Halberstam's Last Stand

I read back my notes from author David Halberstam's alumni key note address on Saturday night, two days before he was killed in a car crash during his visit to the Bay Area. It was a good speech, and took on so much added meaning since it was his last speech.

At first it seemed that there was no recording of it, since Halberstam was notoriously difficult to work with, and no one dared broach the subject with him, according to someone who helped plan the event.

An enterprising alum managed to record his speech on the sly, and you can read the transcript of the last speech he ever gave here.

Here's an excerpt:

I think the most important question, as you go towards being a historian, is why. Why do things happen? Why do they not happen? What are the forces at play? And that’s really, I think, what put me out of the routine of daily journalism. This is not just a book you do. This is part of your own education. This is a great, great gift you get from this life. And that is the chance to be paid to learn. I mean, what defines your life at the end of it when you hit 70 or even a few years more is love and friendship and family and things you’ve done. But I think it’s the education and the ability to spend, what is now 52 years, learning every day.

Going out every day and asking questions and coming away with just a little bit more knowledge. What a blessing. And each book was really like a graduate school. I’d enter graduate school for four years and learn this and go on to the next one and learn something more. And so I got to study the rise of modern media, a book about the industrial challenge of the Japanese, a book about the Civil Rights movement, a book on the impact of technology on the society of the 50s, the conflict of the Cold War, the rise of the China lobby in the Korean War – that’s a great education. That’s more than any person really has a right to expect.