David Halberstam Interview (page: 2 / 6) Pulitzer Prize for Journalism	Print Interview

Were there teachers that were particularly important to you when you were growing up?

David Halberstam: Yeah. I think there are always certain teachers who can reinforce those qualities that make you different, that make you apart. Most of the people I've met here (the Academy of Achievement) are really anti-conventional people. Their success is very idiosyncratic. They have followed a dream, even though that dream wasn't a popular or fashionable or conventional one. This is not the managerial class of the Ford Motor Company or General Motors or some large company where you figured out a career, went to Harvard Business School, stayed in line and mimicked what your superior was. It's really people with all kinds of a wild hair. They follow their own instincts.

I think that there were teachers always who, when I was different and not popular -- and I don't think this (the Achievement Summit) is a convention of people who felt they were popular when they were 14, 15, and 16 years old -- who could reinforce in you that it was okay to be different, okay to get good grades. You know, most American schools, the sad truth is that if you get very good marks and you are a young male, you are sort of a nerd. We reserve our applause to the young to those who are athletically gifted or are cosmetically gifted, and I was really sort of neither, but there are teachers who can reach down and let you know that it is okay to be different, it is okay to have these pursuits which are mildly intellectual and okay not to accept the conventional wisdom.
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I think I was taught well all the way through. We traveled a lot in my boyhood. My father had been in World War I, but when I was eight years old, he went back into World War II, and we followed him to different Army posts, but I grew up -- as much as any place -- in Winsted, Connecticut, which is a small mill town. It was a factory town, a blue collar town of about 8,000 people.

The teachers were what I guess you would call "Maine schoolmarms." They were, by and large, single women. They came from that part of Maine where the industrial revolution had never reached, and therefore, they had gone to what were then called "normal schools." Now you'd call it Maine State or something like that, some kind of state university, but in those days, they were normal schools. They prepared you to teach.

They lived rather lonely lives. They came to Winsted. I think if you were a male teacher, you got $1,200 a year, and if you were a woman, you got $800. That was the bias that existed then and in many ways still exists today. But they taught us. They were good. They knew the uses of authority. They had grown up probably pretty authoritarian.

From that little school in Winsted, a couple of us went on to rather extraordinary careers. I didn't stay there for high school, but I went on to Harvard. A young friend of mine named John Bush went on to Yale and ended up being an Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs in the State Department. A third classmate, Ralph Nader, went on to be Ralph Nader. So you really had a sense of very, very good teaching.

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