David Halberstam Dead in a Car Crash, Which Is Bullshit

Permit us to bloviate some on the death of David Halberstam today in a car crash, which is utter bullshit considering that the guy reported from fricking Vietnam and he dies in a traffic accident in San Mateo (the car that hit him driven by, in a terrible irony, a Berkeley journalism student) (actually, I'm an idiot, his driver was a Berkeley student, so there's no irony, just terribleness).

Halberstam's Summer of '49, about the 1949 Red Sox and Yankees rivalry, was the first sports book we ever read that didn't have "My First Book of" in the title. The guy brought great writing and terrific interviewing skills to sports books in a way that hadn't been done before, and raised the bar on sports books...Moneyball, Friday Night Lights--it's Halberstam's legacy that smart persons write seriously about athletics.

But his greatest work was The Best and the Brightest, a harsh, almost Heller-esque portrait of the Kennedy executive branch blundering that led us into Vietnam (don't believe the Oliver Stone hype, Vietnam was as much Kennedy's war as Iraq is GWB's).

The structure of this work is just vicious--he spends about 250 pages describing how brilliant men like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were, how they'd had nothing but success in their lives, how their friends and even enemies were in awe of their stunning intellects, then about 600 pages demonstrating how royally they fucked up in Vietnam. In his role as a disembodied narrator, Halberstam doesn't stoop to snark, which would've been so easy (hence, why we employ it). Instead, he lets Bundy and McNamara and Dean Rusk hang themselves with their own words. Reading this book affirmed our suspicion that great government mistakes aren't the result of conspiracy, but of that human frailty with which you and I and everyone we know are all too familiar--simple hubris.

When he died, Halberstam was on his way to interview former Giants QB Y.A. Tittle--Halberstam was writing a book about the 1958 NFL championship game, sometimes called "the greatest game ever played." Sounds like it would've been awesome. Sometimes we hate everything.

UPDATE: The Times' Steve Kelley wrote a terrific personal remembrance of Halberstam, with whom Kelley covered the 79-80 Blazers, Halberstam wrote The Breaks of the Game. It includes this nearly unbelievable detail:

During that season with the Trail Blazers, occasionally he would be invited into private meetings, by coaches or front-office people. He always refused. If no other reporters were invited into the Blazers' inner sanctum, David wouldn't go.

That's the kind of integrity he had.