The Korean War's Rumsfeld: examining Douglas McArthur's debacle, David Halberstam found a familiar pattern.

• Author: Demick, Barbara
• Position: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War - Book review

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The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam Hyperion Press, 719 pp.

With binoculars slung round its neck and a jaunty officer's cap on its head, a sixteen-foot-tall bronze statue of General Douglas A. MacArthur stands on a bluff in Incheon, South Korea. It overlooks the very spot where thousands of U.S. troops, under MacArthur's command, landed in 1950 to drive back the North Korean forces. Devotees regularly pay homage to the Korean War general with bouquets of chrysanthemums accompanied by admiring notes--"Long Live MacArthur, the savior of freedom," read one when I visited a few years back. But much larger numbers of South Korean students and trade unionists have chosen this same place for a different purpose: to stage unruly protests in which they unfurl their cri de guerre: "Tear it down," they chant. "Tear it down."

MacArthur's detractors call him a war criminal. They contend that his lies and blunders unnecessarily prolonged the war in Korea, causing tens of thousands of deaths and leaving the country as the last front line of the cold war. This view of the American legacy in Korea has prevailed among younger generations of South Koreans for at least a decade. Now along comes The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, a 700-page-plus accounting of the conflict by the late David Halberstam. It is Halberstam's last book, completed shortly before his April 2007 death in a car accident. The Coldest Winter is a methodical dissection of many of the illusions about the Korean War, and it would seem that David Halberstam agreed with the South Korean dissidents: indeed, where they have failed in toppling General MacArthur from his pedestal, Halberstam has succeeded.

To the extent that most Americans think about the Korean War at all, it is as a selfless military invention to prevent a ruthless Communist dictator from overrunning South Korea. The damning particulars were never reexamined to the degree that they were after the conflict in Vietnam. Except for those who actually fought there, Halberstam notes, Korea became something of a black hole in U.S. history. As the years passed after the ceasefire in 1953, Americans wanted to know less about the conflict, not more. "Perhaps all wars are in some way or another the product of miscalculations," Halberstam writes. "But Korea was a place where almost every key decision on both sides turned on miscalculation."

The Communist invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, caught America by surprise. "Where is Korea?" asked one officer stationed in Japan upon hearing that North Korean forces had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, the line separating the country into two parts. Although the United States had itself partitioned the Korean peninsula after the defeat of the Japanese--and installed its own man, Syngman Rhee, in Seoul--Korea was still viewed as an irrelevant backwater. In a...