Family, friends and fans crowded the Atheneum last Saturday night to honor David Halberstam and to celebrate the posthumous release of the great American journalist and devoted Nantucketer’s final completed work. The Coldest Winter—an evocative and impassioned history of the Korean War—was completed only five days before Halberstam’s saddening death last April. He had regarded the book, which took him a decade to write, as his best.
Halberstam, who bought his house on Nantucket in 1969, once told Plum’s Dan Honan that he’d written 14 of his 22 books while on the island. He addressed his years here in a 1999 Town & Country magazine essay, “Nantucket on My Mind”: “it has given me sanctuary in a demanding and difficult and often volatile professional life, allowing me to work diligently each summer while putting myself back among people who I know love and care about me.”
One such Nantucketer, his friend Eugenie Voorhees, said that Halberstam loved the “physical” things about the island: “He felt it was quite real.” Halberstam, it seems, was inevitably drawn to the “real”: the beautiful, the inspiring, the incongruous, the downright horrifying. His sizzling intellect and scrupulous reporting earned him a Pulitzer for his work overseas during Vietnam and evolved into a remarkably prolific career as an author.
Published four weeks ago, The Coldest Winter offers challenging statements on how the Korean campaign forecasted some future developments in American foreign policy: “it showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited truths…in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons.” Halberstam depicts military leaders who, a half-decade after an exalted World War II victory, make a series of egocentric and unfocused blunders in Korea. General Douglas MacArthur becomes central, his success at the Inchon Landing of September 1950 vastly diminished by the recklessness he exhibits afterwards.
In “Nantucket on My Mind,” Halberstam peppers his examination of the island with the individuals who helped make it a sanctuary for him: friends like David and Sue Fine, Paul and Joan Crowley, Pam and Foley Vaughan, and many others. Likewise in The Coldest Winter, he artfully weaves the overarching specifics of the war with all-too-human stories of individual soldiers.
The Korean War is often dwarfed by other 20th century struggles, Halberstam reminds us: “Korea would not prove a great national war of unifying singular purpose, as World War II had been, nor would it, like Vietnam…divide and thus haunt the nation.” Yet the efforts and sacrifices made by men on the ground were equally great. Halberstam left our community and the world with a sympathetic vision of men “with a job to do, nothing more, nothing less.” And his diligent research, attention to detail and masterful narrative pay, in the end, a significant tribute.
