The two reporters I admired most and who shaped the early part of my career are now gone. Roy Aarons, who reported from the West Coast for The Washington Post for many years died in 2004. David Halberstam was killed in a car crash today. He was 73.
Their careers and their friendship were intertwined through me. In 1971, as a young reporter covering politics and civil rights in Dallas, I was also The Post's stringer in Texas -- and involved with their national staff reporters whenever they journeyed into that state, as Aarons did that summer. I began our friendship as Roy's lackey and wound up doing some of his legwork when he came down with the flu.
Somewhere along the way, and from long distance calls I would get from him, I must have impressed him. Late that year, I got a call from Halberstam telling me that Roy had given him my name as someone who could help him with some last-minute, fact-checking and reporting in Texas. He had some old Lyndon Johnson and South Texas stories he wanted verified, and I spent a week getting him whatever corroboration I could. He said it was for a book that was at the press but over which editors were queazy.
The book would be The Best and The Brightest.
Years later, both of them would be instrumental in helping me get a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, where Halberstam visited me -- closing down the Faculty Club on a snowy evening with me and the poet Robert Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had been a roommate at Harvard and lifelong friend of James Agee, and, like most writers, Halberstam also had a fascination with a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
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