By Dane Anderson, Staff Writer

At 17, armed with a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic camera and self-confidence that belied his youth, Dirck Halstead became Life magazine’s youngest combat photographer, covering the bloody Guatemalan revolution in 1954. He signed on with United Press International in 1957, becoming the first photo bureau chief in Saigon in 1965 and covering the campaign of a green and ambitious Richard Nixon. 

Halstead contracted with Time magazine in 1972, acting as the eyes of the nation at the White House for the next 29 years, from Nixon through the Clinton administration. He photographed movie stars and politicians, the saintly and the bedeviled. He caught faces without their polished facades. He helped set the direction for Time through those three decades, with more covers than any other photojournalist – a record 51.

For 50 years, the Westbank resident has given us the iconic images that have shaped how we understand the world around us. Through his eyes, we took in history, the horror of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon, Watergate and the American counterculture. Through him, we got an inside look at Andy Warhol’s strange existence, and we gave Monica Lewinsky a claim to fame.

Halstead’s many awards have come as a result not only of his artistic talent, but also from his uncanny insight and his genius for living with one foot in the present and one foot in the future. Looking through his lens, he sees not only what is happening in front of him, he understands what that means about what will happen down the road. He gets the photos that matter tomorrow.

Now 72, Halstead isn’t slowing his pace. He teaches visual journalism at the University of Texas and is a senior fellow of the UT Center for American History, which has archived more than 500,000 of his images.

Halstead wrote a book, “Moments in Time,” an autobiography with more than 300 photos published by Harry Abrams in 2006. Last year, he created and began editing an online magazine, The Digital Journalist, as a way to showcase the best in modern photojournalism. The magazine’s readership can reach as high as 9 million an issue. Through his highly acclaimed Platypus workshops, Halstead is teaching journalists to move out of the limiting world of print media and into multi-media reporting. 

Throughout it all, Halstead has been a pioneer of change. His intelligence and insight are backed by an indefatigable positive attitude. The best project he has ever worked on is always the one he is working on now. The best time of his life is right now. 

To Halstead, it is all about the story.

 

High school and the world

Halstead’s own story, the journalistic part, began in high school in Mount Kisco, N.Y.

“We make ourselves up as we go along,” Halstead said. “In high school, I used photography as a way to fashion an identity. I wound up being editor of the high school yearbook and created a job for myself at the local newspaper. They needed photos, and I was cheap.”

One issue of the newspaper contained Halstead’s photos of the McCarthy hearings, Rita Hayworth filing for divorce and the Robert Capra funeral. He parlayed that issue into an assignment for Life magazine to cover Guatemala.

“It showed I knew how to take pictures,” he said. “From a small town, I was covering national events.”

Halstead caught the consolidation of power of Guatemala’s Carlos Castillo Armas on film, and, a few days later, it was a two-page spread in Life magazine. From there, Halstead never paused long enough to look back.

He believes two factors have contributed to his success.

“The most important thing for being a photojournalist is curiosity,” he said. “If you aren’t curious, you shouldn’t be in the business.” 

Halstead said a bit of self-centeredness and an inability to stick within the lines also goes a long way for success.

“Photojournalists are extremely self-centered; everything revolves around us,” he said. “As we go along, most people live within the framework of the possible and adjust accordingly. Photojournalists don’t understand that framework. They just don’t get it. That’s why we are such pains in the ass. That’s why we get the picture.”

Vietnam in the 1960s

Halstead went to work for UPI in 1957, on loan to the Dallas Times Herald. Drafted in 1960, he became a roaming photographer for the Department of the Army from 1960-62. 

“It was the best job anyone could have in the Army,” he said. “I got to write my own orders, never wore a uniform and worked out of an office in the Pentagon.”

In 1962, Halstead went back to UPI, this time running the Philadelphia picture bureau. He convinced UPI to send him to cover the biggest story in the world, Vietnam. In 1965, Halstead stepped off a Pan Am Clipper at Tan Non Nhut Air Base to set up the picture bureau in Saigon for UPI. 

“For journalists of my generation, Vietnam was the dream story,” he said. “We couldn’t get enough of it.”

Halstead said all of his contemporaries, including Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, were young and starting their careers.  

“Everybody who emerged as a top person in journalism went through that experience,” said Halstead. “It was the ticket you had to have punched.”

All journalists were based out of Saigon. They read Teletype and called contacts in the morning. There was a daily press briefing at 10 a.m. 

“Then you got on a helicopter, and you were in the war,” said Halstead. “You were back in Saigon in time for cocktails.”

There was considerable danger. Helicopters were shot down every day. Journalists were killed on the ground. 

“We would go to where the medivacs came in and wait for them to unload the bodies and the wounded,” he said. “If they had come from a very bad place, I could see the door-gunner shaking. You had to make a choice whether you were going to get on that copter or not, and you had to make it fast.”

Halstead came back to the States in 1967, working for UPI in New York. Like many of his colleagues and the soldiers he photographed in Vietnam, it was a very tough transition.

“I came back and went nuts,” he said. “I was absolutely miserable. People seemed to have no sense at all. The things they thought were important just weren’t. Everyone around me seemed insane.”

The true test of a professional is being able to perform while everything around you is going mad, Halstead said. 

“Being a journalist saved me from going crazy,” he said. “I went crazy within the boundaries of what was acceptable to do while being a journalist.”

In the late 1960s, the boundaries of acceptable behavior for a journalist were pretty broad. Halstead had no schedule, and no one to report to. He got a good look at the American counterculture and drugs through his friend Andy Warhol. 

“Andy Warhol was a great artist,” he said. “He loved pop art. He discovered the exquisite in the ordinary, and he could show it to others.”

But, like the culture for which he served as poster child, Warhol had a dark side to his nature.

“He was a blank canvas; he was whatever you projected onto him,” Halstead said. “He had tremendous cache because he was sponsored by the very rich and the very depraved.”

 

Time marches on 

In 1972, Halstead contracted with Time magazine and began covering the White House. 

“If you want to figure out what sort of president a person’s going to be, the best people to ask early on are the photographers,” he commented in his UT biography. “We’re looking through that lens, and we’re looking into the soul of that president. That’s our job, and we’re very rarely wrong.”

Through “shameless pushing of everybody I knew,” Halstead was one of 100 journalists to accompany Nixon to China in 1972.

“The Vietnam War was raging, and the Soviet Union was the evil empire trying to carve up the world,” he said. “China changed from being a communist monolith to a capitalist nation. Any journalist worth his salt would have gladly driven over his own mother to get on that plane.”

As senior White House correspondent, Halstead got a long, close look at each of his presidents. They called him by name. 

Halstead said Nixon was brilliant, perhaps the smartest man to occupy the Oval Office, but he was uncomfortable around people and inept at handling himself. Ford was the most decent of the presidents, Halstead said.

Carter, said Halstead, was a photographic disaster, dressed in a cardigan and Colombo raincoat. 

Halstead calls the first President Bush “a decent, honorable, judicious man,” with a goofy sense of humor. Ronald Reagan, he said, was the best president to cover. 

“I’ve never seen any human being more comfortable in his own skin,” he said. “He was an actor, and the world was a great big set. The Oval Office was his stage. He would come out, hit his marks, say his lines and leave. His acting skills changed the world.”

 

Bright future

In 2001, Halstead retired from his work with Time and turned his attention to the role of digital media. He launched The Digital Journalist in 1997, providing photojournalists with a forum to exhibit and discuss the field and explore new opportunities. He also launched workshops to teach still photographers how to cross the line between print and multi-media reporting. He saw early on the shrinking role of print journalism and the potential for new delivery options through the Internet. 

“The world’s appetite for news has changed,” he said. “We live in a video world full of sound and movement. The basic skill set needed to provide news hasn’t changed, just the technology.  There are no restrictions. Only passion.”