David Halberstam
David Halberstam
David Halberstamwas an American journalist and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, and later, sports journalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. In 2007, while doing research for a book, Halberstam was killed in a car crash...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth10 April 1934
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'
No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.
A staff can be no better than the man it serves.
In team sports the athletes were bonded by each other, there was an immense peer pressure to keep going. One dared not miss a practice for fear of letting his teammates down. Every time an athlete thought of getting back into bed in the morning he knew he would have to face the anger of his closest friends. But the sculler had to find motivation entirely within himself. No one else cared.
These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.
The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.
One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.
Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
Rowing, particularly sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time.
I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.
This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.
Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
He knew that in film there was power, and he was the man working the film, and he knew he was good at it.