David Halberstam Quotes

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.
David Halberstam
Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.
David Halberstam
Do you know what the greatest test is? Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?
David Halberstam
Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ...McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history.The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.
David Halberstam
David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.
David Halberstam
The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?
David Halberstam
Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing
David Halberstam
Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge.
David Halberstam
Gen. Matthew Ridgeway "intended not to impose his will on his men, but to allow the men under him to find something in themselves that would make them more confident, more purposeful fighting men. It was their confidence in themselves that would make them fight well, he believed, not so much their belief in him. His job was to keep them to find that quality in themselves.
David Halberstam
He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.
David Halberstam
[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing t
David Halberstam
What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
David Halberstam
One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.
David Halberstam
his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,
David Halberstam
If he (George Keenan)felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when not being listened to.
David Halberstam
the ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter’s career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.
David Halberstam
The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.
David Halberstam
He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.
David Halberstam
If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.
David Halberstam
Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.
David Halberstam
he was almost joyously what he had always been, a lot of gee whiz, it was all new and fresh even when surely he had seen much of it before, and it was as if he took delight in not having been changed externally by all that he had seen.
David Halberstam
It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.
David Halberstam
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
David Halberstam
He hated House members who longed only to run for the Senate, and senators who longed only to run for the presidency. He was appalled by what he felt television had done to the Senate by the mid-fifties. It had become a major launching platform for presidential campaigns. He thought television had ruined the Senate as a serious body. “All they do there is preen and comb their hair and run for President. It’s like a presidential primary over there,
David Halberstam
In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.
David Halberstam
He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.
David Halberstam
Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.
David Halberstam
Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.
David Halberstam
He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.
David Halberstam
The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.
David Halberstam
It was the responsibility of a senior fireman to teach as well as to do.
David Halberstam
This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.
David Halberstam
There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.
David Halberstam
DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.
David Halberstam
He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.
David Halberstam
Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.
David Halberstam
he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.
David Halberstam
The telephone was a sign of being rushed.
David Halberstam
The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.
David Halberstam
he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.
David Halberstam
If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.
David Halberstam
(I. F. Stone had once called it an exciting paper to read because you never knew on what page you would find a page-one story),
David Halberstam
Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.
David Halberstam
The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.
David Halberstam
He was "more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.
David Halberstam
She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.
David Halberstam
The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and for the team's offense. So, as the team continued to make a series of very good calls on other player personnel choices, there was a general tendency to talk about how brilliant Pioli and Belichick were, and to regard Pioli as the best young player personnel man in the League. Just to remind himself not to believe all the hype and that he could readily have screwed up on that draft, Pioli kept on his desk a photo of Brady, along with a photo of the team's fifth-round traft choice, the man he had taken ahead of Brady: Dave Stachelski. He was a Tight End from Boise State who never a played a down for New England. Stachelski was taken with the 141st pick, Brady with the 199th one. 'If I was so smart,' Pioli liked to say, 'I wouldn't have risked an entire round of the draft in picking Brady.
David Halberstam
The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.
David Halberstam
Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
David Halberstam
Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.
David Halberstam
Nixon under pressure turned only to reporters from publications already favorable to him; Kennedy, in trouble, turned to those most critical and dubious of him, and if anything tended to take those already for him a bit for granted.
David Halberstam
They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and reflectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.
David Halberstam
Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.
David Halberstam
The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.
David Halberstam
Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.
David Halberstam
Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.
David Halberstam
Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.
David Halberstam
Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.
David Halberstam
Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians,
David Halberstam
If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.
David Halberstam