Counterfeit Icon

Journalism: The posthumous publication of his book on the Korean War is confirming David Halberstam's place in the left-leaning media establishment's lexicon of saints. The truth about him is a lot more down to earth.

"The Coldest Winter" by idolized veteran journalist David Halberstam, killed in a car crash in April, is being proclaimed in the media as the icing on the cake of a stellar career as a reporter and author, whose subjects ranged from Vietnam to baseball.

To get a taste of the book's thesis, consider its ludicrous description of the public outcry against President Truman's firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur as "a kind of giant anti-war rally, not just anti-Korean War, but probably anti-Cold War as well."

Anti-war? Americans who supported the architect of our successes in the Pacific theater of World War II, the man who famously declared, "In war, there is no substitute for victory," wanted to win in Korea, not cut and run.

MacArthur's replacement, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, threw back the Chinese invasion of 1950, but the eventual U.N. commander, Gen. Mark Clark, gained only a stalemate.

At 28, Halberstam became the New York Times' Vietnam correspondent, winning a Pulitzer for his 15-month, 1962-64 stint there. "Before he left," according to U.S. Marines Corps University historian Mark Moyar, author of the new Vietnam War history "Triumph Forsaken," Halberstam "would do more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history."

Moyar shows that Halberstam and United Press International correspondent and "A Bright Shining Lie" author Neil Sheehan committed reportorial inaccuracies that helped bring about the November 1963 coup ousting South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem -- clearly our worst mistake of that war. For instance, the two reporters "presented grossly inaccurate information on the Buddhist protest movement and on South Vietnamese politics, much of which they unwittingly received from secret communist agents."

Halberstam pushed hard for Gen. Duong Van Minh to replace Diem, claiming in August 1963 that he "is considered to be as close to an authentic hero as South Vietnam has." Minh would turn out to be a hopeless incompetent.

New Criterion co-editor Hilton Kramer has pointed out that the 700-plus pages of Halberstam's celebrated best-seller "The Fifties" are actually "left-liberal mythology" of the decade, dominated by "the notion of an entire society in the grip of politically inspired paranoid fear, abject social conformism, empty-headed consumerism and spiritual sterility."

His most famous book, "The Best and the Brightest," cemented the Halberstam myth of a true-to-his-conscience iconoclast. Like the purported geniuses of the Kennedy administration whose misjudgments he set out to expose, Halberstam was far less than he was cracked up to be.