Like many an aspiring young journalist of my generation, I wanted to be like David Halberstam when I grew up.

The prolific Halberstam, who died yesterday at age 73 in a car crash in Menlo Park, California, was one of a small handful of reporters who saw through the deceits and obfuscations of U.S. military commanders in Vietnam early in the war and wrote that the corrupt South Vietnamese government would be brought to ground by the Communist guerrillas and North Vietnamese sooner or later.

Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his New York Times dispatches, which infuriated generals and politicians who accused him of being unpatriotic and harming the troops. Such accusations reverberate loudly today in debates over whether the news media is accurately covering the Iraq war.

Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, both published in 1972, are to my mind the two finest works on the roots of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam quagmire and cautionary tales that, of course, were not heeded by the architects of the Iraq disaster.

There is no higher praise than that former Times columnist Anthony Lewis bestowed on Halberstam:

It’s obvious that he was probably the greatest journalist of his generation. He had a core integrity that gave him credibility and power, whether he was writing about basketball or Vietnam it carried an enormous amount of weight. He was a sweet man—loyal, kind, thoughtful. I just didn’t know anybody who is a better representation of journalism.

I didn’t exactly become a David Halberstam when I did grow up, but he taught me a valuable lesson that became my mantra during a long journalism career:

Don’t merely write what happened, explain what it means and why the reader should care about it.