Famous Friends on Tour for a Halberstam Book

By CELIA McGEE
The New York Times
Published: August 28, 2007

The command post is a set of Manhattan publishing offices, and the foot soldiers include Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Anna Quindlen, Alex Kotlowitz, Paul Hendrickson, Samantha Power and Bill Walton. They are going on David Halberstam’s book tour for him.

Related
David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies (April 24, 2007)
Op-Ed Columnist: All the President’s Press (April 29, 2007) An Appraisal: A Skeptical Vietnam Voice Still Echoes in the Fog of Iraq (April 25, 2007)
Appreciations: Halberstam on Journalism (April 25, 2007)

Five months after Mr. Halberstam’s death in a car accident on April 23, some of this celebrated journalist’s closest friends and colleagues will be banding together to cover different legs of a nationwide publicity tour for his final book. Hyperion is releasing that 705-page history, “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War,” on Sept. 25, with a first printing of 300,000 copies, the publisher announced.

The unusual promotional push will stretch from New York to La Jolla, Calif., Washington to Chicago, Milwaukee to Nashville.

At each engagement Mr. Halberstam’s “surrogates,” as Mr. Woodward calls them, will pay tribute to him, a best-selling author of books like “The Best and the Brightest” and “Summer of ’49,” by offering personal reminiscences and readings. It took Mr. Halberstam 10 years to do the reporting and to write the book, which he called, in a term familiar to librarians and football fans, a “bookend” to his Pulitzer Prize-winning work on Vietnam.

“It’s a magnificent book,” Mr. Woodward said of the new volume, partly because of the analogies drawn to the war in Iraq, he said, “the lessons of bad intelligence, no plan, the disconnect between the war as seen by the fighting man and headquarters.”
He added, “It carries an emotional power I didn’t expect.”

The idea for the tour was Hyperion’s, said Mr. Halberstam’s widow, Jean. “Then someone reminded me that when Tony Lukas died just after ‘Big Trouble’ came out, David organized a number of writers to represent it in bookstores in the Boston area,” she said. “David’s friends, who are writers, are well aware that getting attention for a book is hard, no matter how well your last one did. They said, ‘Whatever I can do — I’ll fly to wherever.’ He would have felt amazed and humbled, and that’s not necessarily a word used to describe him.”

An authorless national author tour “doesn’t seem to me to have been done before,” said Constance Sayre, a principal in the Manhattan publishing consulting firm Market Partners International. “What’s going to make it effective,” she added, “is the fact that his best friends are high-profile people, big names. You can also put them on local television and radio. It should create a wave of news because each person is going to say something different.”

But Mr. Hersh said: “Listen, ain’t nothing like David — you don’t need this to keep David alive. You’ve got to market a book, let’s market a book, but he transcends that. He was a great war reporter and a great baseball reporter, and the most loyal person in the world.”

The tour starts on Sept. 25 and concludes on Oct. 15 with a panel in New York at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Ms. Didion will participate, along with Gay Talese, Robert MacNeil and Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek. (A full schedule will be posted on hyperionbooks.com.)

Ms. Didion said she had not yet had a chance to read the book, but “David himself thought it was his best work,” she said, “and I trust him.”

The reading locations are a mix of chain bookstores and independents. On Sept. 30 there will also be one, with Nathaniel Philbrick, at the Nantucket Atheneum on Nantucket, where the Halberstam family has a home.

Mr. Halberstam’s favorite bookstore was Mitchell’s Book Corner on Main Street on Nantucket, his wife said. “He tried really hard to be loyal to independent bookstores, and would have Mitchell’s U.P.S. him books in New York during the off season,” she said. “We tried to split the money we spent on books between independents and the others.”

Mr. Woodward and several others who had scheduling conflicts with specific reading dates are making themselves available for radio and television interviews. Mr. Woodward said he planned to stay with the promotion of “The Coldest Winter” even while he completes his own book, the fourth in his series about President Bush and the Iraq war.

“It is important that David’s book is coming out in the middle of the debate about that,” he said. “David deserves a real salute from those of us who try to understand war.”