Quotes by David Halberstam

Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.

he was almost joyously what he had always been, a lot of gee whiz, it was all new and fresh even when surely he had seen much of it before, and it was as if he took delight in not having been changed externally by all that he had seen.

It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.

If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.

He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.

The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.

the ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter’s career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.

If he (George Keenan)felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when not being listened to.

his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,

One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.

What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

[On writing:] Theres a great quote by Julius Irving that went, Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you dont feel like doing t

He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.

Gen. Matthew Ridgeway intended not to impose his will on his men, but to allow the men under him to find something in themselves that would make them more confident, more purposeful fighting men. It was their confidence in themselves that would make them fight well, he believed, not so much their belief in him. His job was to keep them to find that quality in themselves.

Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge.

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing

David Halberstam quoted Lyndon Johnson saying of a staffer: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ...McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history.The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

Do you know what the greatest test is? Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning?