FBI kept tabs on Halberstam for years
NEW YORK - The FBI tracked the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam for more than two decades, according to newly released documents.
Students at the City University of New York's graduate school of journalism obtained the FBI documents by filing a Freedom of Information Act request.
The FBI monitored Halberstam's reporting, and at times his personal life, from at least the mid-1960s until at least the late '80s, the documents state. The agency released only 62 pages of a 98-page dossier on the writer.
Halberstam won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his coverage of the Vietnam War while working as a reporter for The New York Times. In 1972, he wrote "The Best and the Brightest," a best-selling book critical of US involvement in Southeast Asia. He died in an April 2007 car crash in Menlo Park, Calif., at the age of 73.
It is unclear when the FBI began monitoring Halberstam, though the first documents made public date from 1965, when he was a Times correspondent in Poland during the Cold War.
The agency kept tabs on Halberstam's reporting there and his first marriage, to Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska, the documents show.
In 1971, FBI agents considered interviewing Halberstam, according to the documents. They don't say why agents wanted to talk to him or whether they ever did. The last document released is dated 1987.
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