Looking Out My Back Door

David Halberstam, R.I.P. -- Who Can Fill His Shoes?

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author David Halberstam, 73, was killed in a car accident earlier this week. Noted for his Vietnam War reporting (for which he won the Pulitzer), he later authored many books on war, politics, baseball, 9/11 firefighters, and other subjects. Currently, he was researching a book about the 1958 NFL championship game, and was traveling to interview one of the players when the car in which he was riding was broadsided.

The only book of Halberstam's that I've read is "Firefighters," which he wrote about the firehouse in his Manhattan neighborhood, which lost all but one of its shift responding to the 9/11 tragedy. I came upon it when Vanity Fair published a generous excerpt from the book, which moved me to tears. I purchased a copy for my uncle, a volunteer firefighter and a heroic survivor of Tower Two.

Mike Lupica, whom I've always called our generation's Damon Runyon, is a gifted columnist for the New York Daily News. He is primarily a sports columnist, but started out writing about more general topics. He now writes a political column once a week, probably in response to the yahoos who write in and complain when his Sunday sports and opinion column dares to include a comment about the war in Iraq or other important things outside the realm of sports. He's one of the best.

Lupica wrote about Halberstam on Wednesday, April 24. I am going to quote from the last paragraphs, because I think more people should read his words:

"Could a more vigilant media have stopped any of this [the Iraq mess]? Of course not. Halberstam and Neil Sheehan and the rest of them couldn't stop the war in Vietnam from playing out to its tragic conclusions 40 years ago and nobody was going to stop this President from his Messianic vision for Iraq and the Middle East and himself most of all. Or force him to learn from the past.

This is from the last page of [Halberstam's book] 'The Best and the Brightest':

'...time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out...And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.'

The man who wrote that, wrote about a war from which we did not learn, died Monday. Along with nine more of ours in Iraq."

Dare I say that the baton has been passed to you, Mike Lupica?

posted by Hopster @ 11:37 AM