David Halberstam Quotes

There was, I found, always more to learn.

~ David Halberstam

Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.

~ David Halberstam

Officers came and went and were never a part of daily life.

~ David Halberstam

The men were always wary of an officer who took form more seriously than function.

~ David Halberstam

Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with the figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.

~ David Halberstam

It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself.

~ David Halberstam

When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job.

~ David Halberstam

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.

~ David Halberstam

All professions have some element of theater to them.

~ David Halberstam

Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.

~ David Halberstam

Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.

~ David Halberstam

Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.

~ David Halberstam

Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians

~ David Halberstam

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.

~ David Halberstam

Education was central to reporting.

~ David Halberstam

Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

~ David Halberstam

Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.

~ David Halberstam

The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

~ David Halberstam

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.

~ David Halberstam

Nixon under pressure turned only to reporters from publications already favorable to him; Kennedy, in trouble, turned to those most critical and dubious of him, and if anything tended to take those already for him a bit for granted.

~ David Halberstam

They (the media) found little quality of depth to him, that when she said on the platform with that which he said to them in private. The qualities of introspection and reflectiveness that they particularly treasured were missing.

~ David Halberstam

The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.

~ David Halberstam

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.

~ David Halberstam

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.

~ David Halberstam

The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and for the team's offense. So, as the team continued to make a series of very good calls on other player personnel choices, there was a general tendency to talk about how brilliant Pioli and Belichick were, and to regard Pioli as the best young player personnel man in the League. Just to remind himself not to believe all the hype and that he could readily have screwed up on that draft, Pioli kept on his desk a photo of Brady, along with a photo of the team's fifth-round traft choice, the man he had taken ahead of Brady: Dave Stachelski. He was a Tight End from Boise State who never a played a down for New England. Stachelski was taken with the 141st pick, Brady with the 199th one. 'If I was so smart,' Pioli liked to say, 'I wouldn't have risked an entire round of the draft in picking Brady.

~ David Halberstam

She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.

~ David Halberstam

The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.

~ David Halberstam

He was more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.

~ David Halberstam

If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.

~ David Halberstam

(I. F. Stone had once called it an exciting paper to read because you never knew on what page you would find a page-one story)

~ David Halberstam

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

~ David Halberstam

The telephone was a sign of being rushed.

~ David Halberstam

The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.

~ David Halberstam

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

~ David Halberstam

he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.

~ David Halberstam

Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.

~ David Halberstam

He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.

~ David Halberstam

DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.

~ David Halberstam

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.

~ David Halberstam

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

~ David Halberstam