Get the Damn Story

Book excerpt: "In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda for the people of the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, hard-drinking figure named Homer Bigart. His reporting left marks on history. In 26 years at the New York Herald Tribune and 17 more at the New York Times, Bigart chronicled and brought to life the events that defined the era - wars in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the creation of Israel, the end of colonialism in Africa, and the Cuban revolution. He was one of the first reporters to visit and describe Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. He was the first correspondent to penetrate the Haganah, the militant Zionist underground in Palestine. He recounted the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and the court-martial of William Calley. A model of versatility, he also wrote with verve and compassion about strip mining in Kentucky, squalor on the Bowery and the murder of a shopkeeper in Harlem. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, Bigart never sought fame; when he retired from the New York Times in 1972, he quickly faded from public view, and few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his peers and those who came after, including Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. This is the first comprehensive biography to encompass all of Bigart's reporting, not just his war reporting"--