Reporters remember Halberstam in Vietnam

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‘He had profound moral and physical courage’
Even after branching out with some 21 books on other topics ranging from “The Fifties” to sports, Halberstam remained the man who had most symbolized the aggressive press coverage that revealed the first signs of fiasco and failure in Vietnam.

“He was the institutional memory of the Vietnam War. I think he understood it better than any other journalist,” said Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize covering Vietnam for the AP in 1966, later worked for CNN and is currently a guest lecturer in journalism in China.

“We were being denounced by those on high,” said Neil Sheehan, who was the bureau chief for United Press International in Saigon. “There was tremendous pressure. David never buckled under it at all. ... He had profound moral and physical courage.”

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Halberstam and Sheehan were best of friends in the Saigon press corps, and Halberstam was said to have been furious when Pulitzers were awarded in 1964 to himself and to AP chief correspondent Malcolm Browne, but not to Sheehan, for coverage of the war and the anti-Diem coup.

But when AP’s Arnett was roughed up by plainclothes police while covering a Buddhist demonstration in Saigon, it was Halberstam who went “wading in, arms swinging,” and forced the thugs to turn tail, according to an account by A. J. Langguth, in the 2000 book, “Our Vietnam.”

Browne, now retired in Vermont, said Halberstam was “one of the bright lights of our profession,” and a good friend to all.

Halberstam was not only a prolific author of books, including many best sellers, he produced many magazine articles and was much in demand to write forewords and prefaces for other writers’ books. In one foreword, in a book about photographers killed in combat, he examined why people risk their lives to cover wars, as he and his colleagues had done 40 years ago.

“It is really about doing something, for all the veneer of ego, that is larger than self,” he wrote. People “who may have thought themselves weak and fragile and unsure of themselves when young, are surprised to find that covering something so important gives them not merely purpose and focus, but courage as well.”

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