Turning Journalism Into History: A Talk by David Halberstam

Graduate School of Journalism
University of California-Berkeley
Apr. 21, 2007

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Dean Orville Schell: It is such a pleasure to have David Halberstam here. For many, many decades, we've been reading his writing… In many ways he is sort of a chronicler of the last half-century of the American people and life. David started at Harvard, was at the Crimson, went from there to the Daily Times-Leader in Mississippi and then the national scene, where he gave the scoop down south. And then ultimately ended up at The New York Times and went to Vietnam. And his odyssey through various subjects is quite interesting, because he hasn't been stuck in any stations of the cross. He's covered Vietnam, he's covered the auto industry, civil rights, Japan—remember back in the days when Japan was like China—it could do no wrong and everybody else was just scrambling around them to figure out the riddle of their success. He's covered baseball, football… I believe David has 16 books.

Halberstam: It's about to be 21. (Laughter)

Schell: Many of them I know you all have read. They include The Making of a Quagmire, his book on Vietnam. It really was a tipping point in that struggle. It seems like a long time ago even now as many similarities have been cropping up with our struggle in Iraq. The Best and Brightest, The Powers That Be, The Summer of '49, War in a Time of Peace. His next book is on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter, which will be coming out in a few months.

So join me in welcoming David. He is going to be talking about the role of history in journalism. (Applause)

Halberstam: Thank you very much, Orville, and thanks to all of you all for having me here today. I gather you have had a good, rich number of sessions. Let me see if I can erase the good feeling… [Laughter]

It's my 21st book and this one is about the Korean War, that notorious black hole in our contemporary history—especially the miscalculation, which led to the extension of that war to fighting with the Chinese. The book is called The Coldest Winter. I'm very proud of it. I'm 73 years old, and I think it's my best book.

I thought that I might talk a little bit about a book that I wrote some 35 years ago, which allowed me to cross over from journalism to being both journalist and historian, The Best and the Brightest. I sort of had a foot in both camps, and I probably was accepted by neither—certainly the historians watch people like me warily. Sean Wilentz, the rather well-known, rather gifted historian at Princeton once did a 4,000 word fulmination against David McCullough, one of his books, and took time out to whack me. He said that one of my books, The '50s—that the book had been defeated. And I wrote him a letter saying, "how do you defeat a book?" [Laughter]

You put it out there, people buy it. This particular book sold about 250,000 copies, I think it was, in hardcover. About 400,000 copies in book clubs. It did very well in paperback. It had an eight-part, very good History Channel documentary. And I thought, that was really a pretty good run for a book. But anyway—there's always a little wariness on the part of the more classically trained historian. At any rate, I thought I'd talk a little bit tonight about The Best and the Brightest, and why I did it and then perhaps I could give you some guidance. And then the Dean and I will have a conversation about walking this narrow tightrope that I do, and then we can take questions from you.

The Best and the Brightest reminds me of moments when John Kennedy was a young man running for the presidency, and a young woman asked him how he became a war hero, and he said that it was "entirely involuntary"—that the Japanese had sunk his ship. And in a way, that's what happened to me. I went out to cover a war and then it didn't work. In the sadness of it, in the wreckage of that war, I had a need for better answers than I had come up with.