Although initially eager to cover the events in the country, over time he grew jaded over the demanding working conditions and the difficulty in handling Congolese officials' lack of truthfulness.

[9] When the chief American officer in South Vietnam, General Paul D. Harkins, launched an operation with 45 helicopters flown by American pilots landing a battalion of South Vietnamese infantry to attack a Viet Cong base, Halberstam was forbidden from doing any direct reporting; he was simply told to report the operation as a victory.

"[6] Halberstam argued that the operation could not have been the victory that Harkins had claimed as the Viet Cong must have heard the helicopters coming and accordingly retreated as guerrillas normally do when faced with superior force, leading him to write: "You can bet the V.C.

As an air controller, he instructed paratroopers to be inserted in an area which was almost on top of North Vietnamese troops, leading to many unnecessary deaths.

[11] During the Buddhist crisis in 1963, Halberstam and Neil Sheehan debunked the claim by the Diệm regime that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam regular forces had perpetrated the brutal raids on Buddhist temples, which the American authorities had initially believed, but that the Special Forces, loyal to Diệm's brother and strategist Nhu, had done so to frame the army generals.

[12] He was also involved in a scuffle with Nhu's secret police after they punched fellow journalist Peter Arnett while the news men were covering a Buddhist protest.

[14] Halberstam's reporting led to a feud with journalists Marguerite Higgins and Joseph Alsop, and TIME Magazine publisher Henry Luce, who all championed the Diem regime.

Both Higgins[citation needed] and Luce had been born in China to Protestant missionary parents and were very attracted to the idea of one day converting all of the Chinese to Christianity; Chiang's defeat in 1949 had caused them much bitterness.

[17] In her first column from Saigon, Higgins called the younger American journalists like Halberstam and Sheenan, "typewriter strategists" who rarely went into battle, further adding: "Reporters here would like to see us lose the war to prove they're right."

[18] In Halberstam's view, Higgins and Alsop weren't doing any reporting on the ground, they were merely flying into Saigon occasionally to interview US officials and transmit those comments to their American readers.

Halberstam asked Mieczysław Maneli, the Polish Commissioner to the International Control Commission, if he would be able to arrange for him to visit North Vietnam.

Initially well received by the communist regime, two years later he was expelled from the country as persona non grata for publishing an article in The New York Times criticizing the Polish government.

In 1972 Halberstam went to work on his next book, The Powers That Be, published in 1979 and featuring profiles of media titans like William S. Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time magazine, and Phil Graham of The Washington Post.

[23] In 1991 Halberstam wrote The Next Century, in which he argued that, after the end of the Cold War, the United States was likely to fall behind economically to other countries such as Japan and Germany.

[24] Later in his career, Halberstam turned to sports, publishing The Breaks of the Game, an inside look at Bill Walton and the 1979–80 Portland Trail Blazers basketball team; Summer of '49, on the baseball pennant race battle between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox; October 1964, on the 1964 World Series between the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals; Playing for Keeps, an ambitious book on Michael Jordan in 1999; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship, focusing on the relationships among several members of the Boston Red Sox in the 1940s; and The Education of a Coach, about New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.

In particular, Halberstam depicted the 1949 Yankees and Red Sox as symbols of a nobler era, when blue-collar athletes modestly strove to succeed and enter the middle class rather than making millions and defying their owners and talking back to the press.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Halberstam wrote the book Firehouse about the lives of the men from Engine 40, Ladder 35 of the New York City Fire Department.

A. Tittle for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts,[3] when the journalism student driving Halberstam to the interview illegally turned into oncoming traffic.

[27] Howard Bryant in the Acknowledgments section of Juicing the Game, his 2005 book about steroids in baseball, said of Halberstam's assistance: "He provided me with a succinct road map and the proper mind-set."

[citation needed] Pulitzer Prize-winning Korean War correspondent Marguerite Higgins was pro-Diệm and frequently clashed with Halberstam and his colleagues.

[32] Newspaper opinion editor Michael Young posits that Halberstam saw Vietnam as a moral tragedy, with America's hubris bringing about its downfall.

Young writes that Halberstam reduced everything to human will, turning his subjects into agents of broader historical forces and coming off like a Hollywood movie with a fated and formulaic climax.