David Halberstam

Dirk McGirk's like writing style is, it uh, it's rough, man.

He, he is very clearly angling for some like, uh, was it David Halberstam, like smartest guys in the room type thing.

Like-

Yeah

They don't really sound like they belong in the same conversation, but this week, that's what we're doing.

Welcome to Look Both Ways with David and Wes.

I'm Wes, and this week we start with Waymo and David's time at Climate Week in New York City.

Electric robotaxis sound good, but, you know, what trips are they replacing? Are they actually reducing driving, or are they just making car travel easier to justify? Then we shift to regional rail.

What role can it play in transportation and climate? We use Colorado as an example where the Mustang helped show there's demand for better regional transit before the states started looking more seriously into passenger rail with a cocoa connector in the mountain rail corridors.

So send them to lookbothwayspod at gmail.com. We'll put the best ones up for a listener vote and go from there.

All right, all episodes are available at lookbothwayspodcast.com. And now, on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to Look Both Ways with David and Wes, pragmatic conversations about all things transportation.

It belongs to his dad, Steve.

Or, if you believe David Halberstam's assertion in The Education of a Coach, which we'll take a look at next month, it was actually written by Bill's mom, Jeanette.

who took on the thankless task of condensing a career of football knowledge into something actually readable.

And if you know anything about how football coaches operate, that is no small feat.

I'm glad it exists, even if it's not something most people need to bother with reading.

Next month, we're going to take a look at some of the fruits of Steve Belichick's Football Scouting Methods as they were born in the career of his son...

Bill, David Halberstam, one of the great sports writers of all time, takes us on a tour of the early portions of Belichick's Patriots career in the education of a coach.

That's next month on the Blue 58 Book Club.

So I thought this through, and, uh, maybe, uh, this is a child of immigrant overachiever thing, but I've got four, if that's okay.

Um, so the first one is, uh, The Best and the Brightest, uh, David Halberstam, and I think it's just an incredible observation on the nature of elitism, institutional priorities, groupthink.

It's about the Vietnam War and the ways that we bungled our way through it with the best and the brightest, folks who had all the credentialing, but none of the common sense and none of the moral, uh, engagement with what we were actually doing.

Uh, the second is Amusing Ourselves to Death.

But I have no idea who actually wrote the piece in the mystery document.

How would I know? That it's a famous journalist? Is it like David Halberstam? No? David Moranis? Marinus? Who the hell is that? Does he have a Wikipedia article? Meredith, does he have a Wikipedia article? All right, apparently he does have a Wikipedia article.

He even won a Pulitzer Prize, so congratulations, sir.

So the Gulf War lifted President Bush's approval rating to an unheard of 89%.

You know, one of the greatest examples of the power of, of American journalism is the Vietnam war.

We had reporters, people like David Halberstam who were out in Vietnam.

Um, all this reporting eventually came back and, uh, And helped the United States come to, at least the voters, come to the realization that this has to end.

It led to President Johnson not seeking another term.

And pressure is applied.

And Paley... and and you know if you you can get the whole story in david halberstam's classic book the powers that be um but already you're seeing that sort of pressure applied um you're seeing moments when uh in an earlier era the institution could stand up to the might of the united states government um in 76 it still has some of that power but it's starting to slip away And it's because of what the film is talking about, which is that the economics are changing, that Cronkite could report on the Vietnam War in ways that were very upsetting to President Johnson.

Whereas 55 years after the fact, it's very hard to find people in corporatized media standing up to the current occupant of the White House because the power dynamic is so much different.

Yeah.

And he took a lot of notes.

And so if you, like me, are very interested in writing and storytelling, particularly screenwriting, how you structure a story, how he developed these characters, how he sort of found the allegorical relationship between Max and Diana and all the sorts of things, I can recommend that one.

Then, you know, the classic... book uh about american media institutions in the mid to late 70s when this movie's coming out i referenced it earlier would be david halberstam's the powers that be he's somebody who you know writes a lot about Murrow in that book, definitely had the image of the mythic, the mythic image of Murrow, like that is an essential building block and the wall of Murrow's legend and the sorts of things that I'm having to deconstruct in order to get at what was actually remarkable about this man, what the legend is built on.

But still, if you want to understand these, you know, conflicts over, you know, profit versus public service and the corporatization of media and how CBS went up against the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

Hold on.

Oh yeah, I, I was reading "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam about Vietnam.

Uh, got 80% through that.

I mean, very good, but heavy, dense.

The Washington Post, uh, in its great wisdom, buried this story [chuckles] in the back of, uh, you know, the A section somewhere, uh, back into print newspapers.

But I heard from one reader, someone I never had the privilege to meet in person, and the one reader whom I received an email from was David Halberstam, uh, the famous chronicler of the Vietnam War.

And David Halberstam sent me a very brief note, and he said, "This is the most important story, uh, you know, that anyone should read today, and it is the truth, and it is what's going to happen." Uh, and I think it was, it was written in, in, in the history of, of our overreach and in all overreach, and Donald Trump is learning it again today.

And no, we have not learned the lesson.

And frankly, it's not even clear to me, uh, that we will be ending a war that is historically unpopular anytime soon, because I don't see that we have a clear way out.