Caveat: This is not a book review; I have not read this book. I was interested in the opinions expressed in these two book reviews. But, for a complete account of the war, I recommend William Stueck’s The Korean War and Rethinking the Korean War.
David Halberstam’s last book, The Coldest Winter, about the Korean War, is receiving attention more for its author’s career than the subject.
Two reviews, by Stephen Sestanovich and Erik Spanberg, caught my attention for what each said, not for the book each agreed was important, but if only for its author. Sestanovich concludes:
The Korean War that David Halberstam describes offers echo after echo of our contemporary predicament, or at least of one reading of it. His story is all about the hijacking of American policy, the fomenting of national hysteria, and the disaster that follows. But he would have written a truer?and, for that matter, a more useful?book if he had admitted how many people in high positions thought the policy was both necessary and right. For an understanding of the insidious workings of consensus, rather than of conspiracy, The Best and the Brightest would have been an excellent place to start.
Spanberg concludes:
No one won much of anything, but the ripples and lessons of political and military hubris echo to the present. “The Coldest Winter” is a fitting, warm tribute to the art of reporting, the most appropriate epitaph imaginable for David Halberstam.
What about the Koreas today? What about the Six-Party talks at least? Has the Iraq War and partisan politics in America warped perception so completely, that all of history is a lesson about the Bush administration? Both reviewers agree on Halberstam’s main thesis: General MacArthur was the problem. But, there were over two years left to a sausage-grinder of a war, in which battles often occurred for no reason but diplomatic leverage. Spanberg punctuates what for me is one of the enduring legacies of the war.
Late in the book, Halberstam skips over large portions of the war’s final two years, exhausted, no doubt, by the endless skirmishes over anonymous hills and villages for little to no gain on both sides.
That is a minor quibble in a book filled with insight and marvelous detail. Some of Halberstam’s work in recent years smacked of a reporting treadmill, churned out too quickly. With “The Coldest Winter,” it is clear that Halberstam invested all of his considerable talents – and energy – without being rushed to meet a publishing deadline.
Within the tedious diplomatic exchanges at Panmumjon lies the record of the infuriating tactics Pyongyang has honed to a science in the last 50 years. The casualties and deaths compiled on those Korean hills while diplomats talked is a harbinger of decades of murderous economic development and political infighting in both Koreas, and, possibly, of a future war. America could not end the war then in victory, and America has not found a way to end a war still stuck in armistice. The denizens of the DPRK’s gulags are a testament to that inhumanly brutal and frustrating legacy.
Infidelworld 