Turning Journalism into History

A talk by David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist

The Journalism School community extends our condolences to the family of writer David Halberstam, who gave our Alumni Day lecture April 21 and was killed in an auto accident during his Bay Area visit. One of the nation’s leading authors and an extraordinary journalist, Halberstam wrote 15 bestselling books. While at The New York Times, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his pioneering coverage of the Vietnam War. His classic, The Best and The Brightest, is the definitive book on how and why we went to war in Vietnam. His other books include: The Powers That Be, about the rise of modern media; The Reckoning, about the challenge of Japan to the American automotive industry; and The Fifties, about a decade he regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. During his career, the 73-year-old author also covered the civil rights movement, Washington politics, and sports. He had just finished his latest book, "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" and had started on a new one, called “The Game,” about the NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.

Audio and text of Halberstam’s truly inspired talk at Berkeley are available online.

How does a prize-winning journalist turn into a prize-winning historian? David Halberstam launched his career at the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi, worked his way up to the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Vietnam and then turned to longer-form writing, part of a generation of reporters who started as journalists but in mid-career became historians. His 2002 bestseller, War in a Time of Peace, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. He has written 21 books covering such diverse topics as the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the auto industry and a baseball pennant race.

In his presentation, Halberstam will talk about the crafts of both journalism and history and what it means to turn journalistic reporting into a work of history.

Please e-mail Emilie Raguso for more details.

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