Word: halberstam
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...going to review that Halberstam book," my editor insisted, "you really can't." I began a dutiful protest, but knew he had a point. "Look, you're a nice Catholic kid who spent his whole life in some nice Catholic schools, going to Mass and rooting for Notre Dame. You probably think a bar mitzvah is some kind of Jewish saloon. Why do you want to review a novel about the first Jewish Presidential candidate?" Good question. "Because I liked it," I answered...
That was an understatement. The Wanting of Levine, the first venture into fiction by Dr. Michael Halberstam '53, is an eminently likeable book. The story of A.L. Levine, millionaire Jewish politico, and his accidental campaign for the presidency of an America grown tired and fat and eager for a new face, is most of what any novel should be: funny, touching, slapstick across the surface but with a strong subtle current running along the seabed, a roaring good story with a moral that doesn't have to hit you across the head. Halberstam, who won the 1953 Dana Reed Prize...
...course, that the book is perfect. Halberstam has set his story in the presidential year 1988, a time of serious decay in America. The fuel shortage has dropped the United States into the second division of world powers, border wars are flaring among the states, and "radical youth" has swung to the right to begin a guerilla war against the blacks who, having attained the nervous prosperity of the middle class, have taken over the military and the FBI. It's all in good fun, really--although Halberstam's vision of America has an underlying serious tone, his tongue seems...
...FIRST TRIP to Saigon in 1962 as a reporter for the New York Times, David Halberstam saw the American effort in Vietnam as a worthwhile endeavor. The war, he says in his notes in The Best and the Brightest, seemed to be a test of two political systems in a political war, and he preferred "our system." Admitting his failure, the failure of the press and many others at the time to see the atrocities the United States government would commit in Southeast Asia, Halberstam arrived at a different conclusion by 1962--that our handling of Vietnam was doomed...
...later '60s. Neither the government nor the citizens of this country may support Carter today, but there is little doubt that if the U.S. were to involve itself in a Korean civil war in the future, Carter would deserve the blame for the kind of mindlessness for which Halberstam accuses those "great" leaders in the Kennedy administration...