Manhattan's progressive, politically involved Riverside Church was an apt venue to remember a man who seemed to be on a mission to save the world -- through a kind of journalism that was not only a craft, but his calling.
Born in New York during the Depression, the son of a surgeon, Halberstam was the grandson of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in Poland and Lithuania.
Fresh from Harvard, he covered civil rights in the South while working for a tiny newspaper in Mississippi, then The Tennessean in Nashville, a spawning ground for the black youths who became the Freedom Riders.
"Without David, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings. He made us fly higher," said Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, who had met him during the turbulent era.
By 1960, Halberstam was writing for The New York Times in Washington, then moved to the heart of African strife, in Congo.
In 1962, the Times sent Halberstam to Vietnam, where he became an expert in exposing military misinformation and won a Pulitzer for his reporting, while denounced by US authorities.
President Kennedy had committed US troops to Vietnam with the advice of White House aides Halberstam considered brilliant but arrogant, dubbing them "The Best and the Brightest" -- his 1972 best-selling book chronicling US involvement in Southeast Asia.
It was "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time . . . where our power wasn't applicable," he later said about an "unwinnable war."
That's also how Halberstam felt about the current Iraq war. His 2002 best-seller, "War in a Time of Peace" -- a Pulitzer Prize runner-up -- examines how the lessons of Vietnam have influenced American foreign policy.
Halberstam's 15 best-sellers range from "The Breaks of the Game," which some consider the best book about pro basketball, to books about the auto industry ("The Reckoning") and the mass media ("The Powers that Be"). "The Coldest Winter," an account of a key battle of the Korean War, is to be published posthumously in the fall.
Halberstam died in Menlo Park, Calif., when the car in which he was a passenger was broadsided by another vehicle.
He was working on a book about the 1958 NFL championship between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts -- considered by many to be the greatest ever NFL game. He was on his way to interview NFL Hall of Famer Y.A. Tittle when the crash occurred.
With his tall, patrician bearing, the graying but vital Halberstam could be spotted walking his dog to Central Park and greeting doormen and parks workers in his deep baritone voice.
Other times, he would stroll through a local supermarket to buy groceries; he was seen one night reaching into a basket of inviting sundried tomatoes to enjoy a taste.
But his mind took paths far from the ordinary -- as described in an eulogy by author Anna Quindlen, a former Times columnist.
"One of our sons said that on the phone, David sounded like God, if He had called," Quindlen said.
