Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam was killed Monday in a car crash south of San Francisco. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan. He was the author of 21 books including "The Best and the Brightest," "The Breaks of the Game," "The Reckoning" and "October 1964."

Halberstam was a passenger in a car making a turn in Menlo Park, California, when it was hit broadside by another car and knocked into a third vehicle, said the San Mateo County coroner. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The man who was driving Halberstam, a journalism student at the University of California, Berkeley, was injured, as were the drivers of the other two vehicles. None of those injuries were called serious.

Halberstam was killed doing what he had done his entire adult life: reporting. He was on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts, considered by many to be the greatest football game ever played.

Halberstam came into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for The New York Times. His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground. For that work, Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964.

Below is a picture of Mr. Halberstam in his office. (1993)


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