David Halberstam Quotations

He knew that in film there was power, and he was the man working the film, and he knew he was good at it.

I think you always go out and do books based on what you're curious about.

I think what we tried to do is get a reflection of all the forces that are at play, of the best writing. In the end, we ended up with something that was a pretty good reflection of the changes in society as well.

I think they were watching the movie 'Patton' when they should have been watching 'The Battle of Algiers' about urban insurgency. I'm a Vietnam-era journalist. I think most journalists were appalled as we moved toward war in Iraq. The worst mistake this administration made was not about weapons of mass destruction. It was the administration's view that we'd be welcomed as the great liberator.

Late in his career, when the L.A. Times started pursuing him in its new incarnation during Watergate, it was one of the great 360-degree turnarounds.

I think I got very lucky on this, ... The Red Sox players of that team just were particularly pleasant. Ted Williams was larger than life and exuberant and contentious and cantankerous, but great fun to be with.

I think he was such a magical figure, so compelling a figure, he inevitably drew the interest of very talented writers.

QUESTION: Do you know what the greatest test is? ANSWER:Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?

Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield 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.

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.

Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions.

During their college years the oarsmen put in terrbily long hours, often showing up at the boathouse at 6:00am for preclass practices. Both physically and psychologically, they were separated from their classmates. Events that seemed earth-shattering to them-- for example, who was demoted from the varsity to the junior varsity -- went almost unnoticed by the rest of the students. In many ways they were like combat veterans coming back from a small, bitter and distant war, able to talk only to other veterans.

Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

Always stay in with the outs.

Physically, rowing was remarkable resistant to the camera... the camera liked power exhibited more openly, and the power of the oarsmen [is] exhibited in far too controlled a setting. Besides, the camera liked to focus on individuals, and except for the single scull, crew was sport without faces.

The most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable.

Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it

There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'

No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.

A staff can be no better than the man it serves.

In team sports the athletes were bonded by each other, there was an immense peer pressure to keep going. One dared not miss a practice for fear of letting his teammates down. Every time an athlete thought of getting back into bed in the morning he knew he would have to face the anger of his closest friends. But the sculler had to find motivation entirely within himself. No one else cared.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.

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

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.

Rowing, particularly sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time.

I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.

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

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

When Murrow goes after him, he's finished. That's when you know he's losing the public,

We had absolute military superiority but they had absolute political supremacy. That led to a stalemate - and that became the governing issue.

What happened very quickly was a move away from the bravery of the kids fighting.

As if he were a man of a certain kind of secular faith,

There would be a very nice small book in it about another time and era in America, a kind of sweetness and friendship,

This award is very special because it recognizes what I think of as members of the infantry -- reporters who do the heavy lifting, even though they don't personally have the high public profile that some journalists in print and broadcast media attain. Their commitment to reporting difficult stories over the long haul, often against the conventional grain, is a tremendous public service, and the example of endurance and honor that they bring to the profession is a reminder of what journalism is about at its best.

They understood who they were individually and they understood who they were as a couple. They were marvelously locked in together. For my wife and myself, among the most cherished times were the four-person dinners, because you got these extraordinary intellectuals who were enormously respectful of each other.

It was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.

The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.

I have no doubt he would have been a huge success no matter what he put his mind to,

If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

I read that piece and thought, 'I'm getting out of here,' ... I'm getting out of daily journalism because this is a level way above what I and everybody I know has been doing, and I want to try to do something like this. It's a very influential piece.

I am made nervous, as someone who works in the same vineyard, by the idea of inventing himself as a fictional character, ... It seems unnecessary. It seems taking a major liberty. And the problem with it is if you invent the fictional character and you take this liberty, then the reader is going to think what other liberties?