"It is not a particularly happy chapter I in his life; he did not serve himself or the country well; he was. there is no kinder or gentler word for it. a fool."
That sentence, devastating in its understatement, is from David Halberstam's 1972 Vietnam War masterpiece. The Best and the Brightest. In this instance, Robert McNamara was the target of Halberstam's unforgiving prose. Other officials would be similarly outed in the course of revealing the machinations and misjudgments that characterized a war that haunts us still.
I read the book shortly after it came out. As both a fledgling reporter and a Marine who had served in Vietnam. I found it riveting. And I was never quite the same again.
By then, I was out of the Marine Corps. Journalism was my new career and The Best and the Brightest showed me just how important it could be when practiced with passion, persistence, and a willingness to speak truth to power. David became the journalist I most admired and hoped to emulate.
It didn't take long for me to realize I had set an impossible goal for myself. David was a big-time writer in 1972; in April 2007 when he died in an automobile crash in Menlo Park. California, at age 73, he was a towering figure in the profession.
By the time The Best and the Brightest was published. David already had won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam dispatches in The New York Times and written three other books, the title of one, The Making of a Quagmire, providing the word that would come to embody that war for many Americans.
David was anything but a one-trick pony. Over the next three-and-a-half decades, he would write with authority about the mass media (The Powers That Be), the automobile industry (The Reckoning), the civil rights movement (The Children), and a tumultuous decade (The Fifties). Those were among what came to be known as his "big" books, the ones along with The Best and the Brightest on which his reputation rested. But he took occasional breathers in which he indulged his love of sports with less weighty efforts about baseball, basketball, football, and competitive rowing.
David started as a newspaperman. Following his graduation from Harvard in 1955. he took a job in Mississippi so he could cover the growing civil rights movement. Years later, according to celebrated military writer Joe Galloway, David was asked if he were ever afraid while reporting in Vietnam. "Oh no." he answered. "I could always sleep at night out with soldiers. Fear is being a 27year-old Jew working for The New York Times covering the civil rights struggle in Mississippi."
I met David in 1980 and we would see each other occasionally in the years that followed. My warmest memory of him dates back to 1994 when he published The Season of '49, about the classic New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox series that concluded that year's American League pennant race. I loved the book; all the Yankee heroes of my boyhood were in it. I wrote David congratulating him on another fine effort and related an embarrassing experience in the men's room at Yankee Stadium when I was a kid. occasioned by a walk-off homer by my favorite player. "Old Reliable" Tommy lleniich. David called from New York and told me I had to come u toil book party he was throwing I at Mickey Mantle's restaurant. Lots of the old Yanks and Sox I will be there, David said.
I no sooner walked into § Mickey's than David raced over and shouted across the room, "Tommy. Tommy, this is the guy I told you about." I looked around just as "Old Reliable." a big smile on his weathered face, threw his still powerful arms around me and pulled me into a bear hug.
David was the best, an approachable legend whose work his colleagues envied, whose friendship we all cherished, whose loss we all deeply mourn.
Mr. Timberg is Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings.