Pulitzer Prizewinning Journalist Killed in Car Crash

David Halberstam, one of the best US journalists of the 1960s who was among the first to challenge US government propaganda on the Vietnam war, died yesterday in a car accident at Menlo Park, south of San Francisco.

Halberstam, 73, who won a Pulitzer prize for his Vietnam coverage for the New York Times, spent a lot of time on the ground as a reporter during the conflict and, through his writings, cast doubt on the US government's claim that it was winning the war. He portrayed the puppet South Vietnamese government as corrupt and argued, rightly, that it was no match for the North Vietnamese-backed communist insurgents.

The US government, infuriated with his writing, put pressure on the New York Times to have him posted elsewhere but failed.

Over the last few years, he frequently drew parallels between the US government claims in Vietnam and those of the Bush administration on Iraq.

Halberstam, who lived in New York but had been speaking at Berkley university, was being driven by a young journalism student who became involved in a three-car smash.

The main thesis of one of his finest books, The Best and the Brightest, was that some of the best minds in America had been concentrated on the Vietnam conflict, but, Halberstam argued, they lacked the imagination to appreciate the mess the US had got itself into or to see a way out.

In the years that followed, he wrote a succession of books, ranging from sport to the New York fire brigade. He applied his skills as a reporter - collecting detail from hundreds of interviews - to build up an almost exhaustive account of his subject.

One of the most influential of his post-war books was an account of the ownership of the US media, The Powers That Be, opening up the previously secretive world of the press.

More recent works included an account of the Korean war, The Coldest Winter.