Quotes by David Halberstam

(I. F. Stone had once called it an exciting paper to read because you never knew on what page you would find a page-one story),

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

The telephone was a sign of being rushed.

The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.

Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.

He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.

DiMaggios grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fishermans son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggios grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

It was the responsibility of a senior fireman to teach as well as to do.

In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.

He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.

Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.

Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.

He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.

The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.

Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.

He hated House members who longed only to run for the Senate, and senators who longed only to run for the presidency. He was appalled by what he felt television had done to the Senate by the mid-fifties. It had become a major launching platform for presidential campaigns. He thought television had ruined the Senate as a serious body. “All they do there is preen and comb their hair and run for President. It’s like a presidential primary over there,