David Halberstam, Author, Pulitzer Winner, Killed

David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter who covered the Vietnam War and the U.S. civil rights movement and then wrote a series of best-selling books, died today in a car crash in California. He was 73.
Halberstam died this morning in a collision in Menlo Park, California, south of San Francisco, San Mateo County coroner spokeswoman Michelle Ripe said in a phone interview.
Halberstam won the Pulitzer in 1964 for his coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times. Writing from the paper's Saigon bureau, he filed stories that contradicted the official U.S. government stance that the war was being won.
``Insofar as journalists do have an ability to change the course of governments and history, I think David was right up there,'' Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview. ``He is one of those figures who was able to use history and literature to good effect so that he was able to incorporate his views without seeming prejudiced.''
After leaving the New York Times, Halberstam wrote at least 19 books over four decades, beginning with ``The Making of a Quagmire'' about the Vietnam War. His breakthrough book was ``The Best and the Brightest,'' a profile of the Ivy League overachievers who advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and were architects of the unsuccessful U.S. policy in Vietnam.
`Wrote About Anything'
``His work applied to political figures, media people and even sports figures, and that's a remarkable thing,'' said Frank McCulloch, 87, a retired newspaper and magazine editor who was in Saigon as Time bureau chief in 1963 and became a friend of Halberstam. ``He wrote about anything that interested him.''
In ``The Powers That Be,'' (1979), Halberstam told the story of four U.S. media dynasties and the families that built them: William Paley and CBS, the Grahams and the Washington Post, the Chandlers and the Los Angeles Times and Henry Luce and Time Inc.
``He became an expert on what he wrote about, and he was able to do this across a surprisingly wide spectrum of subjects,'' said Ben Bagdikian, a former assistant managing editor at the Washington Post and a Halberstam friend for more than 40 years. ``His trademark was to write with clarity, readability and authority on a wide spectrum of subjects.''
Born on April 10, 1934, in New York to a surgeon and teacher, Halberstam moved around frequently as a child, according to the Encyclopedia of World Biography. He attended high school in Yonkers, New York.
Harvard Graduate
Halberstam graduated from Harvard University in 1955 with a concentration in history and was editor of the Crimson, the school newspaper. He finished at the bottom half of his class, he said in an interview with the student newspaper two years ago.
Seymour Hersh, a writer at New Yorker magazine who also won a Pulitzer for Vietnam coverage, knew Halberstam for 38 years. He said Halberstam helped him name his book about Henry Kissinger.
``David had read a couple chapters in advance and called me up,'' Hersh recalled in a phone interview today. ``He said, I have the perfect title for you: `The Price of Power.' That was the name we used on the book. David was just one of those guys.''
Halberstam's work wasn't confined to the worlds of government and politics. He wrote about baseball in ``The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship'' and ``Summer of '49,'' and he profiled football coach Bill Belichick in ``The Education of a Coach.''
`The Reckoning'
``The Reckoning,'' published in 1986, chronicled the rise of Nissan Motor and the Japanese auto industry and the struggles of U.S. companies in a market they no longer dominated.
Halberstam died in a three-car collision this morning, Nicole Acker, a spokeswoman for Menlo Park police, said in an interview. Acker said Halberstam was in the passenger seat of a car that was sideswiped.
New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger said ``the world has lost one of the greatest journalists. Our heartfelt condolences go out to his family,'' he said in a statement released through company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis.
``He was an individual of great charm,'' Bagdikian said. ``The impact of his passing will be very great, not just among journalists but among people in public life.''