Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

— David Halberstam

Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.

— David Halberstam

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact.

— David Halberstam

Gen. Matthew Ridgeway "intended not to impose his will on his men, but to allow the men under him to find something in themselves that would make them more confident, more purposeful fighting men. It was their confidence in themselves that would make them fight well, he believed, not so much their belief in him. His job was to keep them to find that quality in themselves.

— David Halberstam

He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.

— David Halberstam

He hated House members who longed only to run for the Senate, and senators who longed only to run for the presidency. He was appalled by what he felt television had done to the Senate by the mid-fifties. It had become a major launching platform for presidential campaigns. He thought television had ruined the Senate as a serious body. “All they do there is preen and comb their hair and run for President. It’s like a presidential primary over there,

— David Halberstam

He knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

— David Halberstam

He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.

— David Halberstam

He saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of his life, and THAT was what he wanted.

— David Halberstam

He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.

— David Halberstam