Reporters remember Halberstam in Vietnam

updated 8:04 p.m. ET April 24, 2007

NEW YORK - In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 23, 1963, Associated Press photographer Horst Faas gathered his gear, left his house in Saigon and climbed aboard a U.S. Army helicopter, one of a fleet carrying hundreds of South Vietnamese troops on a combat operation in the Mekong Delta.

He didn’t bother to wake David Halberstam, the tall, rangy New York Times reporter with whom Faas shared the villa, and who was the acknowledged leader of the small foreign press corps covering the early stages of the Vietnam War. Halberstam died Monday from injuries sustained in an auto accident.

The times were tense during the war, with reporters being accused of disloyalty — and worse — for writing about corrupt Saigon officials, incompetent, self-deluding Americans, and South Vietnamese forces that couldn’t defeat the communist Viet Cong insurgents controlling the countryside.

Just three weeks earlier, Halberstam and his colleagues had covered their biggest story yet — a military coup in which President Ngo Dinh Diem had been overthrown and murdered, along with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the much-reviled head of Saigon’s secret police.

Even before that event, acrimony ran so deep that in October, President John F. Kennedy had asked the Times to transfer Halberstam out of Vietnam. The newspaper not only refused but canceled a planned leave by Halberstam to dispel any implication that it would bow to pressure from Washington.

All was routine on this morning sortie into the Delta, Faas recalled, until the pilot of his helicopter told his passengers by intercom that the operation was being aborted. “We have just been told that President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas,” the pilot said.

The long line of choppers reversed course and headed back to Saigon.

“When I got back to the villa, David was still asleep. I woke him up and told him about Kennedy being killed. At first, he didn’t believe it. Then he cried,” Faas recalled on Tuesday, after learning that his friend had been killed in a car crash in Menlo Park, Calif.

‘He could be passionate about many things’
To Faas, who had first met Halberstam while covering a civil war in the Congo in 1960, Halberstam’s tearful reaction to the Kennedy assassination was no surprise.

Video Journalist David Halberstam remembered April 23: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam dies in a car accident Monday. KNTV's Jean Elle reports. NBC News Channel

“He was a serious correspondent, but he could be very passionate about many things,” Faas said in an interview from his home in Munich, Germany. “As a journalist, he was quite different from the rest of us. He believed in his duty to change things.”

As Halberstam himself often recalled, he and his young colleagues in Vietnam initially regarded the U.S. effort to help South Vietnam resist the Viet Cong communist movement and its North Vietnamese sponsors as a reasonable policy, but became disillusioned by lies and corruption.

Although Halberstam left Vietnam in 1964 — a year before the massive infusion of U.S. combat forces that would turn the conflict into what the Vietnamese came to call the “American war” — he remained a much-consulted authority on the subject.

His book, “The Best and the Brightest,” became a literary landmark that traced the origins of U.S. policy and Kennedy administration figures who had formulated and carried it out.

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