War reporter David Halberstam dies in car crash

David Halberstam, an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, was killed Monday (April 23, 2007) in a traffic accident in Menlo Park, California near the Dumbarton Bridge, his wife, Jean Halberstam and local authorities confirmed yesterday.

The renowned journalist, whose work for the New York Times on the Vietnam War led many to question the U.S. military presence there, was 73-year-old and was living in New York city.

The tireless author of books on topics as varied as America's military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was a passenger in a car driven by a journalism school student which was broadsided by another car around 17:35 GMT while making a left turn across opposing traffic from California State Route 84 (Bayfront Expressway) westbound to California State Route 114 (Willow Road) southbound.

Halberstam’s Toyota Camry car was making a turn in Menlo Park, California, when it was hit broadside by Infiniti sedan and knocked into a third vehicle, said the San Mateo County coroner Robert Foucrault.

Halberstam was declared dead on the spot, while Kevin Jones, 26, a journalism student from the University of California, Berkeley, who was driving Halberstam, was injured, but not seriously. The drivers of the other two vehicles involved in the fatal accident were also injured, but none of them injured seriously.

"Looking at the accident and examining him at the scene indicated it's most likely internal injuries," Foucrault said.

Jones, the driver of the car carrying Halberstam, was taken to Stanford Medical Center for the treatment of injuries. Halberstam was en route to an interview with a football player for his next book, Jones said in an interview from his hospital bed. "We were talking about sports and Vietnam and having kids," Jones added.

At the time of his death, the great author was doing the same job he had done his entire adult life i.e. reporting. He was on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, for his new book, “The Game”, about the 1958 championship game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts, considered by many to be the greatest football game ever played.

Halberstam recently had finished a book about the Korean War called The Coldest Winter, due out later in 2007.

Born on April 10, 1934, in New York City, to an army surgeon, Dr. Charles Halberstam, and a schoolteacher, Blanche Levy Halberstam, the versatile author, Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize at age 30 for his international reporting of the Vietnam War.

Halberstam graduated from Harvard University with a degree in journalism in 1955 where he achieved the prestigious assignment of managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, the school's daily newspaper, and later, started his career writing for the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi.

In 1960 Halberstam moved to the Nashville Tennessean and the same year left the daily newspaper as a confident reporter and then accepted the position in New York Times. Within three years, during Kennedy era, Halberstam was reporting on the Vietnam War. His reporting on the war annoyed President Kennedy, who asked the New York Times to transfer him to another bureau.

Besides the journalism, he embarked an equally distinguished career as an author. Besides writing books on diverse subjects such as civil rights, the world economy, the auto industry, and the war in Vietnam, he also wrote about sports topics, such as basketball, baseball, and amateur rowing.

"I think the work he was proudest of was his trilogy on war," his wife, Jean said Monday night citing "The Best and the Brightest," the Korean War book, "The Coldest Winter" and a study of U.S. policies in the 1990s called "War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals."