Another one of my journalistic heroes has died. Journalist and author David Halberstam was killed in a car accident in San Francisco on Monday, April 23rd at the age of 73. Halberstam became famous for his brutally honest print coverage of the Vietnam War that earned him the hatred and scorn of politicians and the military and the respect and gratitude of the American public. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his war coverage and later wrote a ground breaking book on the failed polices of Vietnam called “The Best and the Brightest.” He had to fight very hard to write the truth about that bloody war, risking his own life and his job as a reporter at The New York Times to get the truth out to the American public. According to Dexter Filkins writing in The NY Times, “in 1963, Mr. Halberstam filed an article about a series of arrests staged by the Saigon government that was flatly contradicted by the State Department in Washington. After much debate, editors at The Times decided to run two articles on its front pages—one from Washington, based on the State Department’s version and the other from Mr. Halbertstam. “Three days later,” Neil Sheehan writes in A Bright and Shining Lie, “other events forced the State Department to admit that the official version had been wrong.” President Kennedy was no fan of Halberstam’s reporting, Kennedy reportedly pressed to have Halberstam pulled out of Saigon but his editors at The NY Times reluctantly at times stood by their young reporter and kept him in the field. Just imagine how different our world would have been today, if just one reporter at the NY Times had been as doggedly determined to tell the truth about the run-up to the Iraq War as Halberstam had been. Think of the lives that would have been saved. Just one courageous reporter could have literally changed the world.

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Four years ago this month I lost my job in radio. Radio broadcasting was a job I loved and the best paying gig I ever had.When my career ended I had just won an award and was really hitting my stride so to say I was bummed out would be a slight understatement. I lost my job because I was a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. You would think with the way things are going that I might have found my way back into broadcasting by now and if I lived in one of those Yankee liberal states it might have worked out that way but…it was not to be. The run up to the war and my dismissal, my subsequent law suit against Clear Channel and the mediated settlement to the lawsuit were so painful that I haven’t even been able to write about those experiences.

Last night I watched a television program that did an excellent job of explaining how our entire country could be rushed into an unnecessary war and describing the experience of being one of the few broadcasters that didn’t believe the hype about the weapons of mass destruction but found little support in those views, Bill Moyer’s program “Buying the War” on PBS. You can view the show on-line by clicking on

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

It’s pretty long but well worth your time and effort. I find it interesting that some of the biggest cheerleaders for the war were too cowardly to appear on Moyer’s show and answer his questions. They feel more comfortable on Fox. Most of the commentators that predicted a quick victory in Iraq are still making the rounds of the talk shows and still making money on those dead wrong opinions. That’s just not right. But like my dad says “Life’s just not fair sometimes.”

I’ve often theorized that President George W. Bush lived in some parallel universe that allowed him to believe that everything in the world was actually fine when it was actually crumbling around him. Kind of like opposite world. This helps me to understand how he can continue to send U.S. troops into Iraq, where they face life threatening situations each and every day. It also helps to explain why he and his Vice President and their band of supporters continue to proclaim that things in Iraq are getting better you just can’t tell because the media just wants to talk about all those massive explosions in the market places and those hundreds of civilians being killed every day. Even hard statistical data including the ever increasing civilian and military causality rates don’t deter their fantatisical beliefs and their stubborn mind set.

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