One of the most distinguished journalists in America, David Halberstam, who was awarded for his work with Pulitzer Prize, has died in a car accident in Menlo Park, California, last Monday on 23 of April, 2007.

David Halberstam was born in New York in April 10, 1934. He attended Harvard University and in 1955 he graduated with a degree in Journalism. He began his career as the one reporter on the “Daily Times Leader” and later at “The Nashville Tennessean”. In 1960, he accepted a position with “The New York Times”, a collaboration that played an important role in his career. In his first months with the well-known paper he covered Washington and within his first year there he was transferred to cover the war in the Congo.

By 1962, Halberstam was in Vietnam a period that he first came to national prominence as part of a small handful of American reporters who refused to accept the official optimism about Vietnam and who reported that the war was being lost. Halberstam’s reporting annoyed President Kennedy so that the latter asked the publisher of The New York Times to transfer him to another bureau, something that never happened. Instead, Halberstam for his reporting in the early days of Vietnam War won at the age of 30 the Pulitzer Prize.

Apart from an important journalist, David Halberstam was also a great author and historian, speciality with which he worked on more intensively after leaving journalism in 1967.

His first book “The Noblest Roman” was published in 1961, while the second one “The Making of Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era” in 1965, was his first attempt to analyze American involvement in Vietnam. His landmark trilogy of books on power in America, “The Best and the Brightest”,” The Powers That Be”, and “The Reckoning” (was voted as the Most Important Book of the Year) have helped define the latter part of this century more than any journalistic works, and have won him innumerable awards as well as broad critical acclaim.

Among others, “The Next Century”, defines the American agenda in our journey toward the year 2000. “The Fifties” examines a decade Halberstam views as seminal in shaping the America of today. In 1998 he released “The Children”, which chronicles the lives of eight young, courageous civil rights activists he met in 1960. In 1999 he wrote a biography of Michael Jordan entitled, “Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made”. “ War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals” came in September 2001 and one year later in 2002 published “Firehouse”.

His latest bestseller was “The Education of a Coach” published in November 2005, is an exploration of the amazing success of New England Patriots coach, Bill Belichick.

David Halberstam had written about 20 books, fifteen of which have been New York Times bestsellers.

Unfortunately, the death of David Halberstam is a great absence for both journalism and literature. But though, the voice of his ideas and values still exist in the numerable pieces of work that he left behind.

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