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 DAVID HALBERSTAM |
Saluting a great journalist
and personal role model
of TheColumnists.com
When I was about
eight or nine years old, more than six decades ago, my hero was
the little shortstop of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Pee Wee Reese.
We all loved Pee Wee because he was a small player on a big team.
The Dodgers came first in our lives before family, God and country.
Then Jackie Robinson came along and Duke Snider, Carl Erskine,
Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, all the Bums of Brooklyn,
heroes for all of us kids with dreams of playing in Ebbets Field.
Well, it didn’t quite work out that way and soon I was writing
about them instead of playing with them. As a sportswriter I
added a few more names to my list of heroes--Casey Stengel for
his charm, Richie Ashburn for his humor, Marvelous Marv Throneberry
for his silliness, Ron Swoboda for his humanity.
As I moved into my 30s and realized it was awkward to fawn over
athletes I was writing about, I came across a new hero.
David Halberstam was sending dispatches from the ugly war in
Vietnam. The stories were clear, concise, incisive, detailed,
a damn fine read. It was what we all tried for in the typing
profession whether the subject was the war Halberstam covered,
the baseball I covered or the music, theater, mayhem, malarkey
all the others covered.
Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his Vietnam coverage,
the Academy award for scribblers, and wrote the best Washington
book ever, explaining it all in “The Best and the Brightest.”
He was the king of the trade when I first met him in Yankee Stadium
early in the 1970s. He wanted to talk about the Yankees and I
wanted to talk about Vietnam. We compromised. We talked about
the Yankees. He was sick of talking about Vietnam.
He would write a brilliant book about the automobile industry,
the civil rights movement, the meaning of the Fifties and the
impact of journalism in “The Powers That Be,” and then
he would call me again and talk about the Yankees.
He wrote books about baseball like “Summer of ’49,”
“October 1964,” and the “Teammates,” the
warm, rich, touching story of three elderly former members of
the Boston Red Sox--Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr and Dom DiMaggio--traveling
together to Florida to visit a dying Ted Williams for the last
time.
Each time he wrote a book around baseball, as a mental break
from the desperation of seriously correcting a failed American
policy, we got together and talked long hours of the game we
both loved.
Baseball filled a role in both our lives, bringing us back our
younger, more naïve days and connecting us with family,
friends and fantasies of youth.
Writer Merle Miller, in a delightful book about creating a television
pilot, “Only You, Dick Daring,” suggested there are
only 200 real people in the world. If you are lucky enough to
meet one or two of them in a lifetime, it is a bonus.
Halberstam was the best and the brightest I ever met, a fascinating
human being, a man of exceptional kindness, a gentleman who defined
modesty in an egocentric society.
When he died last month in a tragic automobile accident in California,
he was on his way to meet Y. A. Tittle, the famed football quarterback
who played in what became known as The Greatest Game Ever Played,
the 1958 championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New
York Giants. He was preparing a book on the game as a break from
his study of the Korean War.
He had spoken at the University of California the night before
and inspired young journalists into pursuing excellence and following
their dreams to the printed page.
Journalism has been taking a beating in recent years from one
scandal after another, from one money-grabbing event to another,
losing the romance most of us journalistic old timers used as
an excuse for pursuing the profession.
Through all the deceit he witnessed, through all the lies he
was told, through all the phoniness he encountered, Halberstam
never lost the most significant element of journalism, its constitutional
guarantees to provide the truth.
Whether it was Johnny Pesky talking of how much he loved and
admired Ted Williams or an amateur sculler explaining the joys
of slashing through the waters of a cold river or exposing a
politico in another fraud, Halberstam could do it better than
anyone else.
He made music with his words. He elevated the passions of journalism
into a majestic art form. He explained how truth was the definitive
measure of printed words.
I had a press conference a few years back for a book I wrote
on Yankee icon Mickey Mantle with Bill Liederman, owner of Mickey
Mantle’s restaurant in Manhattan.
Liederman’s mother, an intellectual snob, wouldn’t
show for her own son’s first book despite the impressive
list of sports celebrities listed as guests. Then she spotted
one name on the guest list and agreed to show. It was the name
of David Halberstam.
“For him I’ll go out of my way,” she told her
son.
For David Halberstam we would all go out of our way. When I count
the special people I have met in my life on the fingers of one
hand, I start with David
It is not as sad that we lost him as it is joyous that we had
him.
©2007 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The photo of David Halberstam is courtesy of Wikipedia.
This column first posted May 14, 2007.
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