His beat was his country

There's a significant truth embedded in that passage. In the years that followed, critics would attempt to paint Halberstam and others fortunate enough to be described as his colleagues as practitioners of an "adversary journalism," one rooted in one or another ideological hostility to American values and American institutions. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, while Halberstam won his Pulitzer Prize as a 30-year-old New York Times correspondent in Vietnam, I've always thought the experience that informed all of his subsequent work was his first full-time reporting job, covering the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the late 1950s. Like other idealistic young men and women who went south in those years, he believed segregation was wrong precisely because it was aberrational, a falling short of national ideals in which he believed deeply, a denial of the basic American goodness to people entitled to share in it. Here is how he later described the young journalists, like himself, covering the trial of the two white men charged with murdering Emmett Till, a young African American, for allegedly whistling at a white woman:

"The editors of the nation's most important newspapers were men in their 50s, who by and large held traditional views of race but who, because of the Brown [school desegregation] decision, were going to pay more attention to the race issue. Their reporters were different. They were younger men in their 30s, often Southern by birth, more often than not men who had fought in World War II and who thought segregation odious. Moreover, they thought World War II was, among other things, about changing America and the South, where things like this could happen.

"They had long been ready to cover the South. Now they had their chance. The educational process had begun: The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of murdering him became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what happened."

Those observations embody both the character and the arc of Halberstam's subsequent project. As he often remarked in his many speeches around the country, he left the South with "a great faith in the common sense of the American people," a renewed faith in American idealism and a courageously unshakable skepticism about the trustworthiness of those in authority to do right by either one.