David Halberstam.(The Talk of the Town)

In 1963, the notion that a newspaper reporter might challenge the official story of generals and ambassadors in the middle of a war, essentially accusing them of lying, was so improbable that it could have occurred only to someone still in his twenties. The Second World War and the unquestionable prestige that it conferred on men in uniform were only a generation old. David Halberstam, who died in a car accident on April 23rd, at the age of seventy-three, was a product of the Cold War, a self-described "square from the fifties" who went off to cover the obscure conflict in Southeast Asia believing that it was a necessary front in a global struggle. He was a liberal anti-Communist, like the leaders of the war. But Halberstam was also a Jewish kid from the Bronx, big and immodest, with oversized hands, clawing his way into the elite culture into which those leaders had been born; his colleague and friend Neil Sheehan later wrote, "His insecurity showed . . . in his compulsion to be recognized and in his need to test himself."

When Halberstam applied his enormous energy to uncovering the failures of the South Vietnamese Army in the Mekong Delta and was met with denials and disdain from American officials, he responded with a personal, vengeful rage. At a Fourth of July party at the United States Ambassador's residence in Saigon, he refused to shake hands with General Paul Harkins, the fatuously optimistic commander of the American advisory effort. Halberstam's wartime work will last not just because of its quality and its importance but because it established a new mode of journalism, one with which Americans are now so familiar that it's difficult to remember that someone had to invent it. The notion of the reporter as fearless truthteller has become a narcissistic cliche that fits fewer practitioners than would like to claim it. "David changed war reporting forever," Richard Holbrooke, who had known him in Vietnam, said last week. "He made it not only possible but even romantic to write that your own side was misleading the public about how the war was going. But everything depended on David getting it right, and he did."

Halberstam went on to write twenty books on almost as many subjects, but historical memory, more ruthless than any of his editors, will eventually cull from them one enduring achievement. "The Best and the Brightest," which consumed Halberstam from 1969 to 1972, has the feverish atmosphere of an obsession, ...