David Halberstam Quotes & Sayings

The fury with which Japan unleashed itself upon international trade, the kind of economic Darwinism that was at the center of its impulse, originally came not just from each company's desire to conquer the world but from its desire to take market share away from domestic competitors. In Japan there was always someone ready to undersell someone else, and there was always someone on the edge of bankruptcy. — David Halberstam

There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.' — David Halberstam

One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television. — David Halberstam

In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity. — David Halberstam

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. — David Halberstam

His failure to adapt to new techniques, to pander (his own word), probably made his supporters love him all the more, and probably also narrowed his political base. — David Halberstam

He hated House members who longed only to run for the Senate, and senators who longed only to run for the presidency. He was appalled by what he felt television had done to the Senate by the mid-fifties. It had become a major launching platform for presidential campaigns. He thought television had ruined the Senate as a serious body. All they do there is preen and comb their hair and run for President. It's like a presidential primary over there, — David Halberstam

The weaknesses of the system, the inherent dangers of being a part of a domestic monopoly in an industry open to other countries, had not yet revealed themselves. So, while other areas of the American economy remained competitive, no one challenged the auto industry until the full-scale assault of the Japanese in the seventies. When it finally came, the extent of American vulnerability surprised even those who had been critical. — David Halberstam

Williams had a very shrewd sense of how much heat the organism could take at any given time; — David Halberstam

By 1957, a mere eleven years after its devastation, Japan not only had the most modern steel mills in the world but was the foremost steel producer in the world. But that was just the beginning: In the decade following 1957, Japanese steel production grew by 170 percent - while the American steel industry grew only 20 percent. The American steel industry, believing itself invulnerable, was headed by a complacent and insular management which was slow to bring in modern technology and which, even as the challenger grew more proficient, locked the industry into ever costlier labor agreements. By 1964, 28 percent of Japan's steel exports was going to America. In Japan, a thrust in shipbuilding followed closely upon the success in steel; by 1956 Japan had replaced Britain as the world's leading shipbuilding nation. — David Halberstam

He wanted to be respectable rather than powerful; he did not want the controversy that went with power. — David Halberstam

(The Revsons apparently did not like a young psychologist named Joyce Brothers, who appeared as an expert on boxing. Thus the questions given her were exceptionally hard - they even asked her the names of referees - in the desire to get her off the show; their strategy had no effect: She became the second person to win $64,000.) — David Halberstam

The ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter's career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished. — David Halberstam

His body language was that of someone frozen and not yet thawed out. — David Halberstam

When he studied, it was not so much for a promotion as to EXCEL at his job. — David Halberstam

QUESTION: Do you know what the greatest test is? ANSWER:Do you still get excited about what you do when you get up in the morning? — David Halberstam

Always stay in with the outs. — David Halberstam

It was like that afore you got here, it's like that now, and it's going to be like that when you and me are gone, departed and left, and so there is only one rule, swing with it and smile. — David Halberstam

The good reporters of that era, those who were well educated and who were enlightened themselves and worked for enlightened organizations, liked the Kennedys and were for the same things the Kennedys were for. In addition, the particular nature of the President's personal style, his ease and confidence with reporters, his considerable skill in utilizing television, and the terrible manner in which he was killed had created a remarkable myth about him. The fact that a number of men in his Cabinet were skillful writers themselves and that in the profound sadness after his murder they wrote their own eloquent (and on occasion self-serving) versions of his presidency had strengthened that myth. — David Halberstam

Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with the figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior. — David Halberstam

He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was. — David Halberstam

I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people. — David Halberstam

This edition of The Making of a Quagmire differs in a number of ways from the original one. Approximately one-third of the text has been cut in an effort to eliminate material that seemed clearly redundant or that did not relate directly to the Vietnam war. — David Halberstam

Alexander Dow, his boss at Edison, who thought him immensely talented, tried to dissuade him. "Electricity, yes," Dow told Ford. "That's the coming thing. But gas - no. — David Halberstam

McNamara was like a drill, relentlessly boring in on the assembly plants. No one worked as hard as he did, no one was as single-minded. Every day there was some new regulation, some new instrument of control. "I can't deal with him," Wiesmyer would tell friends. "This guy is crazy. It's not about cars - I can deal with cars. It's about numbers. Do you know what this guy does for a vacation? He climbs mountains. How can you deal with a guy who on his time off flies to some God-forsaken place and then climbs a mountain? You know, he pays good money to do that. — David Halberstam

If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring. — David Halberstam

One percent of the population ruled - and they were all grafters - while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism. — David Halberstam

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty. — David Halberstam

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past. — David Halberstam

The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it. — David Halberstam

The men were always wary of an officer who took form more seriously than function. — David Halberstam

The little things were not little things, because it was the accumulation of little things that made big things happen. — David Halberstam

Education was central to reporting. — David Halberstam

Krandall had recently done a paper entitled "The Decline of Ford's Market Share," a serious, pessimistic warning that he had reason to believe had never reached Henry Ford. So Krandall, who was thinking of retiring anyway, seized this opportunity to confront a boss he rather liked. The Ford Company, he told Ford, was not equipped to deal with the Japanese challenge. Not only was it doing poorly, he said, but it might not be able to hold its existing share in the future. Krandall had suspected a short, testy answer, but instead Ford looked at him and agreed. "It may not be long," he said, "before we're selling not just cars but apples. — David Halberstam

Had I been given The [Pentagon] Papers themselves that early, I would probably have become a prisoner of them - as it was, I had a good sense of the bureaucratic history [in them] as related by an expert, but I was also free to do several hundred interviews, not merely to flesh out the bureaucratic history, but to balance the pure paper history with a human history, and to relate secret decisions as they were not always set down on paper. — David Halberstam

Anybody is a damn fool if he actually seeks to be President," he told friends. "You give up four of the very best years of your life. Lord knows it's a sacrifice. Some people think there is a lot of power and glory attached to the job. On the contrary the very workings of a democratic system see to it that the job has very little power. — David Halberstam

Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park. — David Halberstam

Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge. — David Halberstam

Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous. — David Halberstam

That was something else I owed Teddy White. I and others of my generation, who went from newspaper and magazine reporting to writing books, owed him a far greater debt of gratitude than most people realized. As much as anyone he changed the nature of nonfiction political reporting. By taking the 1960 campaign, a subject about which everyone knew the outcome, and writing a book which proved wondrously exciting to read, he had given a younger generation a marvelous example of the expanded possibilities of writing nonfiction journalism. As I worked on my own book, I remembered his example and tried to write it as a detective novel. — David Halberstam

In the late fifties Romney had been a forceful advocate of breaking up GM. That, he believed, would make everyone leaner and more competitive. In 1957 he went before the Kefauver Senate committee on monopolies. Before he testified he was summoned to the Ford headquarters by Henry Ford and Ernie Breech, the chairman of the company, who were nervous about what he was going to say and wanted to get some idea of his thrust. Romney explained what he wanted: the breaking up of GM and perhaps even Ford. "But that would just make the competition tougher," Ford had said. "If you broke up GM the rest of us would suffer." "That's exactly what I mean," Romney had said. "Listen, I think it's tough enough the way it is - it's a damn hard dollar," Ford had answered. — David Halberstam

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact. — David Halberstam

If you have to write it down, you don't know it well enough, — David Halberstam

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be. — David Halberstam

Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence. — David Halberstam

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences. — David Halberstam

That made him a perfect match for Philip's new brother-in-law, Jim Lawson. For if Curtis Murphy was weird, then Jim Lawson was even weirder, not only because he was already going to divinity school at the most unattainable of Nashville schools, Vanderbilt, but because he had simultaneously started holding classes on how to challenge segregation in Nashville. — David Halberstam

[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"
(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.) — David Halberstam

Listen, girlie," said one of the executives of Cadillac, a particularly troubled company, to Maryann Keller, an astute and skeptical financial analyst on Wall Street, "it's ready to turn around, and it's going to be bigger than ever. — David Halberstam

When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. "Make something," he admonished. "Create something. — David Halberstam

There was, I found, always more to learn. — David Halberstam

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things. — David Halberstam

No son of mine is going to be a goddamn liberal, Kennedy interjected. Now, now Joe, Luce answered, of course he's got to run as a liberal. A Democrat has to run left of center to get the vote in the big northern cities, so don't hold it against him if he's left of center, because we won't. We know his problems and what he has to do. So we won't fight him there. But on foreign affairs, Luce continued, if he shows any sign of weakness toward the anti-Communist cause - or, as Luce decided to put it more positively - if he shows any weakness in defending the cause of the free world, we'll turn on him. There's no chance of that, Joe Kennedy had guaranteed; no son of mine is going to be soft on Communism. — David Halberstam

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? — David Halberstam

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted. — David Halberstam

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

She had no fear of the spotlight, only of the places it did not reach. — David Halberstam

It was the responsibility of a senior fireman to teach as well as to do. — David Halberstam

She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare. — David Halberstam

Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times. — David Halberstam

He [Robert Lovett] knew that those whose names were always in print, who were always on the radio and television, were there precisely because they did not have power, that those who did hold or had access to power tried to keep out of sight.
Halberstam, David; John McCain (2002-03-26). The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) (Kindle Locations 448-449). Modern Library. Kindle Edition. — David Halberstam

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm. — David Halberstam

To William Ford, on his own land at last, free of the old country, the farm was liberating; to Henry Ford, bored and restless, it was like a prison. (Cows came to symbolize his hatred of the farm. They were lazy, and they lay around all the time. He spent an entire lifetime railing against them. "The cow is the crudest machine in the world," he once said. On another occasion he said that if people would destroy all the cows in the world, they would eliminate the sources of war. When his company became large, he had his labs working constantly to find substitutes for dairy products.) — David Halberstam

He knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves. — David Halberstam

After Game Six of the Finals, as Paxson's shot went through the net, Michael Jordan raced to the basket to get the ball. He held it up high above his head, and his teammates thought he was going to say something about a prospective trip to Disneyland. Instead, he yelled out, Thunder Dan Majerle-my fucking ass! — David Halberstam

Officers came and went and were never a part of daily life. — David Halberstam

As a proponent of big-picture analysis, media pioneer and Time founder Henry Luce asserted, there was more money to be made in slow news than fast news. — David Halberstam

He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups. — David Halberstam

Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently. — David Halberstam

Theodore Sorensen wrote for [Robert Kennedy's 1968] announcement speech: "At stake is not simply the leadership of our party, and even our own country, it is our right to the moral leadership of this planet." The sentence absolutely appalled all the younger Robert Kennedy advisers, who felt it smacked of just the kind of attitude which had gotten us into Vietnam. Nonetheless, despite their protests, it stayed in the speech. — David Halberstam

Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been. — David Halberstam

Iacocca made his pitch: He wanted Ford to build the Fiesta, but with a Honda engine and transmission in it. Honda was delighted: He would like nothing better than this joint production with an American company, whose very name he revered. The price of the Japanese parts would be only $711. He could deliver 300,000 and do it quickly. Iacocca was even more delighted; he had an instant car and an unbeatable one at that. It could be in the dealers' showrooms in only eighteen months. — David Halberstam

She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself. — David Halberstam

ingenue whose career was winding down — David Halberstam

That [Chester Bowles's] ideas seemed to be a little unfashionable did not bother him. He simply did not take the Russian threat that seriously; he thought the real dangers in the world were those of poverty and hunger. To many liberals he was a comforting throwback to the Roosevelt era; he still stood for things that they believed in but which had recently come under considerable attack. — David Halberstam

Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one). — David Halberstam

It was the kind of country that made you feel better about yourself. — David Halberstam

When you are discussing a successful coach," sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie once said, not of Ramsay but of the entire profession, "you are not necessarily drawing the profile of an entirely healthy person. — David Halberstam

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. — David Halberstam

Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion. — David Halberstam

When, in the immediate postwar era, someone at Chrysler had designed a smaller, low-slung car, K. T. Keller, the company's top executive, had mocked it. "Chrysler builds cars to sit in," he said, "not to piss over. — David Halberstam

He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy. — David Halberstam

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. — David Halberstam

Somehow Acheson had been scarred during the McCarthy era; it was not so much that he had done anything wrong as the fact that he had been forced to defend himself. By that very defense, by all the publicity, he had become controversial. He had been in print too often, it was somehow indiscreet of Dean to be attacked by McCarthy. — David Halberstam

Mr. Ford, here is our new plant," Lord Perry, who was the head of Ford in Europe, said proudly. "Where is the water?" the old man asked. "There isn't any water," Lord Perry replied. "Well, let's get out of here," Ford said. "I don't even want to look at it." That had ended the ceremony. Ford had driven off, and they had torn down the plant and moved it to a deep-water site. — David Halberstam

Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence. — David Halberstam

For one measure of economic power was the ownership of sports teams - the Tigers had been owned by the Briggses, an old manufacturing family for whom the baseball park had been named, and the football team by William Clay Ford, Henry's brother - and in the early eighties the two newest owners, of the Tigers and the hockey Redwings, were pizza franchisers. — David Halberstam

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

No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did. — David Halberstam

An aristocracy come to power, convinced of its own disinterested quality, believing itself above both petty partisan interest and material greed. The suggestion that this also meant the holding and wielding of power was judged offensive by these same people, who preferred to view their role as service, though in fact this was typical of an era when many of the great rich families withdrew from the new restless grab for money of a modernizing America, and having already made their particular fortunes, turned to the public arena as a means of exercising power. They were viewed as reformers, though the reforms would be aimed more at the newer seekers of wealth than at those who already held it. ("First-generation millionaires," Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes, "give us libraries, second-generation millionaires give us themselves.") — David Halberstam

He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where — David Halberstam

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple. — David Halberstam

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. — David Halberstam

[David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend. — David Halberstam

They cut the menu from twenty-five items to nine, featuring hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and they made the burgers a little smaller - ten hamburgers from one pound of meat instead of eight. — David Halberstam

His counterpart at Chevy, a man named Bill Holler, had once gathered all of his regional salesmen around a brand-new model, opened the door, looked at them all long and solemnly, and then slammed the door as hard as he could. "Boys," he announced, "I've just slammed the door on the best goddam car in the world" - and a huge cheer went up. — David Halberstam

He was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance. — David Halberstam

The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know. — David Halberstam

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

Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions. — David Halberstam