David Halberstam, RIP

One of my favorite baseball books is "October 1964", the story of the St. Louis Cardinals, the New York Yankees, and their classic seven-game World Series forty three years ago.

The man who wrote it died in a car crash on Monday.

David Halberstam was 73 years old.

In the hundreds of stories and obits on Halberstam, many of them don't even mention "October 1964". That's no reflection on the quality of the work. It's a tribute to Halberstam's prolific talent. He wrote more than 20 books.

Halberstam launched to fame with his book on the Vietnam War, "The Best and the Brightest." Halberstam also wrote the classic, "Summer of '49," the story of the pennant race between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Halberstam died doing what he loved. He was on the way to an interview with former NFL quarterback Y.A. Tittle about an upcoming book on the 1958 NFL championship game when he was killed in a three-car accident.

Tom Brokaw wrote "The Greatest Generation" but I'm not sure anyone wrote more forcefully about the impact of the World War II generation than did Halberstam. Several of his books, "The Fifties," "Summer of '49," and "The Teammates", just to name a few, featured people who first came of age in the 1940's.

Even "The Best and the Brightest," a book centered on Vietnam, is largely focused on men like McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, World War II veterans.

Halberstam's words will echo from the grave. His latest book, "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War," is scheduled to be published this fall.

I'm not the first to point out the bitter irony here -- a man who survived the coverage of war is killed in a car wreck in California. What a shame. What a loss. David Halberstam will be missed.