Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on October 3, 2001:

David Halberstam
Author, War in the Time of Peace

Thank you, Michael, thanks for the introduction.  Thank all of you for caring about foreign policy and the rest of the world when it has not been exactly fashionable.   I wonder tonight if we could stipulate in advance -- I’m on a book tour and writers are supposed to push their book and reference their book in their talks and say, as I mentioned in my book, etc., but I wonder if we could put that aside and stipulate that the book in fact is timely, has gotten very nice reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even The Wall Street Journal a week ago, which nominally uses me for target practice.  Put that aside; it’s going up nicely on the best seller list.  We’ve jumped on the New York Times in about a week from fifteenth to eighth, so it’s nice.  Given the tragedy in the country and in the city in which I live, let’s assume that the book is really germane to who we are, and where we live, and let me talk instead about where we are and what happened.

The night before the world changed completely, I had driven back to New York late in the evening after lecturing at Drew University in exurban New Jersey.  The sky that night after a storm was relatively clear, and I remembered much later that I’d done what I often did on occasions like this.  I’d used the Twin Towers as a kind of beacon for my approach: the first sign that Manhattan was close and I was almost home.  The next morning I got up to walk the dogs, still in a somewhat churlish mood because the football Giants, whose fortunes I took very seriously, had opened their season the night before and played like donkeys. 

At that moment, 8 a.m. Eastern Standard time, September 11, 2001, when the dogs and I began the walk, that game still seemed exceptionally important.  A few minutes later, right around 9:00, a call came from my friend, John Gregory Dunne, the writer, telling me to turn on the television set because a plane, or planes, had struck the tower, or the towers, and they were in flames and, of course, the world had already changed, mine and virtually everyone else’s.  Perhaps only once before in our history, at the time of Pearl Harbor, has there been such a difference between yesterday and today or then and now.  Rarely have newspapers of one day, that is, the morning of Tuesday, September 11, seemed so distant and removed from the events which immediately followed them.  Those headlines now seem museum pieces, remembrances from another oddly distant time, from another country and another city.  Slowly, in those early hours and in the first few days, we, not just in New York, but all of you, began to understand the complexity of our emotions.  First, the sheer shock of the event itself, and then the second, more terrible, knowledge -- the long-range magnitude of it, that which came with the recognition that it is not just the act itself which is terrible, destructive, violent, that so changed our lives, but rather the implications of it.  The fact that it is a threat in continuum.  That it signals the start of a more deadly and immediate chapter in the struggle which is all too familiar to those in other parts of the world and absolutely new to us here at home.

And yet, the threat was always there and New York was always uniquely vulnerable to it, despite the cinematic protection offered us by Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis, who always got the bad guy in the last sequence of any movie which deigned to deal with terrorism: the clock ticking off on the second hand, the bomb about to go off, and they got there.  If anything, we dealt with terrorism as a nation in the past by turning to Hollywood.  We were sometimes, it seemed, protected more by our fantasy factory than by reality, perhaps because the reality was always so much grimmer. 

Yet anyone who paid attention to the way the world was going understood that there were no longer any immunities for Americans and American cities in this world.  In the last page of the book which I was in the process of publishing there was a sentence about the missile shield, which has always struck me as a kind of high tech Maginot Line, saying that the real threat to this country would come not from some rogue state vulnerable to our power, but from terrorists who could walk into any American city carrying an atomic weapon in a cardboard suitcase.  That sentence was born not in any great prophetic sense, but of mere common sense. 

We have had, as a nation, a good deal of time -- twenty, twenty-five years, perhaps more, to understand two things: first, that the great threat to a country like ours was not from some developed nation which also had a nuclear strike force and against which our immense power was so readily applicable, but from terrorists who do not offer a comparable target and [who hated] for the United States for what it represents in the world: a pervasive, in their eyes, a corrupting, decadent culture; for its alliances, not just with Israel, but equally important, and perhaps more important, with moderate Arab states,  [seen as] an affront.  They were at war with us before we were at war with them. 

The second thing was that these groups were increasingly well-financed and their level of trade craft was inevitably bound to go off.  They had allies overt and covert who made their connection to the forces and demands of the modern era infinitely easy, bridging the vast gap of hatred borne of such a primitive condition, giving them the requisite sophistication to pull off acts like this.  But those who acted to pull off a strike as successful and as well coordinated as that of September 11, turning four of our domestic aircraft bound for the West Coast into flying missiles filled with gas, surprised almost everyone. 

There is an additional somber note we should remember, sounded by Warren Rudman, former New Hampshire senator who was the co-chair of an elite committee studying security in the 21st century, whose work, published in March of this year, was largely ignored by the media as he so gently reminded some of the people interviewing him in the days immediately following the bombings.  Senator Rudman pointed out during one of the endless television interviews that followed the bombing that it could have been worse, given the possibility of even more lethal or toxic bombs. 

If we are lucky as a nation, if we are wise and strong and patient, and we can be all those things, what we will have witnessed is a turning point in modern American history, the beginning of what I think is going to be the most difficult and challenging of our modern geo-political struggles, precisely because the enemy is so difficult to fix with our modern high technology weaponry.  Because one of his strengths is patience, which he will match against ours, and this is inevitable in a dynamic society that is constantly in some kind of overdrive, against our innate impatience.  If we are lucky, if the fates smile on us, we will be able to say years from now that the people who launched this attack succeeded beyond their own best interests in that they finally got on our radar, thereby getting us, requiring us, to focus our national attention as a people on something so elementary to our society, to our survival, as a free society, an issue that we had dealt with only sporadically and haphazardly in the past precisely because we were so free, so strong and in so much of a hurry to enjoy the myriad unparalleled new benefits of being so strong and so free. 

Rarely have the previous agenda and the previous concern of an earlier period seemed so inconsequential so quickly, that which had seemed so important in galvanizing the previous week so trivial.  Connie Chung’s semi-famous guest, Congressman Gary Condit.  The ever-absorbing tragedy and saga of Tom and Nichole.  The historical demarcation of September 10th  to September 11th  is far greater even than that of December 6, 1941, to December 7th, because, if you remember, the rest of the world was really already at war.  I was seven at the time of Pearl Harbor and I have very clear memories of those critical days.  We lived in the Bronx where my father, who had already served in World War I, was a doctor.  I can remember that we were in the family car that day listening to the radio and we got the news from the radio as almost everyone did that fateful Sunday, in the stream of interruptions, announcers in their stentorian, doomsday voices repeatedly interrupting the broadcast.  My brother and I -- he was two years older -- had never heard of Pearl Harbor and like most Americans had little idea where Hawaii was.  We didn’t know where California was in 1941.  But hearing the radio, hearing the serious tones, the hushed tones with which our parents discussed the news, tones that we had never heard them use before, we knew in some elemental way that our lives had already changed, which they had.  My father went back in service as a combat surgeon, and we moved around four times in the next few years following him before he went overseas. 

The America that existed at the end of that war was vastly different from the one that had been there when the war began.  Infinitely stronger, more serious, more part of the wider world, something very powerful had been set free in this country.  Great new meritocratic forces beginning with, probably more than anything else, the G.I. Bill, not likely to be turned back.  Looking back at those days, reading books about that time, most Americans will be struck, not merely by the sense of immediate unity and the lack of panic, but by totality of national purpose, how everyone seemed to understand and accept immediately what his or her role was supposed to be.  The equation before us then, though very difficult at the time, lives disrupted and changed forever, seems in some ways easier than the one before us now because it so readily fit our strengths -- even if we did not yet know it -- and because we had no alternatives to so singular a focus of our energies. 

Hearing that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill, vastly relieved and immediately understanding the new changed equation of the war, an equation that greatly enhanced England’s position, had written that the deed was done, that the Allies would win, that the Colossus of America -- he knew that we were a Colossus before we knew that we were a Colossus -- would rise to the occasion, that it was now only a matter of time before victory was achieved, and that Japan, in his exact phrase, would “be ground to powder.”  He was right, of course.  We became, as he immediately understood we would, the arsenal of democracy, our great industrial boundary outside the reach of enemy aircraft as their industrial boundary was not outside the reach of ours.

We are no longer distant from the conflicts of our times.  When I was a young man, forty years ago, in order to catch the conflict of our time I had to go 9,000 miles away to Leopoldville in the Congo and then the next year 12,000 miles away to Saigon.  Now, it has come to my doorstep.  In that way, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ended a unique historical span for us as a great power, one that I would place at nearly a century, or perhaps 87 years, to be a little more exact, a period in which America has been a major player in the world, that has been given at least a partial immunity from the ravages of modern warfare and weaponry because of the combination of its unique geographical position and the sheer force and magnitude of its almost unparalleled industrial and technological base.  It has taken a group of rebels without a country, a ghost nation as it were -- that’s their particular strength to become a threat to us.

In that nearly nine decade period the immense carnage, I mean I do suggest that some of you, when you visit Europe, visit Verdun, visit Somme, the battlefields, visit Normandy. In Verdun there’s a thing called an ossarium.  It is filled with bones.  Ossarium is to bones as a solarium is to sun.  You get a sense of the carnage of this century.  The carnage was always somewhere else.  We were therefore permitted many illusions, some of them existing long after it was obvious that those illusions were, in fact, just that: no longer valid.  We became, in no small part because of our geography and our power as that 87-year span continued, somewhat schizophrenic, a curious blend of innate isolationism, a factor of our two great oceans, our size, richness and economic self-sufficiency combined with the quite involuntary role of being the richest, most powerful nation in the world, a democracy sworn not just to protect our own freedoms, but over the last 45 to 46 years, to shield, in a shrewd estimation of our own enlightened self-interest,  like-minded democratic regimes. 

Yet true internationalism has always been a somewhat uneasy role for America.  Our isolation, which was physical in one era, clearly ended long ago, but it nonetheless remains a vital part of our formidable undertow to a new reality of this modern age, more psychological than physical now, more a hope than a reality.  Our geography, therefore, has always dominated our psyche.  We are by instinct apart from Europe, and we like being apart from Europe.  Our modern history confirms our ambivalence in our love-hate relationship with internationalism.  In 1914, even as America was beginning to surge forward as a major industrial player, the First World War began.  We came in three years after the other major powers.  With most of Europe already bled white and exhausted, we eventually played a decisive and determining role.  Then, still protected by our two oceans, we retreated back to our old ways in our shell and rejected our own President’s attempt at a new internationalism. 

World War II soon followed, and once again we were slowly drawn in.  It took not merely the sacrifice of those who fought in World War II, but the immediacy of the threat of the new weaponry in the period afterwards.  We had come up with nuclear weapons, the Germans had come up with rockets, and the obvious synergy of the two changed the great equation.  It forced us into accepting our superpower status, guardian not merely of our own borders, but of other democracies as well.  That assent was a reluctant one and it’s critically important to understanding how America responds to crises in foreign policy, why it does so slowly and awkwardly, but when finally aroused does so, I hope, with a certain finality.  We are a vast country, we do not unite too quickly for any one purpose and it is, I think, in the long run, a source of strength and tolerance.

After World War II, we sustained both internationalism and anticommunism, the latter more easily than the former, for over forty years.  Then the Soviet empire collapsed.  The bi-polar threat which had hung over the country for some forty years disappeared.  The oceans, which had become ponds, became in the minds of far too many people here oceans once again.  John Kennedy, writing of the period before England rallied itself to the threat posed by Adolph Hitler, once wrote a thesis turned into a small book called Why England Slept.  If someone were to write a book about America from the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to September 11, 2001 it might be called, Why America Napped.  When social historians come to measure us in the future, they may look at that era just past with unusual distaste, a time of trivial pursuits and debate in our public sector and singular greed in the private one and of unacceptably large rewards to heads of our largest corporations and of carelessness in what was put on by the major media. 

There’s a poem that my friend Russell Baker told me about as I was writing an article about this, and I quote the poem.  There’s a poem, which W. H. Auden wrote at the start of World War II, and it’s called September 1, 1939 and the first four lines go:

            I sit in one of the dives
            on 52nd Street
            as the clever hopes expired
            of a low dishonest decade

With luck, and I say this carefully, with luck that era has passed.  What is at stake here is something elemental to what we are as a people and a nation, and it is the survival of the open or free society, where in this new era the very openness of the society makes it vulnerable to its enemies.  Those of us who have over the years worked in societies which are not free have, I suspect, treasured more than most this quality of America, this sense of freedom.  Freedom to be different than those who went before you or your own family, to, if necessary, reinvent yourself and become the person of your own imagination, to be different from your parents.  I believe as a matter of political faith that freedom represents, not merely an easier more pleasurable life in the simplest sense for the individual, but that all our great strengths -- industrial, scientific, military and artistic -- flow from it.  That the freer we are, the more we are able to use our fullest talents. 

In fact, we waste less human potential than any other society that I know of.  When other societies suppress some part, or all, of an individual’s rights and beliefs we never know how much of that person’s talent they also suppress.  As my gifted colleague, Tom Friedman, said the other day in the New York Times, “The people who did this with their unusually narrow vision had the ability to destroy these great buildings and destroy the airplanes that they used as bombs, but in the narrow, arid concept of the society that drives them they would never have the skills to build them.” 

This is a new and infinitely more complicated era.  We who are the richest nation in the world, our down cycles -- I really like up cycles the most -- face an enemy whose very weaknesses, that is, his ruthlessness, his alienation from the societies around him, his ability to move freely at night in the poorest part of the world, have become his strength.  It is, therefore, an enemy uniquely difficult for us to apply our strengths against.  What an irony.  For we who have always consciously or unconsciously depended on our scientific and industrial excellence are threatened not by a first world, second world, or even a third world force, but a de facto terrorist guerilla group, rootless in terms of nationhood, within our view and that of most of the civilized world, a medieval vision of the present and the future, a group that has managed to find exceptional financing and to adapt itself surprisingly well through the shrewd minimalist application of borrowed or stolen modern technology. 

Our response will, I think, be harder than we realize.  The America of Pearl Harbor in 1941 was readier for its particular challenge.  It was poorer, and expectations were much lower because we were much closer, however involuntarily, to a certain kind of Calvinist root.  There was a greater sense, I believe, on the part of ordinary citizens of what they owed back.  By contrast, this is a much more self-absorbed society, one that demands ever-quicker results.  It is accustomed, at its upper, more successful, levels, to being rich and secure and, of course, entertained and having things done instantaneously.  When things go wrong it is likely to be thought of as someone else’s fault, and therefore a mistake that ought to be rectified -- and quickly.  What is important about this new challenge especially for a nation like ours at this moment is that it challenges our attention span. 

For the many results at the end of the Cold War the most surprising, by far the least predictable, was the almost immediate and quite dramatic trivialization of the American political and media agenda, most especially the decline of the importance of serious foreign reporting.  Of our many traditional freedoms was added a new one -- the right not to be bored in your own home.  We became something unique -- a monopoly super-power, the only super-power in the world, the richest most powerful nation in the world, binging on self-involvement, a de facto isolationist nation.  The results of that self-absorption are obvious.  We have wanted or needed in the last decade or so to exercise our power in certain foreign policy crises but, because of our disconnect between our complex international role and the lack of public support in a parallel governmental carelessness and indifference, we have acted with a de facto zero casualties prohibition on ourselves, especially after the events in Somalia in 1993.  Whatever else, that ended on September 11th when we took as many 6,000 casualties. 

The country did not, the pollsters repeatedly told politicians and media executives, care about the rest of the world and so the politicians and the leading media executives and anchors indulged that whim.  Foreign correspondents began disappearing from the screen on network news shows and soon after from their very staffs.  Reality television -- think about reality television.  There is a real world out there.  It’s really interesting.  It’s not boring.  It’s complicated, but it isn’t good enough for those executives at the media because they’re going to give you reality television which is to put eight or nine people in there that they’ve decided represent us and let one of them survive and gong the others.  That’s reality in their world.  I wonder if they still think it’s reality television. 

I’ve always thought that the concept so fashionable in the last few years of the greatest generation that had preceded ours was that of the ultimate historical foolishness.  I say that with great admiration for those who served in World War II, survived the Depression, and the exceptional burden they bore.  My father, the man I’ve always revered more than anyone else, was an emigrant son who served in World War I and World War II, sent himself through college and medical school, and finished his medical training just in time for the Great Depression.  Charlie Halberstam -- it’s 1929, you’ve done it all, welcome to the real world.  Knowing that he’s a member of [that generation].  The idea, by the way, that he belonged to a better generation than that of his father who brought his [family] here from the old country would have surely appalled him. 

But generations, generations aren’t greater or lesser or weaker or noisier or silent.  Ours was supposedly the silent generation.  They are composed of human beings who respond to different circumstances, above all to different challenges in different ways.  Challenged in the right way, properly led in a free society, they will almost invariably do the right thing, responding to a world of easy security and easy affluence with an elite all-volunteer professional army will inevitably bring out certain qualities, almost surely lesser ones.  Responding to a genuine threat, to national security, especially in a time of almost complete economic reversal will surely bring out others. 

If this is to be, to use John Kennedy’s apt phrase from another time, in another conflict, the Cold War, “a long twilight struggle,” and I think that is the right phrase, how well prepared are we for this?  How serious a nation can we be?  Can we sustain our strength and unity once the immediate passion is over?  Do we have staying power?  A willingness to sacrifice?  As serious reporting about foreign affairs disappeared from our television screens, not surprisingly our national debate on important issues accurately during the debates in the last election, allegedly serious political commentators would sit around telling us which of the candidates seemed more likeable -- as if they were judging an election for high school class president, not the leader of the entire free world.  For many in the rest of the world, especially people in Europe, who wish us well all over the world, it has been inexplicable: a nation of so much power and responsibility paying so little attention to the world around it.  Within our own political circles, the government officials representing more sober concerns got less of the hearing from most senior politicians.  Less resource was targeted for serious foreign policy questions. 

This is germane to where we are today.  To be strong and resolute, to sustain our focus, we will have to change, not for a week or two of committing our prime energies to this challenge and to making sure that our agenda is a serious one, but for a long time.  A phrase we used by the way in World War II, lest we forget, was “the duration.”  For a long time, and we will have to change the value system that drives much of our society especially journalism, especially the networks, who deal in public domain capitalism -- lest they forget.  They are part of the critical circulatory system of a democracy.  We will have to change the value system that drives much of our society and, especially, especially journalism, especially the networks, all too many newspaper chains as well.  The belief that the only God is the God of the Stock.  Every serious person in my opinion, most especially those who work, my colleagues who work at the networks in better times, the ‘60s, ‘70s and the ‘80s, know that what has happened there did not happen by happenstance, that it was not by chance that trivial reporting replaced serious reporting, and the divas -- male and female divas -- those great purveyors of artificial empathy and scandal and celebrity, replaced real reporters at an ever-escalating rate and ever-escalating salaries.  It was good for rating, good for the stock, bad for the country. 

So what we have here is a larger question of citizenship.  What the networks, the owners, those men in giant corporations so distant now from their working reporters, men like Michael Eisner, the heirs of Jack Welsh and Michael Jordan, and all the people who work immediately under them, what they’ve done is to fail the most elemental test for all important editors -- balancing what people want to know with what they need to know.

One of the advantages of being someone older, a lot older than when I won that Pulitzer Prize thirty-seven years ago, and having some degree of historical knowledge, is the faith in a free society that comes with it.  The faith you watched over many years in America address problems.  The terrible thing about the Communists, the poet Alan Ginsburg once told me thirty-six years ago when I was reporting for the Times in Eastern Europe and he had a difficult little struggle, first with the Czech and then the Polish authorities, is that all the clichés about them are true. I would add to that a corollary, that one of the good things about our democracy is that many of the clichés about it are true.  You just have to stick around long enough to bear witness.  But in my lifetime, I’ve seen the resilience of American democracy in action time and again.  That encompasses months after World War II when we moved so quickly from a sleeping isolationist nation to what we soon became -- an awesome new international power, occasionally vigilant, occasionally not so vigilant. 

When the Cold War was over, we spoke too much of who won it and not of the cool deliberate understated leadership of the men who determined our earlier response, starting with Truman and Atchison and Kennon and others, men ironically much maligned in those early days for being soft, even as they rallied the nation for what was then a new and very complicated and somewhat distant challenge.  Post-Sputnik, 1957, reflected our capacity to go all out in space with the pledge of John Kennedy in 1961 to put a man on the moon and the ability, only eight years later, to do exactly that. 

What I’ve come to admire is the degree of muscularity and flex in this society and the loyalty and energies of free men and women, freely summoned, and never to underestimate this country’s resolve once that resolve is focused.  More than anything else I have great faith in our common sense, in our resilience.  What I’ve also learned is that the opponents of the free society, whether it was the Germans in 1941, the leaders of Imperial Japan in 1941, the Soviets in the Cold War, Khrushchev saying he would bury us, and, even more recently, Slobodan Milosevic who told American diplomats that he could face death but we could not -- they underestimate our strengths and tend to see our strengths, the slowness of our responses, as weaknesses.  That reminds me of what Churchill said when Hitler said he would wring England’s neck like a chicken.  Churchill said, “some chicken, some neck.” 

The most recent example of that is from Osama Bin Laden, who is quoted as saying that his battle with America was easier than with the Russians because their men were more courageous and more patient.  Men like that believe wrongly that what I consider to be our strengths are certain forms of decadence.  I have a different view.  I think it’s easy to underestimate the strengths and resilience of America.  That we are, because of our geography, different from other countries, more self-sufficient, more isolated, and therefore slower to act.  Getting America to change directions and attitudes from one era to another sometimes seems like trying to change direction in an aircraft carrier by trailing your hand in the water.  But our strengths, when summoned and focused, when the body politic is aroused, are never to be underestimated.

I’m coming to the end of this and I’d like to add a personal note.  I’m a New Yorker. We’re popular this week, I suppose, but that will not last.  I guarantee that.  By the way, this is a great time to visit New York.  You will be treated well.  The taxi cab driver will smile, you’ll be welcomed in almost any restaurant, you’ll get in readily and people are really being nice.  I give it another two weeks.  What was bombed was a city in which I live and I live with my family.  In the end, of course, a challenge like this is not just societal it is an assault upon two things that I cherish not just the way I live, the love of the constant possibilities in a free society but where I live as well.  Some of the people who were killed were firemen at the station house only two blocks away from our apartment.  Men who tried to protect me and my family for years.  Eleven men were lost from our local fire house.

 Being a New Yorker is as much a condition as it is a reflection of resolute.  One becomes a New Yorker mostly by choice.  I happen to have been born there in one of the boroughs, but I did not grow up there.  I came back quite warily in my thirties, twenty-five years after World War II drove us from the city.  When I came back I was not at all sure whether I wanted to stay.  I stayed on, tentatively at first and then, in time, loving it.  I began my own love affair with the city, admiring its grittiness and excitement, even coming to accept its edgier, harsher, often angrier side.  I understand that the very edginess was a critical part of the New York condition and, on occasion, I have surely made my own contributions to it.  I understand that being a New Yorker is not necessarily a warm and fuzzy role.  We celebrate our city’s flaws as much as we do its virtues.  I think of it, and I don’t think this is chauvinistic, I think of it as “freedom city,” because so many of my fellow citizens were not even born in this country, but came to this city, hoping for a better life here than there.  I’ve lived there thirty-five years now.  My wife and I were married there, our daughter was born there, and grew up there….

This is not about bravado.  I shrink in my advancing years from bravado. Rather, it is about simple preference.  Love of an odd difficult place in spite of, and sometimes because of, its flaws.  There are many things worth cherishing in life, and I have found almost all of them there.  We, as a family, have chosen to live there, not just because of the movies and the theater and the restaurants, not just because of the wonderful enduring friendships of thirty years, but finally because of the human pulse of the city which has always seemed so regenerative.  Perhaps now more than ever.

Thank you very much for having me here.