The family had lived for a time in Winsted before moving to Westchester County, N.Y., where David Halberstam wrote for his high school paper and ran track before entering Harvard. He became managing editor of the Harvard Crimson and campus correspondent for the Boston Globe.
Halberstam, 73, was widely respected for his incisive reporting and graceful writing on the Vietnam War and politics, the civil rights era, professional sports, the economy and the auto industry. He left daily journalism in 1967 to write books.
But his training at The Courant taught him a crucial thing about reporting - to ask a lot of questions and not be shy about going back to ask even more, he said in a Courant interview in 2006, after stepping in on short notice to replace Mike Wallace as a keynote speaker at the National Writers Workshop in East Hartford.
The director of the workshop, Denis Horgan, writing on his blog denishorgan.com , recalled approaching Halberstam repeatedly over the years to speak at the event, with no success. But when Wallace had to drop out 70 hours before his talk, Halberstam - on deadline for a book and with a party of his own that night - finally said yes.
"He had a presence to him," said Horgan, a former Courant writer. "He carried himself with such dignity and spoke elegantly and was so wise. And he took the time that day to answer many questions and never forgot he had worked at The Courant."
Listening to his speech about the essentials of good reporting, "You could feel he liked making that contribution to other journalists," Horgan said.
Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1964, at age 30, for his coverage of Vietnam, which became the basis for his 1965 book "The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era." His 1972 work "The Best and the Brightest" further examined how the United States became entangled in an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. In 2002, his best-seller "War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals" was a Pulitzer finalist for nonfiction.
What he loved most about journalism, he told Courant reporter Regine LaBoissiere at the 2006 workshop, was that "it is about learning. It's about being paid to learn."
Halberstam learned a great deal about American politics, business and sports over the course of his long and illustrious career. Here is a sampling of his 21 books.
(1968) - A chronicle of Kennedy's run for president, cut short by his assassination. The book ends with this: "Then he descended to acknowledge his victory, to talk about the violence and the divisiveness, and to let a nation discover in his death what it had never understood or believed about him during his life."
(1972) - A deeper, even more devastating examination of American involvement in Vietnam. "Insights into how a great and good nation can lose a war and see its worthy purposes and principles destroyed by self-delusion," said Sen. John McCain in the book's foreword.
(1979) - How the media came to shape public opinion and policy, told through portraits of CBS's William Paley, Time's Henry Luce, the Grahams of the Washington Post and the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times.
(1993) - How this supposedly quiet decade changed the world to come, from McCarthyism to the H-bomb to school desegregation to The Pill to fast-food restaurants to the blooming of suburbia and, not least, Elvis Presley.
( 2001) - How the lessons of Vietnam - not all learned well - and the media, technology and a new generation of leadership influenced foreign policy after the Cold War.
(2002) - Halberstam lived near Engine 40, Ladder 35, and wrote movingly but never sentimentally of the lives of its 13 men, 12 of whom died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
(2003) - A tender account, as Ted Williams lay dying, of the long friendship of Red Sox players Williams, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky and Bobby Doerr.
At the time of his death, Halberstam had just finished a book on the Korean War, "The Coldest Winter," which is due to be published this fall. The fatal car crash occurred while he was on his way to interview Y. A. Tittle for his next book, "The Game," about the 1958 Colts vs. Giants NFL Championship.
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