David Halberstam ’55, a former Crimson managing editor, covered the early civil rights movement, the Congo and Vietnam in a reporting career which included stints with yhe Nashville Tennessean and the New York Times. Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam for the New York Times in 1964, left daily journalism in 1967 and began writing books full-time two years later. The author of 17 books, Halberstam talked with The Crimson about his latest, War in a Time of Peace, from his New York office last week.

The Harvard Crimson: How do you go about researching a book like this? How long did it take to write it?

David Halberstam: It took about two years. I’m really old-fashioned. I just go out and interview a lot of people. Because of previous works I’d done, I had something of a pretty good bridgehead in that world. I hadn’t written about it in a long time, but in an odd way there were people I knew going back any number of years. I had known Colin Powell in previous incarnations, and I had known Tony Lake and Dick Holbrooke when they were young foreign service officers.

I really operate in a very old-fashioned way, which is just to go out and keep interviewing people and interviewing and every time I see someone I say, “Who else should I see?” That’s the way I’ve always worked, and that’s worked well for me.

THC: Do you see this book as a sequel to The Best and the Brightest?

DH: I think of it as a younger sibling to The Best and the Brightest. I hadn’t gone into that venue in 29 years, publication date to publication date. It’s going back into the same territory, but it’s different. That was more a portrait of the architects. This is more a portrait of a nation, of a society at a historic moment at the end of the Cold War and how it behaves. There’s something larger at stake, which is the change in a society when transformative events take place, like the end of the Cold War. What do we do when the Cold War ends? The question I was always wrestling with was an interesting one: were we a monopoly superpower that was, in the events before Sept. 11, a de facto isolationist country? In finance and business we weren’t, but were we in other areas? And I thought that the political system and the media, most particularly television, showed that we were. That’s what I was really trying to get at. That was the question I was really wrestling with, and I thought it was a very germane question.

It seems to me that there were three outgrowths of the end of the Cold War. One was the economic boom fueled by our high-technology industries. This, along with the opening up of vast parts of the world that had been closed, including Eastern Europe, led to this huge, unparalleled jump in the Dow, 6,000 points in six years.

The second thing was the rise in nationalism in areas which had been frozen, such as the southern tier of the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia is another example, but it happened everywhere. You can see in some ways a world that is dangerous in a different way.

But the least predictable thing, the thing that surprised me most, was that society started binging on self-absorption. We’ve had the trivialization of the political, and the media heralded the rise of all these trivial things, with its absolute obsession with gossip, celebrity and scandal. The networks were pulling back their foreign correspondents.

THC: Taking the events of Sept. 11 into consideration, have they changed your view of your book?

DH: Not of my book, no, not really. The general feeling is that the book has been validated. The three principal reviews its had so far have all sort of said that the events support it more than ever, and I’m inclined to agree. Rather to my surprise I’ve been something of a talking head in the last two and a half weeks. Much to my surprise, on a lot of shows that don’t normally have been calling in and asking for me.