Wednesday, April 25, 2007

More on Halberstam

Tributes to David Halberstam continue to be published. In today's New York Times, a long piece putting his ground-breaking Vietnam work into context, and then bringing the experiences forward to today and Iraq:
"I just never thought it was going to work at all,” Mr. Halberstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January. “I thought that in both Vietnam and Iraq, we were going against history. My view — and I think it was because of Vietnam — was that the forces against us were going to be hostile, that we would not be viewed as liberators. We were going to punch our fist into the largest hornets’ nest in the world."

Update: In an interesting tribute in the Washington Post, Henry Allen closes with:
For those who remember journalism back in a 1970s heyday they can't explain to to the young, Halberstam's death was not just the death of a hero, it was like the death of the great Hollywood stars -- Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable. Who would replace them? No one has. Maybe no one ever does.

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