Halberstam Hailed at Memorial Service: "...on the phone, David sounded like God."

[DeepModem Mom]

Editor&Publisher: Halberstam Hailed at Memorial Service
Published: June 12, 2007



NEW YORK David Halberstam, whose writings probed American life from its failures in war and civil rights to its sports glories, was mourned Tuesday by some of the best and brightest of his generation.

"In his public life, he was a Mount Rushmore of a figure, but I loved him for his kindness," writer Michael Arlen, a close friend, told about 1,000 people at a memorial service for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who died on April 23 in a car crash at the age of 73.

Singer-songwriter Paul Simon sang "Mrs. Robinson," accompanying himself on guitar, from the altar of Riverside Church. Peter Yarrow, from the famed folk trio "Peter, Paul & Mary" and who lived in the same building as Halberstam, sang "Sweet Survivor."

Writer Gay Talese and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin also attended the service at the progressive, politically involved church. It was an appropriate place to celebrate the life of a man who seemed to be on a mission to save the world — through a kind of journalism that was not only a craft, but his calling....

***

Fresh from Harvard University, he covered civil rights in the South while working for a tiny newspaper in Mississippi.

"Without David, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings. He made us fly higher," said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who met him then and called Halberstam "a great witness of our nonviolent revolution ... and we will never, ever be the same."

By 1960, Halberstam was writing for The New York Times in Washington, D.C., then moved to the heart of African strife, in Congo. In 1962, the Times sent him to Vietnam, where he became an expert in exposing military misinformation and won a Pulitzer for his reporting....His 2002 best seller, "War in a Time of Peace," examines how the lessons of Vietnam have influenced American foreign policy....

***

...his mind took paths far from the ordinary — as described in her eulogy by author Anna Quindlen, a former Times columnist.

"One of our sons said that on the phone, David sounded like God," Quindlen said.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003597937