A great loss

Last night I was half-watching the Red Sox postgame show when I looked up and suddenly realized they weren’t talking about the game anymore—they were reporting that writer David Halberstam had been killed in a car accident in San Francisco. He was reportedly on his way to an interview for a book he was writing on the 1958 NFL championship game.

Halberstam is probably best known for his political and war reporting (he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting on the Vietman War), but I know him best for his books on baseball. “Summer of ’49” is an excellent reminder that the heat of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is not a recent, ESPN-fueled development. And I loved “The Teammates,” a book about the relationship between four Red Sox players from the ’40s and ’50s—Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio.

Halberstam was the master of the telling anecdote. One scene in particular from “The Teammates” stands out in my mind as a compelling illustration of Williams’ moody perfectionism: Williams berating his good friend Doerr for not slicing an orange in the proper way.

Whether he was writing about baseball or weightier topics like the United States’ involvment in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf, Halberstam was a master of his craft. It is our great loss that he will not be writing any more books.