David Halberstam killed in car wreck

[Dreams End]

Journalist David Halberstam killed in car crash
POSTED: 7:58 p.m. EDT, April 23, 2007
Story Highlights
• Police: Pulitzer winner involved in a 10:30 a.m. crash near San Francisco
• Halberstam, 73, spoke to students at UC-Berkeley Saturday
• A New Yorker, Halberstam was working on book in California, dean said
• Wrote 21 books on various subjects including Vietnam War, civil rights, sports
Adjust font size:
Decrease fontDecrease font
Enlarge fontEnlarge font

SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam has died in a car accident in Menlo Park, California, near San Francisco, the San Mateo County coroner's office said Monday.

In 1964 Halberstam, then with The New York Times, shared a Pulitzer for international reporting for his coverage of the early years of the Vietnam War, including the 1963 overthrow of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem.

The accident happened at about 10:30 a.m. (1:30 p.m. ET), and the driver of the car carrying Halberstam identified him as the victim, according to the Associated Press.

The driver is a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where Halberstam had spoken Saturday about the craft of journalism, the Associated Press reported.

The student was taken to Stanford Medical Center, the AP said, and two others involved in the crash were injured.

Orville Schell, the dean of Berkeley's journalism school, said Halberstam was in the Bay Area working on a book on NFL hall of famer Y.A. Tittle. He said Tittle, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, now lives in Palo Alto, California, near the scene of the wreck.

After attending Harvard University, Halberstam launched his career in 1955 at the Daily Times Leader, a small daily newspaper in Mississippi. By age 30 he had won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Vietnam War for the New York Times.

He quit daily journalism in 1967 and wrote 21 books covering such diverse topics as the Vietnam War, civil rights, the auto industry and a baseball pennant race. His 2002 best-seller, "War in a Time of Peace," was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

His 1972 book, "The Best and the Brightest," documented the Kennedy administration's early steps during the war.

Halberstam lived in New York.

Authorities say the accident is still under investigation.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/23/halber ... index.html

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

In 1979 he published 'The Powers That Be' as a personality-driven history of Time, CBS, WPost, and the LATimes.

But he left out that in 1977 Carl Bernstein had revealed that there were hundreds of CIA assets in the so-called mainstream media.

In fact, Halberstam portrays the CIA and the media as totally separate institutions despite his emphasis on specific CEOs and managing editors as having significant power on national perceptions and policies. How odd.

I'm afraid that Halberstam was more a creature of the 'The Powers That Be' than a commentator on it.

[judasdisney]

Hugh is right about Halberstam -- I'm more inclined to believe that Halberstam, a close friend of blueblood Team Scooter archgatekeeper Bob Woodward, was himself an archgatekeeper -- and yet anyone who's ever read Halberstam knows that he was amazing, talented, and most important, a master storyteller who sewed a tapestry of unifying social narrative of our collective history.

The fact that this master storyteller was transcribing a masterful and badly needed history of the West that was a gatekeeper history is tragic.

Halberstam is for me a symbol, an emblem of a "creative duty gap" in which we've let masterful gatekeepers overpower us. We've failed in our duty to create the narratives, write the history books. And we let talented spiders like Halberstam write those history books that society was waiting for.

And Halberstam poisoned us. With exceptional talent and flair.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

he was amazing, talented, and most important, a master storyteller who sewed a tapestry of unifying social narrative of our collective history.

The fact that this master storyteller was transcribing a masterful and badly needed history of the West that was a gatekeeper history is tragic.

Halberstam is for me a symbol, an emblem of a "creative duty gap" in which we've let masterful gatekeepers overpower us. We've failed in our duty to create the narratives, write the history books. And we let talented spiders like Halberstam write those history books that society was waiting for.

And Halberstam poisoned us. With exceptional talent and flair.

Wow. Well said, judasdisney.
I'm afraid Bill Moyers has these excellent double-edged qualities, too.
Even some sincerity. But he's still holding out on us. Maybe that'll change.

Ex-CIA whistleblower Ralph McGeehee wrote in his 1983 book 'Deadly Deceits' that after he got squelched for producing intelligence showing Vietnam was impossibly lost and he was killing time in a dead end task waiting to retire he started to notice that the Washington Post and New York Times were publishing stories that perfectly matched intelligence reports and vice-versa. Sometimes one came before the other and sometimes at the same time.

Eventually he figured out that the CIA had become a massive government news agency issuing the stories that justified their covert ops and desired policies.
They were just writing a script for the world to follow transmitted through their hundreds of assets in world media.

Rather than work to figure out what was going on they emphasized controlling what people thought was going on. Media as mind control.

And the CIA analysts and case officers not part of the covert media division were just as in the dark as anyone else with no way to tell what was disinfo and what was 'real' news so all the black propaganda got sucked into the intelligence system and re-amplified and validated socially and beaurocratically...which is a perfect feedback mechanism for getting people to act on the written script to make it 'real.'

As Ron Susskind warned us, they really do "create their own realities." And know it.
With just a pen.

This was how the Vietnam War was gotten rolling and kept going despite its futility.
Seems not just the CIA knows how to work this self-regenerating narrative machine.

Others who know how it works can throw stories into the amplifying efeedback loop, too. This neocon-PNAC crew knows how this Operation Mockingbird machine works from using it back in Nixon days.

And craftsmanship is highly valued in this process. Halberstam is a great loss. To them.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Tonight Bill Moyers is doing a PBS show on the media's war pimping but it is a classic limited hang-out mea culpa for the Operation Mockingbird system that started Vietnam II.

Moyers spent an hour on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman playing some clips and priming us for his program attempting to retrieve some credibility for the state-controlled press just as he did during Vietnam I.

The show has heavy reinforcement of the 9/11 cover story as an excuse, of course, along with minimizing the role of the press to just a few malefactors like Judy Miller. The old 'no budget for reporters, just pundits' excuse.

But Moyers said that when he was Johnson's press secretary that it was only Halberstam that helped him see problems in his war. Moyers also said twice that 'the farther you get from power the closer you get to reality.

And Halberstam was just killed. Timing. Imagine if Halberstam was giving interviews after Moyers' show this week.

I wonder if Halberstam was 'too far from power' to be relied on during this Mockingbird damage control campaign to be relied on to play along. Broadsided, hunh? Ah well. We'll never know.

Moyers glossed over his 'leaving the government' in January 1967. That was the year he became director of the Council on Foreign Relations. Soon he'd be the official 'liberal' commentator on CBS, a network so tight with CIA it was indistinguishable from the CIA-WPost and CIA-NYTimes.

And Amy Goodman let him gloss over his CFR role in the worst years of Vietnam I.
Why, Amy? Did you let yourself get suckered by 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend?'