Tonight Will Be Fine

"By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are.” - David Halberstam

I've got an anal side to me. My bookcase would tell you that. I've had a series of books written by David Halberstam scattered throughout that piece of wooden furniture that I was purposefully saving so that over the course of my life, I would have something worth reading. Right now, there's a book about Vietnam, Basketball, the decline of this country's manufacturing force, a New York City Firestation, and the civil rights movement of the 1950's. But now there will never be another new book added to my shelf and in turn into my mind.

Taking a look at the quote up top from Halberstam is paradoxical in a way. If the statement is a true one then David Halberstam defied it. He won a Pulitzer early in his career for his Vietnam reporting for the New York Times and went on to a life of reporting. His topics were so vast but always interesting whether it was the rise of big media, the 1964 World Series or the decade of the 50's. And yet, he never became the story, never the main character in a Washington Post article about hobnobbing with his subjects. More importantly for a guy who wrote numerous books, there is no accusations out there that he plagiarized or anything of the sort. These days that is pretty commendable.

I think if I ever had chosen a career in writing non-fiction I would have tried real hard (and I mean real hard) to emulate a Halberstam-esque style. It wouldn't have been easy. Rather than just brainstorm a topic, conduct interview after interview, and finally begin the process of setting it all to paper, he made sure there was something else included in his account. Halberstam made sure that each and every topic he wrote about became the definitive work on that topic. One could obviously argue that no topic exists that can be definitively written about and that may be true in essence but in reality once a writer goes near something and makes it his own, other writers are thereby warned to stay away. This I believe, was not a tangible warning, instead the works spoke and speak for themselves.

Hitting to something close to creating definitive works, Halberstam could be trusted. As I recall the end of his books are filled with pages of his sources. Sometimes you read something in a book and want to to know how it got there and why you should believe it and most of the time there is nothing to support the point. I don't know why that is but I do know the credibility factor regarding the accuracy of the work goes down as does the interest one is willing to devote. Maybe I should have, but I never doubted what I was reading in one of his pages, I took it at gospel.

There is no doubt that Halberstam was a great journalist but it would be unfair to say that that was all he was. He was like the favorite college professor who condensed a whole area of life into an understandable course that was both interesting and riveting. I've sort of always equated a book like The 50's or The Powers That Be as being as important to my knowledge of this country's history as any classroom experience I've ever had.

I once heard the quotation upon a songwriter's death that went something like, "Now that the singer is gone where shall I go for the song?" The line is a powerful way to conjure up the importance of the recently deceased, but almost a trick to get some emotion out of your audience and come off poetic at the same time without having really done your work. The reason I bring the line up isn't for a cheap emotive pull, though that is always nice, but because I'm not really sure how else to say that Halberstam is gone and I don't believe anyone will be able to replace him or those books that slowly peel off my bookshelf.