Professor Elam

David Halberstam was killed in a car crash this week at age 73.  While it has been said that many live through history without understanding the changes around them, Halberstam certainly labored to chronicle them. His The Best and The Brightest is still the classic on how the US went wrong in Viet Nam.  His one work that I am most familiar with is the landmark The Fiftys.  PBS made this into a multi part series for television.  It is a revealing look at how the real seeds of change for the latter half of the century were laid in that ‘quiet’ Eisenhower era. I know watching the series made me think about that era, that I lived through as a very young child, in a whole new perspective.

We never know what will happen to us.  And on this day Halberstam was still going, making speeches and on his way to do an interview for his latest book.  And then, kaput, in a single thoughtless instant, some fool no doubt talking on a cell phone and attempting to drive, whatever, certainly not paying attention to driving, the car Halberstam was in was t boned in an intersection.  Like Patton, all that war and then killed in a car wreck.

Check it out, Halberstam was an author of statuture for the last fifty years.