Journalist David Halberstam died Monday at 73. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was killed in a car crash near San Francisco.
As a young reporter in Vietnam for The New York Times in the 1960s, Halberstam accused U.S. military briefers of giving misleading, overly encouraging accounts of the war.
His book The Best and The Brightest told the story of how Kennedy- and Johnson-era policymakers walked the country into a quagmire.
Author and journalist Neil Sheehan, who also covered Vietnam in the early days, remained a close friend of Halberstam's many years after their assignments in Saigon.
Of his colleague, Sheehan told NPR, "He was interested in everything, and he had the extraordinary energy — physical and intellectual — to get the bottom of something."
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