An Interview with David Halberstam
Not Allowed to Be Boring
He won the Pulitzer Prize for his early reporting for The New York Times on the Vietnam War, a body of work that became the highly acclaimed book, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972). A commercially and critically successful social commentator on American life, he spoke recently in Washington, D.C., with Naval History Editor Fred L. Schultz. Halberstam's next book, a narrative history of various aspects of the Korean War, is due in 2006. The tentative title is The Coldest Winter.
Naval History: How compatible are your two vocations, journalist and historian?
Halberstam: It has worked for me. I'm not a classic historian; I'm a contemporary historian, which is taking things in front of us—whether it's Vietnam or the current media—and finding their roots. I have my strengths and weaknesses. I'm not as good at finding and using documents as probably a classically trained historian might be. But interviewing and knowing how to find people to interview is my strength. By the time I started becoming a historian, I'd probably spent 15 years as a journalist, so I knew how to find and interview people. I also learned to ask my interviewees about other people I should talk to about the subject. In fact, I kept a list of names on the back page of my interview notebook of people I was told I should see and paid special attention to names that came up often.
Journalism teaches one, presumably, how to write. This is not to say all people who come into history by dint of journalism are good writers, but several are. David McCullough is not a classically trained historian, but he came in through journalism. Robert Caro came to history through journalism. Dick Reeves and Jean Strouse did, too. We have tended to learn to write reasonably well in magazines. To get a piece published in a popular magazine, you must learn to write good literate biographical portraits. We have a certain skill. In journalism, you're not allowed to be boring.
Classic historians sometimes get angry at us and call us “popularizers.” I often think of myself as being part journalist, part historian, and part playwright. One critical difference is that none of us is tenured, so in some ways we are more dependent on the marketplace than our colleagues in academe. I've been elected to the Society of American Historians, which is very flattering for someone who was a terrible student when he was young.
But I don't know that we ever quite get accepted into the club. A Princeton professor wrote a screed about David McCullough, when McCullough's book on John Adams came out. It was a mean-spirited and strident 5,000-word piece in The New Republic .
McCullough is such a wonderful writer, who takes a lot of Americans who would not normally be reading about the Revolutionary War and makes the figures of our founding fathers real for them. In that way, he helps connect serious lay readers to the past. If I were in a history department, I would think that's good. This was an angry piece and quite condescending.
It was angry at people who write “big books.” It said my book, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993), had been defeated. So I wrote the professor a letter and asked, “How do you defeat a book?” This is a guy who has, so far as I can tell, written only one book. I found it at the New York Society Library and saw it had been taken out twice in 30 years. The Fifties was a very serious book. It got very good reviews, and it became a very good ten-part television series on the History Channel. It is used in courses all over the country. It was a Book of the Month Club selection. And I think it's now in its 12th paperback printing. I never got an answer from the professor.
It's important to say that a lot of traditional historians also write very well. Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers (New York: Knopf, 2000) is a beautifully written book. I would presume, in the next generation of classic historians, a good many of them will write better. They're going to want to save history from the docudrama or from someone like Oliver Stone, who has a rather more conspiratorial view of events, shall we say. And he has access to a powerful instrument—the movies. Work such as that will present a very interesting dilemma for future classic historians.
Naval History: With the notable exceptions of works by authors such as you and David McCullough, why has history been such a hard pill to swallow for the American public?
Halberstam: There's a tendency to think history is serious and not a lot of fun; that it's dry—which, of course, it is not. I suppose that goes back to college and the historians of another day, historians who did not compete with movies or television. If you're writing what we do today, you're competing with all kinds of other media that are easier to enjoy; they demand less work of the participant. That's made us write better.
So, why has history not enjoyed great popularity? It's probably because a lot of people weren't ready to read history when they first had to read it. In many places, it was taught by people who didn't make it fun. And people in their formative years, in high school and in college, weren't interested in history. They were interested in the present and in themselves. I've found that as you get older, you get more interested in history. You're more ready to accept the importance of the past. I think it's in the eye of the beholder.
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