Halberstam: Americans `not too bad'

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by George Hatoun

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History professor Allen Matusow introduced Halberstam as "the most popular writer of nonfiction books in this country."

Halberstam started his journalism career with the Harvard Crimson . He worked for a small daily newspaper in Mississippi, the Nashville Tennesseean and The New York Times .

In 1962, Halberstam, still working for the Times , was sent to the Congo to cover the civil war there. Eight months later and at "that point when the [Vietnam] war was beginning to penetrate the American consciousness," he arrived in Saigon.

"He saw how the war was actually being fought, and -- more than anybody else -- the brilliant dispatches which he wrote from the field shaped the image of a generation of that war and at least as important, showed the difference between the way the American government wanted that war to be covered and what the reality was," Matusow said.

"President Kennedy himself tried to silence Mr. Halberstam, but instead he got the Pulitzer Prize," he said.

Since 1971, Halberstam has written 14 books, including The Powers That Be, The Reckoning and The Fifties .

Halberstam's address, entitled "America Then and Now: Post-War to the Next Century," focused on the loss of national identity that America has felt since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end of the Cold War.

"We feel that we are a nation momentarily adrift," he began.

"The Cold War is over and what had been a consuming purpose in foreign policy and in domestic policy for some 40 years is gone, and nothing has replaced it," Halberstam said.

He said that the end of the Cold War has led to a period where the nation lacks a sense of purpose.

"Our consensus of who we are and what we should be doing with ourselves -- a consensus that grew almost too easily in that period -- is momentarily suspended.

"In fact, much of that purpose in those years was probably unnecessary. We were making not only a financial commitment but probably a psychological commitment that was increasingly less real.

"We were girding our loins for confrontation with a superpower which was increasingly not a superpower and for confrontation that was not to come."

He termed the former Soviet Union as a country with many nuclear warheads but "in all other ways -- economic, social, political -- essentially [an] underdeveloped third-world Caucasian country."

Halberstam commented on various other social and economic milestones that have occurred in recent history.

He said that Japan's increasing economic power does not come from natural resources but rather from "the maximization of the human brain."

Halberstam said that the notion that the children of his generation might not live as well as that generation did "goes against the almost cardinal assumption of American life ... [that] your children are supposed to live better than you are."

He said that the nature of our advancing technology makes our political processes, which have remained primarily unchanged, look inefficient.

"It makes our politics look slow and cumbersome because they function as they did ever before ... we find flaws that in fact were probably always there," he said.

Halberstam said this phenomenon is responsible for former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's current surge of popularity.

Powell will speak at Rice next month as part of an annual conference sponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

"It explains why for the moment one of the most popular men in the country politically is a man who is a member of neither political party, seems not to be driven to run for the office [and] seems to be reassuring to us on racial grounds that America is more complete racially than others say.

"I think we're touched that he's somehow outside the political process. It is an irony that in the past much of the crankiness in a society politically came from people on the fringe on both sides and now the crankiness ... seems to come from the very center of the political matrix."

Halberstam said that the former Soviet Union is also suffering from the end of the war.

He cited a lack of transportation to move food supplies as well as harsh economic conditions.

He said that in its collapse, the Soviet empire may be even more of a threat than it was at the height of its power.

"... it's made them dangerous. When you think of the Soviet Union in this period of collapse, you're inclined to think of some of the symptoms of Germany between the wars."

While Halberstam didn't offer direct solutions to the problems that he described, he cited a passage by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perez in which he described how to measure the greatness of a country -- by the scientific, intellectual, technological and moral condition of the people.

Halberstam said that it was clear that America was doing well in all but the last of these, but even in that realm we are doing better than some, like Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, would have us think. He said that America should not become involved in a cultural war to try to solve its problems.

"So [as to] the question of the nature of the people, I think we're not too bad. I think we're pragmatic and ambitious and generally hard working. We are frustrated because of economic changes. We have great problems in our inner city and racially.

"But we have this reservoir of ordinary people who want to do well because they want their children to do better than they did," he said.

Halberstam's talk was sponsored by the Friends of Fondren Library. Founded on May 30, 1950, the Friends of Fondren is the oldest support organization at Rice.

It is dedicated to stimulating the growth of library facilities and resources.

This item appeared in the News section of the October 6, 1995 issue.

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