SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Halberstam, whose work for the New York Times on the Vietnam War led many Americans to question the US military presence there, died on Monday in a car crash in Northern California.Halberstam, 73, was a passenger in a vehicle involved in a three-vehicle accident at 10.35 a.m., according to the Menlo Park Police Department. “He was pronounced dead at the scene,” said Kristine Gamble, senior deputy coroner for San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

Halberstam covered the civil rights movement early in his career while at the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville and then moved to the New York Times, where he gained fame for his writing on Vietnam.

In the Southeast Asian nation in the early 1960s, he was one of a small group of young and intrepid reporters who questioned the official Washington line that the United States was winning the war.

The New York Times had to resist pressure from the Kennedy administration to take him out of the country, and he won the Pulitzer Prize at age 30.

“Now that I look back on it, it was the beginning of the credibility gap,” journalist Neil Sheehan, a close friend who worked closely with Halberstam in Vietnam, said in an interview. “It was the first time when the senior people were absolutely off the beam and the facts on the ground contradicted them.”

Halberstam’s 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire described how the United States got involved in the war in 1961 and 1962 and helped link the word quagmire with the Vietnam War.

In 1972 he wrote The Best and The Brightest, which made the case the best minds in the US government had engaged the country in an intractable and unwinnable war.

Recently, he drew parallels between the current US war in Iraq and the past failure in Vietnam.

Halberstam wrote many non-fiction books that brought to life recent historical events, from the inner workings of Washington (including The Powers That Be) to the civil rights movement (The Children).

“He was a man of extraordinary physical and moral courage. He had incredible energy and incredible curiosity,” said Sheehan, who also won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing about Vietnam. “He was totally dedicated to his work.”

In recent years Halberstam often turned to sports, publishing books about basketball superstar Michael Jordan in 1999 and past baseball seasons, including Summer of ‘49.

One of those he featured in his baseball writings was Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr, who praised both Halberstam’s writing and manner in approaching his subjects.

“He was a very likable, compassionate type of person,” Doerr, 89, told Reuters by telephone after hearing of the death. “He was not the type of person to make you think ‘I’m David Halberstam’. He was just kind of like part of the family.”

Halberstam, who lived in New York, spoke on Saturday night to journalism students at the University of California, Berkeley on the topic, “Reconstructing the past: when history and journalism meet”.

The car’s driver, Kevin Jones, 26, a first-year journalism student, was also injured with Halberstam in the accident. Halberstam was being driven to an interview with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle

“We were talking about sports and Vietnam and having kids,” Jones said in an interview from his hospital bed. “He seemed generally interested in what I had to say, just some random student chaperoning him around.”

Born April 10, 1934, in New York City, to a surgeon father and teacher mother, Halberstam attended Harvard University, where he was managing editor of the Harvard Crimson newspaper.

After graduating in 1955, he started his career at the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Miss. He spent only a year there because the editor at the time thought Halberstam was too liberal, said Bill Minor, Jackson bureau chief for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

He went on to The Tennessean, in Nashville, where he covered the civil rights struggle, and then The New York Times, which sent him to Vietnam. Halberstam quit daily journalism in 1967 and turned to books.

Halberstam told journalists during a conference last year in Tennessee that government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminded him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.

“The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn’t salute or play the game,” he said. “And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around and they’ve used up their credibility.”