All-Time Prescient Insights

Lansdale seized on the idea of using [Former VP Richard] Nixon to build support for the elections [in Vietnam], really honest elections this time. "Oh sure, honest, yes, honest, that's right," Nixon said, "so long as you win!" With that he winked, drove his elbow in Lansdale's arm and slapped his own knee.

David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 1972.

Halberstam. and Updike. Williams. and Knight.

On the somber occasion of John Updike's passing, much has been made of his "lyric little" essay, 'Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu."

An interesting sidelight, where Updike plays an 'off-screen' role, is David Halberstam's account of trying to obtain an appointment with Ted Williams in 1990:

My appointment with Mr. Theodore Williams of the Islamorda, Fla., Williams family had been agreed on well in advance, though we had not yet talked to each other. That is normal in matters of this gravity, and our earlier arrangements had been conducted through intermediaries.

My representative was Mr. Robert M. Knight of Bloomington, Ind., who in addition to being my occasional appointments secretary, is coach to the Indiana University basketball team. Mr. Knight, on occasion, has had troubles with members of the press himself, and was almost as celebrated as Mr. Williams in this regard.

It had taken no small amount of time to win over Mr. Knight's good opinion, for somewhat early in our relationship I had failed him on a serious literary point. Mr. Knight, unbeknown to many, is a literary man and I would not be amiss if I referred to him as a kind of literary executor for Mr. Williams. On that earlier occasion, he had quizzed me on my qualifications to write about Mr. Williams.

I had done reasonably well until the final question. Mr. Knight had asked to quote the best-known sentence of John Updike's famous New Yorker piece on Mr. Williams. I had not known, and Mr. Knight had, with no small measure of disdain, pointed out that it said, "Gods do not answer letters."

from Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures.

All-Time Great Prefaces

From David Halberstam's "The Breaks of the Game"

"Fame," O.J. said, walking along, "is a vapor, popuularity is an accident, and money takes wing. The only thing that endures is character."
"Where'd you get that from," Cowlings asked.
"Heard it one night on TV in Buffalo," O.J. said. "I was watching a late hockey game on Canadian TV and all of a sudden a guy just said it. Brought me right up out of my chair. I never forgot it."
-- From an article by Paul Zimmerman, Sports Illustrated, November 26, 1979, on O.J. Simpson.

The next (and final) line in the Zimmerman piece:

"The character of O.J. Simpson will endure. It will be his legacy."

And who's on the cover of that issue of SI?

More on Halberstam

Tributes to David Halberstam continue to be published. In today's New York Times, a long piece putting his ground-breaking Vietnam work into context, and then bringing the experiences forward to today and Iraq:

"I just never thought it was going to work at all,” Mr. Halberstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January. “I thought that in both Vietnam and Iraq, we were going against history. My view — and I think it was because of Vietnam — was that the forces against us were going to be hostile, that we would not be viewed as liberators. We were going to punch our fist into the largest hornets’ nest in the world."

Update: In an interesting tribute in the Washington Post, Henry Allen closes with:

For those who remember journalism back in a 1970s heyday they can't explain to to the young, Halberstam's death was not just the death of a hero, it was like the death of the great Hollywood stars -- Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable. Who would replace them? No one has. Maybe no one ever does.

David Halbertsam, RIP

There are tributes and memorials to David Halbertsam (who died in a traffic accident last night in Northern California) all over the web this morning.

In looking back at his career, what stands out are the number of phrases or concepts - Vietnam (in 1965, well before Tet) as a 'quagmire', the 'best and brighest', the 'powers that be' - that he either invented or popularized.

In recent years, his sports books have seemed to have a Boston-bias, from the Ted Williams' Teammates to the profile of Bill Belichick.

He will be missed.