David Halberstam

[John Simkin]

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.

[John Simkin]

David Halberstam

A Pulitzer-winning reporter, he questioned the official line about the Vietnam war

Godfrey Hodgson

Wednesday April 25, 2007

The Guardian

David Halberstam, who has died aged 73 in a car crash in California, was one of the most talented, influential and prolific of the American journalists who came of age professionally in the 1960s. He was one of the small group of young reporters - with his New York Times colleague Neil Sheehan, Stanley Karnow of Time magazine and Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett of the Associated Press - who, having initially accepted the reasons for the Vietnam war, came to believe, first, that it was not going as well as Washington maintained, and later that it was ill-conceived and unjustified.

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Halberstam and his colleagues eventually persuaded a decisive slice of American public opinion to question the war's rightness. He first described how things had gone wrong in his 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire, and in 1972 drew on his years of experience of the war, reinforced by a heroic schedule of interviews, to write The Best and the Brightest, an unsparing critique of the gifted men in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who blundered into humiliating defeat.

A fairly tall, good-looking man who had been a good athlete in high school, Halberstam had a quiet, thoughtful manner that helped him to persuade people to open up to him in interviews. In the middle of his career, he established himself as a gifted and perceptive popular historian and wrote an enjoyable and influential history of the 1950s. In recent years he turned himself into an enthusiastic, if at times romantic, chronicler of baseball and other American sports.

When he was killed he had just been talking about The Coldest Winter, his forthcoming book about a battle in the Korean war, and was on his way to interview YA Tittle, a legendary American football quarterback of the 1950s and 1960s.

After the World Trade Centre atrocities of September 11 2001, Halberstam wrote an account of the team from his own local fire station in New York, Engine 40, Ladder 35, which lost 12 men in the catastrophe. Like many of his books, it dealt sensitively with the motivations for courage, with male friendship and the sense of honour that impels men to face fearfully dangerous duty.

Halberstam researched meticulously, transcribing dozens and, for some books, hundreds of interviews in longhand. He wrote rapidly, and learned to shut himself away either in New York or in a holiday home at Nantucket, an "iron-clad discipline" that enabled him to write two books in the 1960s, three in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, and six in the 1990s. He was scrupulously fair and had an instinctive grasp of the context and import of the story he was telling. If he had a fault, it was a taste for emotion, sometimes brushing sentimentality.

David Halberstam was the son of a surgeon and a teacher. He was born in New York City, but after moving all over the US when his father was in the army during the second world war, the family settled in Yonkers, half an hour north of where he was born. He went to high school there and then studied journalism at Harvard. After graduating in 1955, instead of going to work for one of the big media companies in New York, he headed for West Point, a small town in Mississippi.

It was the year after the supreme court's momentous decision banning school segregation, and Halberstam soon became fascinated by the human tensions of the racial crisis. He went to work for the Nashville paper, the Tennessean, and there got to know the group of young activists, led by the Rev James Lawson, whom he celebrated in a 1999 book about the civil rights movement, The Children.

It was not long before he was picked up by the New York Times, who packed him off to the Congo to cover the upheavals consequent on the abrupt collapse of Belgian colonial power there and on the Kennedy administration's fear that the Soviet Union would take advantage of that situation. Before long he was sent to Saigon, where he stayed from 1961 to 1964.

He and his friends and colleagues took advantage of the American military's willingness to helicopter them into combat situations. It was not long before they, with Halberstam always a leader among them, began to question the bland confidence of the official line as peddled at the so-called "five o'clock follies", the daily press conference at the American headquarters in Saigon. In 1964 his work received the ultimate accolade for an American reporter, the Pulitzer prize.

Later politicians, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon among them, questioned Halberstam's honesty and even his patriotism. They misunderstood a passionate, if generally soft-spoken, belief in the goodness of the American system. Halberstam and his friends questioned and criticised American policy and military conduct in Vietnam, not out of a lack of patriotism, but out of their conviction that the US must conduct itself according to the highest possible standards.

Late in his life, he became gently critical of the style and conduct of the Bush administration.

Halberstam was married twice. In 1966, while working in Poland, he wed the actor Elzbieta Czyzewska. The next year they were both expelled because of his critical reporting on the communist regime. In 1977 the couple divorced and he married Jean Sandness Butler in 1979. She survives him with a daughter Julia.

· David Halberstam, journalist and writer, born April 10 1934; died April 23 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story...2064691,00.html

[Paul Rigby]

David Halberstam, A Pulitzer-winning reporter, he questioned the official line about the Vietnam war, Godfrey Hodgson, The Guardain, Wednesday April 25, 2007

The Guardian has long been the CIA’s most important pipeline to the British left; and Godfrey Hodgson, first as The Observer’s correspondent in the US, then as the foreign editor of The Independent, a dutiful British hack regurgitator of US establishment pap. Put them together on the subject of the recently deceased David Halberstam and there could be only one outcome – lucid, confident, CIA-serving tosh.

A reliable indicator of the accuracy of the Hodgsonian obit in yesterday morning’s edition of the paper (p.31) is to be found in the photograph and caption which accompanied. It is the front cover of a reissue of Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” – foreword by noted truth-seeker Senator John McCain, no less – under which lies the following caption: “Halberstam, on the cover of his 1972 book about flawed US foreign policy, was scrupulously fair in his reporting.” In fact, the figure in the photograph is obviously, unmistakably, Robert Strange McNamara.

Halberstam’s grotesquely inflated reputation rests on two aspects of his career: His work as a correspondent for the New York Times, Langley’s paper of anti-record, in Vietnam, 1962-64; and the subsequent books and journalism derived from that period. An honest examination of both compel a very different accounting and conclusion to those furnished by the sycophantic Hodgson.

In the establishment parallel universe occupied by such as Hodgson, American journalism of the Cold War era existed in a CIA-/Mockingbird-free zone: There was no Agency recruitment in US universities; plum foreign assignments were offered purely on merit; and reporters didn’t spy, or act as mouthpieces, for CIA foreign (and domestic) policies. Thus Halberstam could not conceivably have been talent spotted by the Agency at Harvard, sheep-dipped in the south as a remarkably well-informed cub reporter of civil rights activism, then sent to Congo to cash in this credibility as a hard-right CIA mouthpiece. No, such an interpretation is paranoid nonsense and without foundation. Or is it? In the case of his Congo posting, the contemporaneous example of the Scripps-Howard group suggests otherwise.

In mid-1960, S-H’s correspondent in the Congo, D’Lynn Waldron, was acting as a courier for the increasingly besieged Lumumba, ferrying his defiant, pitiful entreaties for assistance and understanding over the border for transmission to Washington. She was recalled. In her stead, Richard Starnes, not long resigned as the managing editor of the group’s one-time bellwether, the New York World-Telegram & Sun, was offered the post at meeting with the S-H executive, and former OSS-er, Oland Russell, and a CIA officer. Starnes declined. In his place went Henry Taylor, Jr., ex-ONI, who was to be killed in fighting shortly after his arrival in early September 1960. In short, then, the CIA had an intense and active involvement in which journalists went to the Congo in the period. And the CIA had a policy for the Congo, one which ran utterly counter to everything Kennedy had argued for, first as a presidential candidate; and subsequently, in turn, as President-elect, then President.

In the Congo, Halberstam produced precisely the kind of journalism exterminatory US neo-colonialism required in its quest for uranium tri-oxide and the like. In the NYT’s in-house paper, Times Talk, we find such classic contributions as “It’s Chaos for a Correspondent in the Congo” (October-November 1961) and “Congo Boondocks: Land of Cannibals and Diamonds” (William Prochnau. Once Upon a Distant War: Reporting from Vietnam (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1996, p.509). Africans, the less than subtle subtext had it, just couldn’t be trusted to run a country, particularly one full of strategic, or merely desirable, minerals. On the same assignment, according to serial flatterer Prochnau, Halberstam “played mostly by the old rules. He checked in regularly with the CIA men, and, in the accepted fashion of the day, thought nothing of doing a little routine information trading” (Ibid., p.150). Did this closeness cease upon Halberstam’s move to Saigon? Hardly.

On his second day there, Prochnau earlier disclosed, Halberstam went to lunch with “the CIA’s Saigon station chief, John Richardson” who gave him “an unexpectedly good lead” (Ibid., p.133). A little further on, we learn: “By now his CIA contacts from the Congo had begun to flock to the hot new action in Southeast Asia like bees to honey. Vietnam was a spook’s dream…” (Ibid., p.169). Interestingly, the Times of Vietnam, in its detailed expose of the abortive CIA-orchestrated coup planned for August 28/29, 1963, had this to say: “Beginning in January of this year, it is reported American secret agency “experts” who successfully engineered the coup d’etats in Turkey, Guatemala, Korea, and failed in Iran and Cuba, began arriving in Vietnam, taking up duties mostly in the U.S. Embassy, U.S.O.M., M.A.A.G., and various official and unofficial installations here” (“CIA Financing Planned Coup D’Etat: Planned for Aug. 28; Falls Flat, Stillborn,” Monday, 2 September 1963, pp.1). Had those Agency coup experts also served in the Congo, to thwart Kennedy’s backing for the UN?

Whatever the truth of that conjecture, there can be little doubt that Halberstam’s closeness to, and affinity for, the Agency endured. His first book derived from his posting in Vietnam, Making of a Quagmire (NY: Random House, 1965), is littered with testimony to the relationship:

pp.221-225: extended defence of CIA’s role in Saigon.

p.222: “…many CIA agents in Saigon were my friends, and I considered them among the ablest Americans I had seen overseas or at home.”

p.241: “That night I had drinks with two friends in the CIA. They were exceptionally bitter…”

p.262: “Our basic information, coming from several sources close to the CIA…”

p.263: “…more than a year later, another CIA friend claimed that…”

In later years, Halberstam sought to distance himself from the charge of acting as a CIA mouthpiece in Vietnam, telling Prochnau that fellow reporter, UPI man Neil Sheehan “had better CIA sources. I had better military because I could travel more…” (Once Upon a Distant War, p.277). Any sense of reassurance was somewhat undercut by the earlier admission that his acknowledged lead source, Colonel John Paul Vann, was “a blunt, essentially conservative, at time almost reactionary man…much of our information came from men like Vann” (Making of a Quagmire, p.164). In any case, Vann was recalled from South Vietnam in early April 1963.

Sheehan, like Halberstam, formed part of a journalistic clique that worked assiduously for the overthrow of a Diem government engaged in protracted peace negotiations with Hanoi; and its replacement by a military junta that would prosecute the war with more vigour. That the clique worked hand in glove with the Agency was never more clearly demonstrated than in the aftermath of the publication of Richard Starnes’ ‘Arrogant’ CIA Disobeys Orders in Vietnam on 2 October 1963. Two members of the clique, Halberstam and AP’s Malcolm Browne, were at the forefront of the CIA’s defenders in the pages of the NYT. Halberstam’s contribution to whitewashing the Agency’s open revolt ran as follows:

New York Times, Friday, 4 October 1963, pp.1 & 4

Lodge And C.I.A. Differ on Policy

Ambassador and Agency’s Chief in Saigon Clash on Conduct of the War

Saigon, South Vietnam, Oct. 3 – Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the head of Central Intelligence Agency operations in Saigon do not agree on United States policy for Vietnam.

The Ambassador would be happier with a new C.I.A. chief. [The present C.I.A. chief in Saigon is believed to be John Richardson.]This is not a problem of personalities. What is involved is in part the traditional relationship, sometimes of rivalry, between the State Department and the C.I.A. In part it involves the problem of whether the C.I.A. should be primarily a straight intelligence network, or have operative functions; whether there should be separate chiefs for intelligence and operations.

It is believed here that Mr. Lodge feels that when a man is assigned to an important and, in this case, difficult operative function, the requirements of that post conflict with the objectivity and disinterest required of an intelligence chief.

There is no evidence that the C.I.A. chief has directly countermanded any orders by the Ambassador. Assertions that he has are denied in all quarters here.

Rather, even amid the current controversy, it is acknowledged that the C.I.A. chief, for more than a year, has carried out the extremely difficult and taxing job of working closely with Ngo Dinh Nhu. In this aspect of his duties he has done a superior job, say the other members of the mission. It is the basic contradiction between this role and that of an intelligence chief that is at stake.

Informants here say Mr. Lodge has told Washington he wants a new chief, and that the C.I.A. is fighting back hard. The matter is believed now resting with the White House.

It is believed here that Mr. Lodge and the C.I.A. chief see this war effort in somewhat different lights. Likewise, they see the proper function of a C.I.A. chief in different lights.

It is also true that in recent weeks in Saigon, as a major re-evaluation of United States policy has been taking place, the American mission here has tended to become the theater, on a small scale, of the traditional conflict in Washington of the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A.

Part of the present struggle over the C.I.A. chief is believed to have a parallel in a struggle by Mr. Lodge against Maj. General Paul D. Harkins to establish himself as the real as well as the nominal head of the American mission here.

At the moment, some sources say, there is a growing effort to make the C.I.A. the scapegoat for the unhappy events of the last six weeks. When Government forces raided Buddhist pagodas on Aug. 21 the C.I.A. seemed confused about what was going on. There followed the demand by Washington that Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife be pushed out of the Government, defiance of that demand by Ngo Dinh Diem, and Washington’s decision to go along with the regime.

Some persistent enemies of the intelligence agency are accused of using recent events as an opportunity to voice their bitterness against the agency.

Many persons in Saigon contend that in general intelligence operatives here are at the highest caliber, and say they have played vital roles in some of the most successful programs of the complicated counter-insurgency machinery

The piece is fascinating not least for the extent to which it confirmed the justice of the charge made in Frank Coniff’s New York Journal American column of 26 August 1963 that Halberstam had “resurrected from oblivion good old ‘reliable sources,’ and idiomatic usage that was, alack, fast disappearing from the reporter’s arsenal. We stopped counting in Saturday’s Times after 11 hits by good old ‘reliable sources’ or his less sturdy brother, plain old ‘sources.’ Mr. Halberstam has done us all a favor by restoring new vigor to a rapidly fading journalistic cliché” (“New York J. A. Takes Issue With New York Times,” Times of Vietnam, 3 September 1963, p.1). In his 4 October defence of the Agency, Halberstam ran the gamut of euphemisms for the CIA: “all quarters here”; “some sources”; “Many persons in Saigon”; “other members of the mission”; and “Informants here.”

First in his 4 October 1963 riposte to Starnes, then in his 1965 book, Making of a Quagmire, Halberstam was unwilling to concede that Richardson, at the time of his recall by Kennedy, was a firm advocate of Diem’s overthrow. That concession was to be slipped in to his 1972 magnum opus, The Best and the Brightest (NY: Random House, 1972 edition): “Even the CIA chief, John Richardson, who until recently had been so close to Nhu, was a surprising advocate of a coup, and a prophet that the coup would come and come quickly” (p.264). It was this book that provoked Warren Hinckle, editor of Ramparts, to one of the great book reviews of the 1970s:

“What critical reporting there was about Vietnam dealt with questions of the efficiency or practicality of the means of American policy but did not question its ends. It is a measure of the level of press criticism of America’s great Vietnam misadventure that David Halberstam was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for calling Madame Nhu a bitch. Halberstam, long the war’s most celebrated critic, chastised the corrupt Nhu family and poked the wind machines of the General’s public relations machinery while still accepting the basic ideological tenets of American policy. In an Esquire interview in 1964 Halberstam worried that ‘this pretty little country will be lost.’ In his earlier book, The Making of a Quagmire, said Halberstam the war critic: ‘The lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that we must get in earlier, be shrewder and force the other side to practice the self-deception.’

I would not nitpick Halberstam were it not for his recent and nauseating criticisms of those liberal Establishment types who made America’s Vietnam policy – that they were the victims of some weepy, ill-defined hubris that kept them from seeing the fatal flaw in the whole undertaking – that the formulates in his trendy best seller, The Best and the Brightest, which must rank as one of the great bullxxxx books of all time. Halberstam adroitly skips over the fact that the American press establishment had its own best and brightest in Vietnam (not the least of them Halberstam) during those years of folly – a decade of electronic, plugged-in and satellited reporting that exhibited the same arrogance or, if we must, hubris of the ideology of the men whom Halberstam now so artfully brushes with the vanishing cream of tragedy.”

Warren Hinckle. If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade: An Essential Memoir of a Lunatic Decade (NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), pp.162-163.

Real history is in Hinckle. For the CIA fairy tale, see The Guardian and the equally appalling Hodgson.

[Paul Rigby]

“What critical reporting there was about Vietnam dealt with questions of the efficiency or practicality of the means of American policy but did not question its ends. It is a measure of the level of press criticism of America’s great Vietnam misadventure that David Halberstam was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for calling Madame Nhu a bitch. Halberstam, long the war’s most celebrated critic, chastised the corrupt Nhu family and poked the wind machines of the General’s public relations machinery while still accepting the basic ideological tenets of American policy. In an Esquire interview in 1964 Halberstam worried that ‘this pretty little country will be lost.’ In his earlier book, The Making of a Quagmire, said Halberstam the war critic: ‘The lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that we must get in earlier, be shrewder and force the other side to practice the self-deception.’

I would not nitpick Halberstam were it not for his recent and nauseating criticisms of those liberal Establishment types who made America’s Vietnam policy – that they were the victims of some weepy, ill-defined hubris that kept them from seeing the fatal flaw in the whole undertaking – that the formulates in his trendy best seller, The Best and the Brightest, which must rank as one of the great bullxxxx books of all time. Halberstam adroitly skips over the fact that the American press establishment had its own best and brightest in Vietnam (not the least of them Halberstam) during those years of folly – a decade of electronic, plugged-in and satellited reporting that exhibited the same arrogance or, if we must, hubris of the ideology of the men whom Halberstam now so artfully brushes with the vanishing cream of tragedy.”

Warren Hinckle. If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade: An Essential Memoir of a Lunatic Decade (NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), pp.162-163.

Real history is in Hinckle. For the CIA fairy tale, see The Guardian and the equally appalling Hodgson.

From one secret police urinal to another: Seymour Hersh’s tribute to David Halberstam on BBC Radio 4’s arts programme, Last Word, broadcast yesterday afternoon, Friday, 27 April. Students of rank mis- and dis-information will perhaps be interested to know that it’s repeated this Sunday afternoon.

To think, British license payers have to cough up over £10 a month – or suffer a fine and/or a spell in the nick – for the privilege of having such spook guff beamed at us.

You have to admire the bare-faced cheek of it all.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/lastword.shtml

David Halberstam

Journalist and author who has died aged 73.

BBC lie:

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam was one of the first reporters to file from the front line of the Vietnam War.

[Nonsense: he was about reporter 2500…]

BBC lie:

He was later one of the first to argue in print that the United States was fighting a losing battle.

[As a matter of readily ascertainable fact, he initially championed a more ruthless prosecution of the war; and he did so in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency.]

The rest of the tribute:

He wrote for the New York Times, returning to his native city in the early sixties after stints covering the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Tennessee. His postings in Vietnam also resulted in two acclaimed books The Making Of A Quagmire and The Best And The Brightest . Both won prizes and influenced American public opinion the 1960s.

John Wilson talks to another controversial prize winning reporter who made his name exposing the military quagmire of Vietnam – Seymour Hersh.

David Halberstam was born April 10th 1934. He died April 23rd 2007.

PS: Minor point - Halberstam helped facilitate an entirely unnecessary war that killed and maimed millions. What a hero.

[William Kelly]

"A cold day in December. Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man's grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease. How as concerned about the weather, that the old man would be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of freezing newspapermen....In just a few weeks the young man would become President of the United States,...On the threshold of great power and great office, the young man seemed to have everything. He was handsome, rich, charming, candid...Now he was trying to put together a government, and the candor showed again.He was self-depreciating with the older man. He had spent the last five years, he said ruefully, running for office, and he did not know any real public officials, people to run a government, serious men. The only ones he knew, he admitted, were politicians, and....what did they know about the Germans, the French, the Chinese? He needed experts for that, and now he was summoning them."

"The old man was Robert A. Lovett, the symbolic expert, the representative of the best of the breed, a great surviving link to a then unquestioned past, to the wartime and postwar successes of the Stinson-Marshall-Acheson years. He was the very embodiment of the Establishment, a man who had a sense of country rather than party....."

David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest (Random House, NY, 1969 p.3-4).

[William Kelly]

"A cold day in December. Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man's grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease. How as concerned about the weather, that the old man would be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of freezing newspapermen....In just a few weeks the young man would become President of the United States,...On the threshold of great power and great office, the young man seemed to have everything. He was handsome, rich, charming, candid...Now he was trying to put together a government, and the candor showed again.He was self-depreciating with the older man. He had spent the last five years, he said ruefully, running for office, and he did not know any real public officials, people to run a government, serious men. The only ones he knew, he admitted, were politicians, and....what did they know about the Germans, the French, the Chinese? He needed experts for that, and now he was summoning them."

"The old man was Robert A. Lovett, the symbolic expert, the representative of the best of the breed, a great surviving link to a then unquestioned past, to the wartime and postwar successes of the Stinson-Marshall-Acheson years. He was the very embodiment of the Establishment, a man who had a sense of country rather than party....."

David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest (Random House, NY, 1969 p.3-4).

If anything, we can thank David Helberstam for calling our attention to Mr. Lovett, the man who convinced JFK to bring Dean Rusk, Robert MacNamara and McGeorge Bundy into the White House cabinet.

Robert A. Lovett, the member of the board of directors of Freeport Sulfer and Mining Company, whose offices in Cuba were adjacent to those used by David Phillip's fake PR firm, and whose private plane was piloted by David Ferrie and whose passingers included one Clay Bertrand.

BK

[Paul Rigby]

Halberstam helped facilitate an entirely unnecessary war that killed and maimed millions.

“The newspaper reporter has brought us to that degree of impoverishment of the imagination which makes it possible for us to fight a war of annihilation.”

“Paper burns and has set the world alight. Newspaper pages have acted as a kindling for the world conflagration…Would the war have been possible at all without the press – possible to begin or possible to continue?”

Karl Kraus

[Myra Bronstein]

Great material Paul. Thank you. I had no idea what Halberstam was all about. I'd planned to read some of his books, so you saved me from wasting time. Now I'll look for Warren Hinckle instead.

I was thinking about the similarities with Sy Hersh as I was reading your info then you started quoting him too. Guess he and Halberstam had a lot in common.

And thanks for the info about Robert Lovett BK. I'd never heard of him but he has my attention now. I was wondering how a piece of work like McGeorge Bundy ended up in President Kennedy's staff.