Halberstam: The best and the brightest of war reporters

LET THEM SAY of David Halberstam that he set the bar for what a reporter's job should be in speaking truth to power in wartime 45 years ago -- a mark to which the subsequent generations, and generations yet to come, will aspire.

When death came, Halberstam was doing what he loved best, reporting, to which his more than a score of book titles attests. His interests ranged from the life of lonely rowers in an underappreciated sport to the "The Best and the Brightest," his devastating tome on how so many senior officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administration could get their country into such trouble in Vietnam.

It was in Indochina that the Halberstam legacy was born. In the early '60s there were few American reporters stationed in Saigon. The Kennedy administration's effort to shore up the sagging South Vietnamese regime was in trouble when David Halberstam arrived for The New York Times.

There were other reporters there who excelled: Neil Sheehan, whose "Bright Shining Lie" became a Vietnam classic, Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett who, along with Halberstam, won Pulitzers. But because of the weight and importance of the Times, and because of Halberstam's exuberant and forceful personality, he came to symbolize the era. I would put the ratio of that equation at 20 percent Times, 80 percent Halberstam. He came to be the most celebrated war reporter since World War II's Ernie Pyle.

Together, Halberstam & Co. came to realize that the administration and the American mission in Saigon was spinning a web of deceit on how well the war was going. The Saigon regime was mired in corruption and hadn't the will to confront the more inspired and better organized Communist insurgents. Halberstam began to report the war for what it was, which the administration hated -- culminating in President Kennedy's famously crude attempt to get The New York Times to reassign him.

The American mission in Saigon kept trying to tell Halberstam and his colleagues to "get on the team," to be more patriotic, in effect, to join the propaganda effort by writing more favorable stories about how the war was going. Although there had been reporters who had found fault with other war efforts, few had been as outspoken and blunt as Halberstam. Indeed, some of his older colleagues saw this as inexcusable negativism. Right after Pearl Harbor things had looked grim, but the national press remained upbeat to support the war effort, they argued.

Halberstam would have none of that and stuck to his guns. The subsequent failure of Vietnam justified his early efforts.

My own time in Indochina came after Halberstam had left, but his long shadow was evident. It was not acceptable to simply take the word of a briefing officer, or even the general in command. It was necessary to get out of Saigon, to go into the countryside, to talk to Vietnamese and less senior Americans in the field who would invariably be more truthful than the party-liners at headquarters.

Today we are in another war that differs from Vietnam in everything except the essentials. As the Vietnam War was born in the lie of the Tonkin Gulf incident, so was the Iraq war born of the falsehood that it was about weapons of mass destruction. The lies and deceits about our current lost war have already exceeded anything seen in Vietnam. The proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel," which so marked the American government's self-deception in Vietnam, is being glimpsed today by American officials who should, and perhaps do, know better.

Today we have a shelf of best and the brightest-style books, by authors such as George Packer, Ron Suskind, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Anthony Shadid, and others. Each owes a debt to Halberstam as they walk in his footsteps.

David Halberstam was often accused of lacking patriotism. The opposite was the truth. Later, as the war in Vietnam dragged on for too long, there came some reporters who felt the war itself was evil and that America was wicked to pursue it. But Halberstam believed in the effort and wanted the United States to prevail. It was just that he couldn't stand the dishonesty, which he thought was harming the effort. He wanted his country to do better.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.