Headlines about football in the 1960s ran side by side with dispatches from the war in Southeast Asia. Dark newspaper tales of jungle warfare, internecine guerrillas, and befuddled generals, once American heroes who had defeated Hitler but now drowning in a worthless and godforsaken place called Vietnam, were echoed in Baltimore by stories of the superior but sad Colts improbably defeated far from home.
Football in America provided an outlet for a fundamental human urge, the need to dominate and humiliate one’s neighbors. Within the game the nation’s metropolises were city-states, stadiums were walls that would repel or fall, and game fields were the battlefields where triumph or disaster unfolded. They were modern-day Athenses and Spartas speaking the same language and worshipping the same gods yet inexplicably at “war” every Sunday.
The metaphor was more urgent and poignant in Baltimore than it was in most places. Baltimore wasn’t glamorous like New York or a place of great consequence like Washington. It wasn’t as large as Philadelphia or as celebrated as San Francisco. It was often the butt of cruel jokes by other East Coasters who merely cruised through it on I-95, holding their noses at the smell of the smokestacks and at the sight of the grimy workers who lived and labored beneath them.
Unitas didn’t exactly change that perception, but in the Sunday wars his missiles made Baltimore the lone superpower. He was an ancient warrior wielding the javelin with the skill and precision to strike from afar, and he was a Cold Warrior, a launcher of state-of-the-art weapons that could end your civilization.
Because he had been a long shot, and because his city was so reviled by outsiders yet so utterly sacred to its residents, it wasn’t hard for fans to view him as a David, improbably defending his Jerusalem against hordes of the others. His right arm, of course, was nothing more than a sling.
The helmets, tactics, uniforms, and violence all made the game seem like combat, though football was not war at all, far from it. Americans were acutely aware of that because their sons were participants in a perverse lottery that dragged them from their homes when they were barely out of footie pajamas and taught them how to kill. Many returned irretrievably broken. More than fifty thousand of them never returned at all.
The war that raged on while the football games played on shared very little in common with previous American conflicts. It was dissimilar in almost every way to World War II. There was no obvious starting point. There was no villainous face to which all the blame could be attached. There was no real threat or danger to the United States. And there were no clear goals to be achieved.
Right alongside the boys who went to fight were other young men who went to tell the stories: writers, reporters, and broadcasters who would deliver the news of America’s successes or failures. Many of them reported what they were told, but one in particular reported what he actually saw. In the end he would change everything.
That man was David Halberstam.
Halberstam was born in New York City and raised in the suburbs, first in Connecticut and, later, in the New York suburb of Yonkers. He was the son of Jewish parents. His father was an army surgeon, and his mother adored him so completely, she imbued him with the massive ego and utter confidence that were his hallmarks to everyone who knew him.
He had the good fortune to graduate high school not long after quotas limiting Jewish students at Harvard were lifted. So he took his brilliant mind to Cambridge, Massachusetts, but being a pioneer wasn’t entirely gratifying. He didn’t belong to a single club at Harvard. His free time was spent holding jobs he found demeaning, including cleaning the rooms of his fellow students.
Despite his setbacks and disappointments, Halberstam found his life’s work at Harvard writing for the Crimson, the school newspaper. His talent and passion were evident even then. In a place filled with brilliant thinkers and writers, he eventually rose to the position of managing editor.
After school he went south, first working at the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi and then, more significantly, covering the civil rights movement for the Nashville Tennessean.
He seemed to be in a hurry to define his legacy, and while he was still in his twenties he started the significant work that would change his life and in a very real sense change the course of human events. The New York Times hired him, and in 1962 they made him a war correspondent and sent him to Vietnam.
If possible, he was less welcome in Indochina than he had been at Harvard. Just as the circumstances of the war were something no one had exactly seen before, Halberstam’s approach to covering it was also unprecedented. He refused to cozy up to power and declined to take the word of American generals at face value in an era when their prestige was unquestioned. In fact, he contradicted them at press conferences and in his dispatches for the Times, calling into question their honesty and integrity. Even worse, when Paul Harkins, the U.S. commanding general, approached him at a cocktail party, Halberstam refused to shake his hand.
The government didn’t take his insults or, more precisely, the uncomfortable truths he told lying down. Eventually, Harkins and Frederick Nolting, the American ambassador in Saigon, turned to smearing Halberstam, insisting to all who would listen that he was a liar. He even got on the wrong side of the president. Kennedy, seeing his war undermined with every word Halberstam pecked out on his portable typewriter, insisted that the Times fire him. But the ownership backed their man. Not only did they retain Halberstam, but they also refused to grant him vacation time, lest anyone get the idea that Kennedy was successfully intimidating them. The New York Times wanted it to be crystal clear that David Halberstam wasn’t going anywhere.
Halberstam was not in the least bit obsequious. His relative youth and position could not be exploited by power to intimidate him. Kennedy’s glare in his direction did not prevent him from doing his job and reporting the truth that he found. “Halberstam didn’t have an idea that he was currying to the Kennedys,” said his close friend Gay Talese. “He didn’t give a shit. He didn’t care. He did not want to be in their little Harvard club. He went to Harvard, sure, but he did not want to knuckle under or praise at their altar. He didn’t want that.”
Neil Sheehan, Halberstam’s friend and journalistic colleague in Saigon, described Halberstam as an indefatigable worker, a reporter who would fight through crippling exhaustion and work all night long at the typewriter to meet a deadline. Sheehan also described him as a man whose “physical courage in action matched his moral courage.”
Halberstam went out into the field on patrol with the soldiers. He saw for himself what was happening in battle. In this he won respect. The Mekong Delta troopers initiated him into their “Blackfoot Club,” a society that could be joined only if you traversed the rice paddies where the mud was so thick and pervasive, it seeped through even military boots and dyed the skin of the feet a dark and filthy black.
That hard work and intensity paid off. The young man whose credibility was questioned by the president of the United States was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. By then Halberstam was just thirty years old, and Kennedy was dead.
Gay Talese, another reporter at the Times with big ambitions, shared a lot in common with Halberstam, not the least of which was a desire to stretch the boundaries of journalism. Talese, who started as a brilliant sportswriter, had slightly different goals than his friend. He did not want to write for a newspaper, per se, but instead wanted to be a writer at a newspaper. In other words, he had literary ambitions for his nonfiction prose.
He and Halberstam where changing the medium. Talese wrote long, unflattering magazine profiles of American heroes. In one, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” he portrayed the beloved singer as self-absorbed, rude, and controlling. In another he eviscerated the legend of Joltin’ Joe and showed “the great DiMaggio,” as Hemingway called him in The Old Man and the Sea, as little more than a bundle of weaknesses and insecurities. That was some contrast to the image the public had of the indomitable Yankee Clipper, the successful suitor of Marilyn Monroe, who willed his team to so many pennants and World Series championships.
These pieces, so hurtful yet so obviously true, were gripping to read and in a sense courageous for showing beloved figures as they were, not as how the public wished them to be. In essence, by exposing the frailties and deficiencies of the great, Talese was doing much the same thing with popular-culture icons that Halberstam was doing with politicians and generals.
Halberstam’s work was not only engrossing but having a profound effect on his country. By exposing the lies behind Kennedy’s war, he was risking everything. He was standing in direct opposition to credible men who, in the case of the generals, had risked their lives over and over for their country. Others were either elected to or appointed to high office. All of them claimed Halberstam was a liar or a subversive or both. They suggested he was doing the enemy’s work.
That Halberstam was ultimately proved right not only vindicated him and catapulted his career but also called into question the nation’s belief in the veracity of its most consequential men. It was a loss of faith that would gain momentum as the decade careened on.
So what were these important military men and political leaders all lying about? Only the reasons young men were snatched away from their families and sent halfway around the world to kill; only about the atrocities their country was committing; only about America’s realistic chances for victory.
“The fact that [Halberstam] was right was beside the point,” Gay Talese said. “He thought he was right before [other] people thought he was right. He had an awful lot of confidence.”
Talese felt that Halberstam’s almost unbelievable ability to stand up to power at such a young age came from (where else?) his mother.
“Some of these guys grew up with mothers who were really cheerleaders,” Talese said. “And their sons are seduced by their mother’s high opinion. They go far. Blanche Halberstam [David’s mother] was a major figure in his life. She was the supreme cheerleader. She adored him. And she thought David was the greatest figure in the world, and he believed it. She thought he was Moses, for Christ’s sake.”
The confidence that Halberstam had in the face of the generals was also present in front of a far more imposing figure, the blank page.
Talese marveled at the speed with which his friend worked. “He was enormously fast,” he said. “I’m ten times slower than [he was]. He wrote very, very, very quickly. He didn’t have a lot of self-doubt, which I do, for example, and even Tom Wolfe does a little bit. But David Halberstam had no self-doubt. Whatever sentence he wrote, he thought, ‘That is what the story is.’ He didn’t question himself. I once wrote that Halberstam had the ego of Charles de Gaulle.
“I saw him write pieces for magazines or parts of books he was writing,” Talese said. “He would sit there at that little typewriter he had, banging away. Even if there were errors, he didn’t bother correcting the typos. He would do it later. I would want to correct the typos right away. Not him. He would just go ahead. His page was sloppy. My page was very careful. When I finished a page, it was pretty much ready for the printer. Halberstam needed many, many phases of correcting, typos and other things. But it didn’t bother him. He had this tremendous confidence to go on. Many people who are more self-doubting might say, ‘Well, maybe I should try to get it right because maybe it is not quite right.’ He always thought it was quite right.”
The full expression of Halberstam’s self-confidence didn’t come until a few years later, when he wrote his second Vietnam book. This one focused less on the war in the field and more on the men back home who disastrously conceived of an adventure that was doomed to failure. His book was called The Best and the Brightest.
The title referred to the men whom President John F. Kennedy had handpicked to advise him in his new administration. This eclectic group included many men who, because of their high positions of power and especially because of their proximity to the Vietnam adventure, were household names in America for the entire decade of the ’60s. Their ranks included cabinet members and advisers, such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretaries of Defense Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, and National Security Special Assistant McGeorge Bundy, to name a few of the more prominent names. By and large, they were Ivy League educated and brilliant. For the most part, they were career academics, college presidents and professors, or business successes. They constituted a core of the most highly respected individuals in the nation and were regarded as one of the most talented teams any president had ever assembled. Yet they inevitably led the nation to a ruinous war that was anything but inevitable. They went to work every day and made the disastrous decisions for ten years that killed, maimed, divided, and destroyed. Their ideas tore America apart, separating fathers and sons, young and old, affluent and working-class poor.
Though this group and Kennedy made the terrible decisions, they didn’t make them in a vacuum. French colonialists pulled them into the quagmire. Republicans who had so easily and expertly attached the “soft on communism” label pushed them. And then, of course, there was Joe McCarthy, who, just a few years before, proclaimed to find communists, like termites, infesting their ranks.
Kennedy himself, though initially skeptical of going to war in Indochina, finally was the one to initiate engagement, and for the very worst of reasons. Convinced by Averill Harriman, one of his men, to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, he walked like a baby into a disaster.
Though Kennedy had been a hero in World War II and a congressman and a senator before assuming the presidency, Khrushchev viewed him as young, inexperienced, and especially soft. This view was bolstered by Kennedy’s first embarrassing experience standing up to communism, in Cuba, at a place called the Bay of Pigs. That’s where, in April 1961, Kennedy’s Central Intelligence Agency supported an invasion of the newly communist country by a paramilitary group of dissident Cubans. All along Kennedy had hoped to act subversively and deny U.S. involvement. Eventually, however, he got cold feet. At the last minute he failed to back up the dissidents with the American military help he had promised for the invasion. The result was a humiliating defeat that was aggrandized by the Cuban communists to the humiliation of the United States and especially the Kennedy administration. In the end the failed invasion only weakened Kennedy and buttressed Castro’s revolution.
Tensions were high over Soviet aggressions in Europe, especially Berlin, but Kennedy had the bravado to go into the room with Khrushchev, his more experienced counterpart solo. The president started the meeting on a conciliatory note. “I propose to tell you what I can do, and what I can’t do, what my problems and possibilities are and then you can do the same.”
Halberstam wrote that Khrushchev responded with venomous reproach. “The reaction was astonishing, a violent attack on the United States, on its international imperialism, but particularly its presence in Berlin. . . . The missiles would fly, the tanks would roll, they must not doubt his word.”
The meeting was a disaster for Kennedy and the United States. Khrushchev dominated the personal encounter with the president, who felt he lost a key battle.
“I think [Khrushchev] did it because of the Bay of Pigs,” Kennedy told his friend influential journalist Scotty Reston off the record. “I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it, and didn’t see it through, had no guts. So he just beat hell out of me. So I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.”
The place for that action, Halberstam showed, was Vietnam. One disaster led only to another, ad infinitum. So many lives lost and ruined not because of an imminent danger to the United States or because of a gathering storm of threat. It happened only because one powerful man had humiliated another.
Halberstam’s book was so thorough, so brilliantly researched, so ingeniously conceived, so moral in its perspective that it begged one important though silent question: If it was about a “club” of men who were the nation’s finest and most intelligent, how could Halberstam himself have been excluded from it?
Halberstam, too, was a Harvard man with an unassailable work ethic. He was articulate and engaged. He would have been an exceptional addition to any team who valued excellence in statecraft, yet he was an outsider. It was a position some thought was inevitable for him owing to one simple fact—he was a Jew.
The Catholic Kennedy often spoke of feeling like an outsider himself in a society dominated by Protestants. But as Talese pointed out, that was nothing compared to being a Jew.
“McNamara and those Kennedy people, including Kennedy, who went to Harvard, were of a different stripe than Halberstam,” Talese said. “The great thing about Halberstam and the great thing about Jewish journalism, they brought to journalism a sense of mistrust of power, experienced from their ancestry of being abused by, excluded by, power. It brought to journalism of that period a point of view of the outside in, by people who were very, very unimpressed with power. And Halberstam was very unimpressed with those smart white guys like McNamara, typically, but the whole rest of them, Mac Bundy and all those guys.
“As far as reporting, Halberstam was always tough, and he was always willing to take an unpopular position because he felt his views were not being heard strongly enough, because he was a bit of a contrarian,” Talese said.
“Halberstam, on the contrary, was fighting the generals and the general position of the State Department and the White House all the way through that war. He led [Neil] Sheehan (also a future Pulitzer winner) and numbers of others,” Talese said. “He was working on the New York Times. If he was working at the Baltimore Sun, you never would have heard of David Halberstam. But he was working at the New York Times, and that’s the biggest paper in terms of international coverage, and here he’s saying, ‘We’re losing the war.’ And the generals are saying, ‘No, we’re not. We’re winning the war.’ And Robert McNamara was saying, ‘No, we’re not. We’re winning the war.’
“The Best and the Brightest, the best book he wrote, was about the reputation of these so-called experts and bullshitters in our government,” he said.
Halberstam’s book about Vietnam dominated the New York Times best-seller list for the better part of a year and became, in its era, the centerpiece of intellectual discussion. Yet despite this towering contribution to American letters, Halberstam was not above criticism. In his speed to write and demonstrate facts, his prose style suffered. His sometimes-lusterless pages were in the crosshairs for the cruel attacks aimed at him.
Writing for the New York Review of Books, author and noted critic Mary McCarthy dismissed him as she described his work as an effective soporific.
“I attribute my stupefied boredom partly to Halberstam’s prose, which combines a fluency of cliché with deafness to idiom and grammatical incomprehensibility,” she wrote with a switchblade. “Yet I have read many dull and badly written books about Vietnam with no particular effort. If Halberstam’s was such a grind to get through, there must be other reasons.”
All criticism aside, the things Messrs. Halberstam and Talese revealed about American heroes, patriots, and priorities uncovered corrosion in the nation during what was supposed to be “the American Century.” They didn’t invent the corrupt leaders or create those deeply flawed heroes. They weren’t the policy makers who engaged in inglorious war or defended its gauzy lies or continued to turn the sausage grinder of death. They were merely energetic and engaging enough to present things that others didn’t have the industry or talent to see, let alone show. In the process they stripped away American denial.
If it was all terribly unseemly, like an injudicious man telling his neighbors about his family problems, it was also true and necessary.
Before men like Halberstam and Talese, America was under the misapprehension that it was an all-white country, that it had unlimited power that could be exported anywhere to do anything to anyone who didn’t also have a nuclear arsenal, that its heroes and leaders were sacrosanct and flawless, that marriage was inviolable and average Americans were sexually moderate.
Halberstam’s and Talese’s work disabused Americans of all these self-generated lies. If the facts were hard for a repressed nation to swallow . . . well, at least the delusions were gone.
The Best and the Brightest, brilliant and flawed though it may have been, was nothing if not a primer on how the mighty lose.