Quotes from David Halberstam

If the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had seemed to inaugurate a brand-new chapter in the history of warfare, supposedly making all other weapons obsolete and creating a world where military power rested only with the richest, most technologically advanced nations, then the Korean battlefield defeats of early July 1950 shattered that belief

ingenue whose career was winding down

Education was central to reporting.

This was especially relevant in Korea, a new kind of limited war, which demanded all sorts of political decisions and a certain pragmatism that was alien to MacArthur's sense of duty. Eisenhower thought a younger commander would have been far more appropriate than, as he phrased it, "an untouchable." There was also the danger with MacArthur that he had begun to see his mission in Asia in a quasi-religious light, as the leader of a holy crusade against a godless enemy.

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians

That did not augur well, for these alienated, complacent workers, whether they knew it or not, were under challenge from purposeful, disciplined workers around the world, and their jobs and their whole way of life were in the balance.

Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution.

In retrospect, Reston was convinced that the Vienna bullying became a crucial factor in the subsequent decision to send 18,000 advisory and support troops to Vietnam, and though others around Kennedy retained some doubts about this, it appeared to be part of a derivative link, one more in a chain of events which saw the escalation of the Cold War in Kennedy's first year.

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.)

Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.

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.

There was, I found, always more to learn.

the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

It requires a certain kind of mind to see the beauty in a hamburger bun.

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.

Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.

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.

Up to then there had been something of a gentleman's agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things.

she had no fear of the spotlight, only of the places it did not reach.

Those years [as the war progressed] would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

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.