Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam was killed in a car crash on Monday in Menlo Park, California. He was being driven from Berkeley to an interview with former NFL quarterback Y.A. Tittle when the crash occurred, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Halberstam reported from Vietnam for The New York Times and was one of the first reporters to ask tough questions about that war; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. His 1972 book The Best and The Brightest explored how the United States got into Vietnam in the first place. In later years Halberstam veered between politics and sports, writing well-received books about baseball (The Summer of ’49, 1989) and Michael Jordan (Playing for Keeps, 1999) as well as weighty political books like War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (2001).
The San Francisco Chronicle has a good recap of Halberstam’s career and a detailed description of the accident.
Menlo Park is about 30 miles south of San Francisco and just north of Palo Alto. It’s been a bad year for car travel in Menlo Park: last July, Prince Tu’ipelehake and Princess Kaimana of Tonga were killed in a crash there.
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