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 23^rd 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.

Mr. Halberstam was outspoken in his criticism of the Iraq war and it’s similarities to Vietnam. “I just never thought it was going to work at all,” Mr. Halbertstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January. “I thought that in both Vietnam and Iraq, we were going against history. My view and I think it was because of Vietnam-was that the forces against us were going to be hostile, that we would not be viewed as liberators. We were going to punch our fist into the largest hornets’ nest in the world.”

Halberstam was a great journalist because he cared more about the truth than he did about being popular. Speaking to the Columbia School of Journalism on May 18, 2005 Halberstam said, “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. (So, if you seek popularity, this is probably not the profession for you.) There are a few things I would like to pass on to you as I come near to the end of my career.

One: It’s not about fame. By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are. Besides fame does not last. At its best, it’s about being paid to learn. For fifty years, I have been paid to go out and ask questions. What a great privilege to be a free reporter in a free society, to be someone whose job is a search for knowledge. What a rare chance to grow as a person…”

Commenting on the collapse of the American press in November 1999: “Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks. Television’s gatekeepers, at a time when a fragmenting audience threatens the singular profits of the past, stopped being the gatekeepers and began to look the other way on moral and ethical and journalistic issues. Less and less did they accept the old-fashioned charge for what they owed the country. The viewpoint seemed to be-from their testing and polling-that the American people did not want to know what, was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.”

Contrast David Halberstam an iconoclast, truth-telling journalist with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge with the celebrity whores that pass for journalists today. People like Bob Woodward who went from being a great investigative journalist working at a wonderful newspaper like the Washington Post breaking one of the best stories of all time, Watergate, which brought down a corrupt President who now with-holds potentially damaging information about a sitting President because it might hurt his book sales. That’s disgusting. Woodward is such an insider that he is indistinguishable from his own sources. He’s dining and drinking with the Washington elite, rubbing elbows with the stars of Capitol Hill to obtain his scoops for his next big book. Like Halberstam so wisely said, “the more famous you are, the less a journalist you are.”

We won’t see the likes of David Halberstam any time soon. Rest in peace, we owe you a huge debt of gratitude for the words you wrote and the truth you told.