SKEPTICAL ATTITUDE: DAVID HALBERSTAM, REPORTER - HISTORIAN

In the beginning, we believed our president. Of course that was FDR and there was a war on against the sneak-attacking infamous Japanese Empire, of Pearl Harbor fame, which resulted in Nazi Germany declaring war on us as well. We were suddenly actively fighting in a three-front war in Europe, the Pacific, and the China-India-Burma theater, or Bridge on the River Kwai fame, and flying over the Hump, the Himalayas, to supply our ally against Japan, China. That war, World War II, ended, of sorts, in 1945, but out of the tilled soil of devastated Europe, especially the flattened and divided Germany, a new war grew, the Cold War which lasted either until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, a period of decades when the world was divided into two warring camps, the West, led by us, and the other led by Josef Stalin of the USSR.

Six years after the end or WWII, the Korean War broke out when North Korea invaded South Korea, our ally. This was a proxy war. The North was backed by its two communist allies, Red China (today's People's Republic of China, in polite circles) and the Soviet Union. If we crossed the Yalu river, bordering North Korea and China, and perhaps even the Soviet Union, I'd have to check a map, we'd be fighting directly with the two largest communist entities the world had ever known. We didn't want to do that. The war, technically called a 'police action,' to avoid legal complications, I suppose, ended in a stalemate in a place called Panmunjon on the 38th Parallel, which remains in effect over half a century later. We still have a lot of American troops there. We're tryihg to get North Korea, an isolated, nearly bankrupt and failed state whose people are starving, to give up its ambition to develop nuclear weapons.

We call Korea a proxy war because the major powers used substitutes, initially, to do the fighting. We had troops there, of course, fighting on the ground, and China suddenly sent in waves of ground forces that pushed us back to the sea at Pusan. This is when MacArthur launched HIS famous left hood, the landing at Inchon, which cut the forces of the North in half, leading to the half-a-loaf stalemate that leads us down to today.

Meanwhile, over in French Indochina, the native Vietnamese were cleaning the floor with their French overlords, especially at the final battle of DienBienPhu in which surviving French troops were fortunate to escape with lives.

We were warned not to leap in where Angels fear to tread, but that's exactly what we did. We began supporting an unpopular regime in Saigon and began sending "advisors" into Vietnam. These are troops who advise national forces how to fight. Of course we send in more troops to shore up those national troops and to support the advisors. We began hearing about this in 1963, perhaps the year before. DienBienPhu was 1954, which I was a high school freshman. In the Summer of 1963, I was working at South Shore, Lake Tahoe, and would watch the news out of this place I couldn't find on a map called Vietnam.

David Halberstam was reporting from Vietnam at that time, although I wasn't paying attention to by-lines then. What he reported differed from the rosy picture presented by our generals and political leaders.

In November, 1963, my second year of law school at NYU in Greenwich Village, as I walked to the bank to cash a check to get me through the next week, perhaps $30, I stopped into a record store on 8th Street near Waverly. It was quiet. Another browser and the clerk at the register, on the telephone.

"What?!" he suddenly shouted as though he'd just heard that his mother died.

We looked.

He hung up.

"President Kennedy's been shot," he said. His face was stricken.

I headed out and toward the bank a few blocks up Fifth Avenue. In front of stock brokerage windows small crowds were gathering to read the ticker in red lights in the window. JFK had been shot in Dallas, a motorcade, details to follow, no report on his condition, which in itself was ominous.

By the time I returned to my dorm, the news was in, the president, whom most of us admired greatly for his vigor, charm, looks, success, inspiration, etc., was known to be dead. On Sunday, with New York basically called to a halt, roommates and I drove to Holyoke, MA, where one had a girlfriend. We stopped at her mother's in the Bronx where I heard Mrs. Grossman say in great sorrow, "What a beautiful man." I'd never heard a man described as beautiful before, so that stuck with me all these years. On the drive up to Holyoke we heard the next big news out of Dallas, that Lee Harvey Oswald, said to be the assassin of JFK, had himself been murdered in the basement of the headquarters of the police station in Dallas.

"What is going on?" we wondered as at least one of us felt ill. We all did, I believe, not being able to process the head of our stable government being murdered and suddenly being cast into stormy seas.

We've never been the same, this country.

Vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson inherited the war in Vietnam, which until then had cost about 8,000 lives. He created a surge by inserting 20,000 more, and then half-a-million more, instituting a draft. If you want to see opposition to a war, start drafting college kids. Suddenly they awaken, and their parents, and the demonstrations and rioting begin.

David Halberstam reported the Vietnam war, and introduced the note of skepticism which grew and grew as government lies became bolder and...suddenly...voila...were uncovered, when Daniel Ellsbergl, a high Pentagon official stole the secret history of the war and lagged it over to the New York Times and the Washington Post, who published them despite cries of treason and a government injunction to stop the presses, an order which was overturned in the Pentagon Papers case, U.S. v. New York Times.

Vietnam taught us that our government is in the business of lying to us, and that the business of the press is to uncover and publish those lies.

David Halberstam led the charge. He was killed instantly in a traffic collision in Menlo Park, California, en route to interview Y.A. Tittle, a later quarterback for the New York (football) Giants, about the NFL Championship Game in 1958, the best game ever played, some say, when I was a college freshman, Wagner College, Staten Island, NY.

You don't like hearing that government is in the business of lying to us? Check out today's paper, in which the lead stories are the congressional hearings into the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, and Pfc. Jessica Lynch, captured and rescued by American soldiers in Iraq. The military covered up the circumstances of death in the Tillman case and fictionalized the account about Lynch, apparently to feed the preconceptions necessary to make her a greater hero than she is in speaking the truth about what happened. She got hurt badly in a road bombing. The Army tried to make her a combination Wonder Woman and Rambo, which neither of us needed.

See the article below on David Halberstam by Dexter Filkins of the NYT.

And ask whether you think it's a good idea to believe what our president is selling.