How Some Pogressives Die Part Three

      How Some Progressives Die - Part Three


            The first two parts of this story dealt with plane crashes. Now let's look at car crashes.
    David Halberstam died in a car crash in  who wrote some great liberal books.
     alifornia in 2007. Halberstam was a liberal who wrote about American issues.
   He started out as a reporter and ended up in Vietnam in the early 1950's working for 'The New York Times'. His stories angered the Kennedy administration as did his book 'Vietnam: The Making of a Quagmire'.  
     His main message in the book was simple: America is losing the war in Vietnam. Halberstam then moved back to the U.S. and wrote many books. They included works on the decline of the U.S. car industry, the big U.S. media, and one other big book on Vietnam called 'The Best and the Brightest'.
     Here Halberstam skewered the liberal elites like U.S. president Lnydon Johnson and his secretary of defence Robert MacNamara, for their roles in the Vietnam war. Not all progressives liked the book.
    Noam Chomsky dismissed it as just gossip. Mary McCarthy accused Halberstam of twisting the facts when he alleged that some government officials who helped make policy decisions in Vietnam lost their jobs. McCarthy said that most of these people kept on working for the U.S. government.
    Still, Halberstam's portraits of powerful Democrats must have angered them.
    Halberstam was researching a book on sports when he died in a car crash. His driver, a graduate student in Berkeley journalism school was sentenced to five days in jail after it was found out that he made a left turn into opposing traffic.
   "This wasn't a crime," a Berkeley resident told me. "Halberstam died in a simple car crash because of his driver's mistake."
 This was true. Yet I miss Halberstam  who wrote some great liberal books.
  Then there was David Fraser McTaggart, another David who died in a car crash.