KEY POINTS:
David Halberstam, a prolific author whose Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the Vietnam War led many to question the US-led effort there, died on Monday in a car crash in northern California.
He was a passenger in the car. Halberstam covered the civil rights movement early in his career at the Nashville Tennessean newspaper and then moved to the New York Times, where in the early 1960s he was posted to Vietnam.
He questioned the official line that the United States was winning the war, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his reportage while at the Times. Halberstam wrote many non-fiction books on a wide variety of topics.
In recent years he also turned to sports, publishing books about basketball superstar Michael Jordan and on the 1949 pennant race battle between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.
- Agencies
