David Halberstam killed in auto accident

One of the men most responsible for the coup that overthrew the Diem regime which sank South Vietnam into chaos was killed in an auto accident in California. The NY Times describes him as:

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Tall, square-jawed and graced with an imposing voice so deep that it seemed to begin at his ankles, Mr. Halberstam came into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for The New York Times.

His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.

For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”

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The Washington Post obit leads:

David Halberstam, a dogged reporter who was regarded as among the leading journalists of his era and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the war in Vietnam was credited with helping change the nation's view of that conflict, died yesterday in California. He was 73.

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Mark Moyar in his brilliant Triumph Forsaken, has a different perspective of his work.

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... Halberstam was twenty-eight when he came to Vietnam. Before he left, fifteen months later, he would do more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history.

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... In his book The Best and the Brightest, published in 1972 after the war had become unpopular among the large segments of American elite, Halberstam claimed that by the fall of 1963 he had concluded that the war "was doomed and that we were on the wrong side of history." Not only was Halberstam not opposed tot he war in 1963, he was not even opposed to the war during the much bleaker year of 1965, when he wrote in The Making of a Quagmire that Vietnam was "one of only five or six nations in the world that is truly vital to U.S. interests," and, in reference to the Vietnamese and others facing similar challenges, that "we cannot abandon our efforts to help these people."

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While his death is regrettable, the man's legacy will probably not reflect the damage he did to this country and to South Vietnam. His undermining of Diem who was an effective anti communist leader help lead to the coup that resulted in Diem's death. Those who replaced Diem also replaced many of the effective anti communist leaders in the bureaucracy and the army. Much of this was done at the urging of militant Buddhists who had been infiltrated by the communist. Halberstam fell for the communist ruse and helped to precipitate the quagmire he later deplored. Unfortunately he has many imitators in the media today who have become neo quagmirest.