Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.
David Halberstam wrote as if history were a trial transcript, and America was always on the stand. His sentences carried the weight of evidence—clipped, layered, relentless. In The Best and the Brightest, he exposed how arrogance and illusion led a nation deeper into war. In The Powers That Be, he mapped the machinery of media as both mirror and manipulator. Even in his sports writing, whether chronicling Michael Jordan or the 1979 Portland Trail Blazers, he treated games as parables of ambition, failure, and human drive.
I first read him in college, expecting policy analysis. What I found instead was a cadence that shaped my own: scandal as parable, detail as indictment, narrative as forensic record. He showed me that writing could be both archive and accusation, both witness and warning. He never offered easy closure—only the insistence that truth, however uncomfortable, must be inscribed.
Halberstam shaped me by refusing spectacle. He wrote not to dazzle but to document, not to entertain but to expose. His work taught me that scandal is not gossip—it is history, and history demands a witness. To write in his shadow is to honor that relentless witness, to keep asking the questions power would rather bury.
Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan
Stories That Are All True 