David Halberstam was an acclaimed American author, journalist, and historian. He was well-known for his work covering a wide range of topics, including politics, business, media, sports journalism, American culture, the Vietnam War, history, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Born in 1934, Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955. He began his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi, and later moved to The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee, where he covered the early stages of the American Civil Rights Movement. In the mid-1960s, Halberstam reported on the Vietnam War for The New York Times, gathering material for his book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. His reporting on the war earned him a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964, a George Polk Award, and the prestigious title of being the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 30.
Halberstam's most famous work, The Best and the Brightest, was published in 1972, focusing on the paradox that those who shaped the U.S. war effort in Vietnam were some of the most intelligent, well-connected, and self-confident men in America. This book critically examined the role of these individuals in the failure of the United States' Vietnam policy. Following the success of The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam published The Powers That Be in 1979, providing profiles of influential figures in media, such as William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, and Phil Graham of The Washington Post.
In the latter part of his career, Halberstam turned his attention to sports journalism. He published several books on the subject, including The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at the Bill Walton and the 1978 Portland Trailblazers basketball team, and Playing for Keeps, an ambitious book on Michael Jordan. Halberstam's prolific writing career spanned several decades, with him publishing two books in the 1960s, three books in the 1970s, four books in the 1980s, and six books in the 1990s. He continued to write and publish in the 2000s, before his untimely death in a car crash on April 23, 2007, in Menlo Park, California.