The Coldest Winter

In the early winter of 1950, in the brutal cold of North Korea, formerly victorious American troops were ambushed and overwhelmed by vast Chinese armies. Over the next six months, the two nations fought a series of murderous battles up and down the Korean peninsula. The question of why so many hostile troops were so easily able to elude surveillance and strike so hard without warning, is not easily answered. In The Coldest Winter, the late David Halberstam uses a series of perceptive interviews with veterans of the war to illuminate what is for many Americans an obscure corner of history--not only how the war started, but how it escalated, and the threat is posed to fragile East-West relations in the first years of The Bomb's existence. Understanding what happened in Korea between 1950 and 1953 is critical to understanding America's transition from World War 2 conqueror to Cold War bungler.

This gritty, blow-by-blow chronicle of key battles, from the disastrous U.N. withdrawal from Kunuri to the bitter irony of Pork Chop Hill, is balanced by a thoughtful analysis of Cold War politics, giving the reader an opportunity to understand the inner workings of the Truman administration and its dealings with Capitol Hill and the military command structure. The strange case of General Douglas MacArthur, and his liability for thousands of American deaths, is painstakingly contrasted to the even more lethal behavior of Chairman Mao.

Halberstam uses interviews and contemporary documents to trace the career arcs of Truman and the other principals; the deadly momentum beginning with events as far back as the American Civil War, which helped shape the personality of Arthur MacArthur, the General's father. Much attention is paid to the influence of his mother, Mary Pinkney "Pinky" Hardy especially early in his career. By the time he takes command of the force defending the South, in the summer of 1950, MacArthur has become, not only one of America's authentic heroes: a legendary field commander complete with a partially-fabricated reputation, but a deluded victim of hubris and a willing tool of anti-communist crusaders on the American Right. He was a man determined to make a mark on history.

His decision, against orders, to bring the war to China, as part of a larger plan to challenge Mao's government and, ultimately, the Kremlin, is laid out in often painful detail. The real outrage of this conflict, Halberstam is able to see clearly after half a century, is of course that so many lives were lost, not for sound strategic purposes or the interests of national security, but because of the vanity of MacArthur on the one hand and Mao's indifference to human life on the other, and how these sinister forces were tragically joined; as two great nations were led by dynamic but profoundly flawed human beings.

After three years of fighting, and innumerable tales of personal suffering and tragedy, the Korean War ended by treaty with no territorial gains for anyone. Its U.S. veterans were quickly forgotten and their stories rarely featured in the national media, which continues to produce masterpieces on World War 2. The story is, frankly, embarrassing, from the United States' point of view, which explains, more than anything, why it was so quickly and utterly forgotten. Painful though it may be to remember, it is yet more painful to understand. The conflict might easily have been contained, even after the successful Northern invasion in the summer of 1950--indeed, that was what Truman and the Joint Chiefs wanted and expected from MacArthur.

What they got was an international crisis of the first order, with massive troop mobilizations, ill-fated offensives onto hostile ground, unlimited fodder for the propaganda mills of Mao and North Korea's Kim Il Sung, and a bloody full-scale war on territory nobody in their right mind would want. How that strategic blunder developed into decades of sometimes hysterical red-baiting, advancing the careers of the likes of Ronald Reagan, is one of those slyly misunderstood sidebars to American history. Halberstam, by contrasting big-picture dynamics with individual personalities, helps explain a lot about the lurch to the Right in the United States as cold warriors, in uniforms as well as in business suits, shaped the course of foreign policy through Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes.

The Coldest Winter is particularly important in helping to understand the next great exercise in futility by American forces, the Vietnam War. While most Americans seem to have at least some grasp of the factors involved with that conflict, the obvious connections to it, indeed causes for it, which arose in Korea a decade earlier are rarely discussed. Halberstam outlines the presidential moves, from Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, which led the U.S. into that deadly misadventure, illustrating the continuity of events over three decades.

Since the book was written and researched mostly during the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Halberstam is able, indeed obliged, to compare the influence of politics on both military intelligence and chains of command in the armed forces. He does so in an even-handed manner, coldly aware of the facts but reluctant to make bold criticisms which might seem appropriate to some writers.

America has been at war for at least 25 of the past 50 years, not counting brief encounters, and it's not always easy to understand why. Halberstam provides, in meticulous detail, a handy blueprint to this major theme in American life. He is able to put together, if not a rationale, at least a reliable plot explaining not only why this keeps happening, but the effect it has on people exposed to its violent terms.