On Glenn Greenwald and David Halberstam

Glenn Greenwald is in rare form today as he undertakes to eviscerate the mainstream press in its hypocrisy and general slackerism (link). The whole thing is worth every bit of the ten seconds’ worth of effort it takes to jump the Slate paywall. The piece might be read as an expansion on his earlier posts remembering the career of his hero, David Halberstam, dead this week at 73 (e.g., link, link, link). But the comparison/contrast, can with profit be pressed a bit further.

In any discussion of Halberstam and the excessive chumminess between the press and its sources, one curiosity is that Halberstam, the ultimate loner, was anything but an outsider. He spent a good chunk of his youth in Westchester County; he was managing editor of the Harvard Crimson (his brother went on to be a prominent cardiologist in Washington, DC).

But after Harvard Halberstam took a career step that must have appeared eccentric to the point of lunacy. While his classmates were scrambling to be copyboys at the New York Times, Halberstam went off to report for the local paper at West Point, Mississippi (the paper published a gracious memorial, recalling his West Point beginnings (link)).

The point, at least as he remembered it,* was that he saw that the story of the moment was civil rights, and the place to cover it was on the front lines. This account, if true, describes the Halberstam of memory: courageous and self-possessed to the point of near pathological arrogance . No wonder, then, that when Jack Schafer went looking for memories of Halberstam among those who knew him in youth, his gleanings were mostly unkind (link).** For me, nothing captures the attitude better than the picture I’ve linked here of Halberstam waist deep in the big muddy, but making time to look over his shoulder to cook a snook at those who trail along in his wake.

I remember Halberstam’s Vietnam stuff, and The Best and the Brightest (which I thought overlong, but interesting); also The Fifties, again a bit overlong, but fascinating to me because I had lived through the 50s, unencumbered by much of the insight that Halberstam seemed to have acquired. I’m not much of a sports fan so I passed over a good many of the other books. Still others seemed, well, perhaps not worth the effort.

So the late Halberstam was not, I think, the kind of reporter that Greenwald so much admires. But who cares? It is hard work being a courageous loner, perhaps inevitably left to the young and the energetic He paid his dues and he had a right to coast. The real trouble is the folks that are trying to have it both ways: the ones who want to trade on the Halberstam aura and mystique, without evincing anything like the Halberstam grit and drive.

[And don’t get me started on Bob Woodward…]

*Why do I qualify? Glad you asked. I qualify for the same reason I felt skeptical of the Jessica Lynch story from day one: it sounds too neat.

**On the other hand, was there ever a more bitchy or backbiting crowd than the folks in the newsroom at the NYT?