Writer Halberstam is killed in car crash

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, a resourceful reporter and elegant writer who brought war, politics, journalism, sports, and other contemporary topics vividly to life, died yesterday in a car crash in Northern California.

Mr. Halberstam, who was 73, was killed in Menlo Park south of San Francisco when another vehicle broadsided the car in which he was a passenger. Mr. Halberstam was declared dead at the scene. The driver of his car, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, and the driver of the other car suffered minor injuries.

Mr. Halberstam was reportedly on his way to interview former New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle for a book he was writing about the 1958 NFL championship between Tittle's Giants and the Baltimore Colts in what many refer to as the greatest football game ever played.

Jean Halberstam, his wife, learned about his death at about 5:45 p.m., when two police officers came to their Manhattan apartment.

"He would like to be remembered as an historian and particularly remembered for his generosity to his peers and young people choosing the field of journalism," she said yesterday.

A best-selling practitioner of long-form narrative non-fiction, Mr. Halberstam had just finished correcting the galleys of what will be his 21st book, "The Coldest Winter," about battles in the Korean War in the winter of 1950 and 1951. The 700-plus page book, which he worked on for 10 years, is scheduled to be published by Hyperion in September.

"He considered it the best work he has done since 'The Best and the Brightest,' " Jean Halberstam said, referring to his 1972 book about US government leaders during the Vietnam era.

"The Best and the Brightest" established Mr. Halberstam's reputation as a chronicler of power -- how it was accrued and used, whatever the arena and whoever the protagonists.

A Harvard University graduate and longtime fixture of Nantucket's summer community, Mr. Halberstam first attracted acclaim covering the civil rights movement for a small Mississippi newspaper. Hired as a correspondent for the New York Times, he was dispatched to Vietnam in 1962, where, at age 30, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting two years later for reporting that often rankled those in power within the government and military. The Kennedy administration tried to pressure the Times to transfer him from the war zone.

Lance Morrow, a book writer and longtime essayist for Time magazine, said Mr. Halberstam's reporting during the Vietnam War delivered "a terrific object lesson in the journalistic importance of being at the place and seeing what was actually happening."

"What he brought to that story was something tremendous, which was the testimony of somebody who was there on the ground, seeing it," Morrow said. "Before the Pentagon saw it, before Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara and the rest of them saw the truth of what was going on there, Halberstam was reporting it."

Mr. Halberstam wrote about subjects as diverse as Robert F. Kennedy, the American media, Michael Jordan, the Japanese auto industry, and a pair of local sports legends, Ted Williams and Bill Belichick, the latter dissected in the 2006 book "The Education of a Coach."

"One of his greatest assets, I think, was his gift as a storyteller," said Morrow. "He was sort of a bardic storyteller. He wasn't a careful or refined writer. The story would just come out of him in a tumble when he would saturate himself in a subject. He had this wonderful novelistic sense of storytelling, of character, of atmosphere, of anecdote."

Many who knew Mr. Halberstam from the wide circles in which he traveled reacted to his death with sadness and shock.

"Oh my God. What a gigantic loss," said Red Sox president Larry Lucchino last night at Fenway Park.

Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky recalled spending time with Mr. Halberstam during the reporting of "Teammates," a book about a quartet of Red Sox players -- Williams, Pesky, Dominic DiMaggio, and Bobby Doerr -- whose friendship deepened during the decades after they retired.

"He was a great orator and writer," Pesky said last night, adding, "He fell in love with Dominic, who was definitely the smartest of all of us."

George Mitrovich, a former press secretary for Robert Kennedy, called Mr. Halberstam "one of the most important journalists of our time. All of us who care about issues, about our country, about the profession of journalism, about the art of writing, are lessened by David's passing." Mr. Halberstam was born April 10, 1934, in New York City. His father was a surgeon in the military and his mother was a teacher. The family moved around the country during his childhood, spending time in Texas, Minnesota and Connecticut.

At Harvard, Mr. Halberstam was managing editor of the Harvard Crimson newspaper.

He quit daily journalism in 1967 and began to write books. Other books included "The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era," "The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy," "The Powers That Be," and "The Breaks of the Game."

The best-seller, "War in a Time of Peace," about American involvement in the Persian Gulf was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

His "The Summer of '49" detailed one of the greatest pennant races between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees and the central role baseball played in postwar America.

In a Globe interview published when "Teammates" appeared several years ago, Mr. Halberstam spoke about how and why he chose to shift from such weighty topics as Vietnam and the Persian Gulf to the quotidian concerns of a baseball season or NFL coach.

"Writers don't get sabbaticals," he noted, "but you could come off a hard, serious book and do a sports book and be operative from day one."

Last night, Belichick reflected on being a subject of a Halberstam book.

"It was a privilege and honor to watch David practice his craft and an even greater one to call him a friend," Belichick said in a statement. "David was as warm, considerate, intelligent, interesting and accomplished a person as I have ever met and his loss is heartbreaking."

In an interview earlier this month with the Associated Press, Mr. Halberstam spoke about his reporting in Vietnam and the role of journalists in a democracy.

"We had a great story, which we knew and we had a lock on the truth because we had such great sources. When for a variety of reasons -- a flawed, deeply flawed policy -- the government starts lying, that is when independent journalism really matters."

The idea that somewhere before it is a big story that there is some young person . . . putting themselves on the line morally, ethically, journalistically, that is a great thing," Mr. Halberstam said. "I mean, that is what a free society is about."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Halberstam leaves a daughter, Julia, a schoolteacher.

Globe staff writers David Abel, Gordon Edes, and Don Aucoin contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used.