and it’s rare to hear anyone talking about David Halberstam.
I do, particularly when I’m stuck inside a difficult story. I think about the way he compulsively pursued interviews and did not allow barriers of access to slow him down. Halberstam wrote a sprawling book on Michael Jordan even when, partway through his reporting, the thin-skinned basketball star decided to avoid him. He wrote with such rich detail about the White House advisers who sucked us into Vietnam that you wondered whether he slept in Robert McNamara’s sock drawer. This, despite President John F. Kennedy, at one point, wanting him yanked off his New York Times beat.
For Halberstam, the facts were the foundation. And that foundation established a truth that allowed him to draw on his vast knowledge of politics, psychology and social structure.
Nobody told the sweeping story of 20th-century America, the “macro forces affecting the world and the government,” as the novelist John Burnham Schwartz describes it, like Halberstam. Which probably hasn’t helped his Q-rating. Yes, it’s easy to understand how, in our tweeterific modern world, a David Halberstam can be forgotten.
Hunter S. Thompson, the great Gonzo journalist, stood ankle-deep in snow with a pistol drawn at his Selectric. Woodward and Bernstein were given big-screen immortality by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Halberstam’s style was to have almost no style. In most photos, he’s dressed like an insurance salesman or undertaker: plain tie, white shirt, dark jacket. He may have exhaustively covered hundreds of subjects. He did not let himself become one. On the rare occasion that he wrote about his family, his writing was flat and vague. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a single probing profile, never mind a biography, written about one of the greatest documenters of his time. There certainly was no memoir.
“I don’t think he saw that as the story,” says Julia Halberstam, 36, his daughter. (His wife, Jean, died in 2014.) “He was always really generous with younger reporters in terms of sharing, but the idea of writing a memoir, he didn’t see that as his charge.”
His charge was what he put on the page.
“He could be thin-skinned, and people did sometimes poke fun at him because he was so much larger than life,” remembers Quindlen, who met Halberstam in the 1970s, when she was working at The New York Times. “But nobody ever poked fun at the work, because it was so clear that it was the product of indefatigable work. I don’t recall anybody ever coming back saying, ‘You got this wrong.’ He was a reporter who took pleasure in getting it right.”
He was as competitive as they came. He was also not one to forget a slight.
There are some particularly delicious letters in the Halberstam files at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. In 1999, he blasted then-Talk editor Tina Brown for bungling a previous deal to run an excerpt from his auto industry book, The Reckoning, in 1986.
“It’s thirteen years later — and 44 years since I wrote my first national magazine article — and no editor has ever treated me in so cavalier a way,” he wrote.
Two years later, Steven Brill dared to terminate an assignment by fax.
“I have been working as a journalist and writer for 46 years and no other employer I have ever dealt with has ever behaved in so appalling and disrespectful a manner,” Halberstam wrote.
Then there is the more personal.
Gay Talese told me about Halberstam’s complicated relationship with his older brother.
Michael Halberstam, as he understood it, wanted to be a writer but felt pressure to follow his father’s footsteps into medicine. In the years leading up to his death — Michael was shot in a burglary in his home in 1980 — he published book reviews and features, largely in The New York Times, about health and medicine.
“I don’t know how many pieces had the title Dr. Michael Halberstam, but when they would appear, David would be calling me to complain. ‘I wish he would just be a doctor.’ ”
Talese also told me about his falling out with Halberstam.
In the early ’80s, the two realized they were both courting Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca. But Talese already had been traveling with Iacocca. Because of their friendship, Talese suggested they both drop the subject. Halberstam refused. The disagreement led to a more than decade-long freeze in their relationship. Talese decided not to write his Iacocca book. Halberstam wrote The Reckoning.
“Leo Durocher said he’d knock over his grandmother if she was blocking second base,” Talese says. “I was upset, I was shocked. That this was going to break us up. I believed I was more important to Halberstam than a story. I was wrong.”
Whatever drove Halberstam to work so hard, to question authority so vigorously, drove him from the start.
Bill Kovach, then a young reporter at the Johnson City Press Chronicle in Tennessee, remembers meeting Halberstam in 1959. They were covering the Senate primaries and staying in the same hotel. That night, as he tried to sleep, Kovach heard the pounding sound of typewriter keys through his hotel wall. The next day, he approached Halberstam.
“ ‘David,” Kovach said, “what the hell are you doing all night?”
“I’m working on a great story,” Halberstam said.
Kovach would go on to become the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times and editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But Halberstam would be the pioneer on one of the most important stories of the era, the story of the civil rights movement.
“I knew it was going on, but didn’t think it could amount to anything,” Kovach says. “A bunch of black kids going to the Capitol? It didn’t impress most reporters. But Halberstam. That’s the reason he came South. He was on top of that story before any reporter in Tennessee or any reporter in the South.”
By 1962, Halberstam was working at The New York Times and had been assigned to cover Vietnam. Although he would write books on everything from rowing and firefighters to the media industry, this is where he did his most important work. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for international reporting. The Best and the Brightest, published in 1972, shows off Halberstam’s ability to connect a detailed character study with the bigger picture.
The reader met Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s boy genius defense secretary, with his “hair slicked down in a way that made him look like a Grant Wood subject.”
“Do not, he told his aides, let people brief me orally. If they are going to make a presentation, find out in advance and make them put it on paper. “Why?” an aide asked. A cold look. “Because I can read faster than they can talk.”
That’s the detail. In his account, Halberstam then, with a simple flourish, defined McNamara as a “can-do man in the can-do society, in the can-do era.” Now his central figure represents something larger.
“He didn’t consider things in a vacuum, as something that exists on its own plane,” says Will Schwalbe, one of his former editors. “That ability to contextualize the events and the decisions and the politics was extraordinary, and so needed.”
I met Halberstam once, for an interview in 1999. I was 28, working at a daily newspaper in North Carolina, and he was promoting Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan & the World He Made. It was not his greatest work. The book had been an editor’s idea, not his. And the Bulls star, on the cusp of his first retirement, agreed to sit down with him at the end of the season. Then he reneged.
What I remember, though, is what Halberstam told me when I asked whether he got frustrated when a central figure wouldn’t talk. He told me the best strategy is moving forward. He makes at least one call a day. He also remembers that, sometimes, the 10th man on the bench has more to say than the star. Because the man on the bench is always watching, always listening.
Then there was a more personal act. He may have been ferocious when dealing with his peers or when he felt slighted. And perhaps a no-name reporter 40 years younger did not pose a threat. But Halberstam asked me what I wanted to do in life. I told him, in so many words, I wanted to be like him. To report, to write and to report and write the best stories I could find. He asked me to give him some clips.
I did, and a few weeks later, I got a handwritten postcard from Halberstam telling me to get in touch with Joseph Lelyveld, the managing editor at The New York Times. I never did. I wasn’t ready. But his generosity stuck with me, as did his strategy for overcoming a dead end.
For years, whenever I’ve been working on a story, I remember to make that extra call, that additional interview. You never know when you might find gold. And I think back to the last question I asked him for the piece on the Jordan book: What would you have asked Jordan if he had given you an hour?
“I’d have needed more than an hour.”