The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War | David Halberstam

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War | David Halberstam | One of a kind

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The Coldest Winter...

	The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War David Halberstam Hyperion, 2007 - 736 pages average customer review:based on 126 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

David Halberstam's magisterial and thrilling The Best and the Brightest was the defining book for the Vietnam War. More than three decades later, Halberstam used his unrivalled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another dark corner in our history: the Korean War. The Coldest Winter is a successor to The Best and the Brightest, even though in historical terms it precedes it.Halberstam considered The Coldest Winter the best book he ever wrote, the culmination of forty-five years of writing about America's postwar foreign policy.Up until now, the Korean War has been the black hole of modern American history.The Coldest Winter changes that. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures -- Eisenhower, Truman, Acheson, Kim, and Mao, and Generals MacArthur, Almond, and Ridgway. At the same time, Halberstam provides us with his trademark highly evocative narrative journalism, chronicling the crucial battles with reportage of the highest order.At the heart of the book are the individual stories of the soldiers on the front lines who were left to deal with the consequences of the dangerous misjudgments and competing agendas of powerful men. We meet them, follow them, and see some of the most dreadful battles in history through their eyes. As ever, Halberstam was concerned with the extraordinary courage and resolve of people asked to bear an extraordinary burden.The Coldest Winter is contemporary history in its most literary and luminescent form, and provides crucial perspective on the Vietnam War and the events of today. It was a book that Halberstam first decided to write more than thirty years ago and that took him nearly ten years to write. It stands as a lasting testament to one of the greatest journalists and historians of our time, and to the fighting men whose heroism it chronicles.Includes an Afterword by Russell BakerTributes to David HalberstamDavid Halberstam died at the age of 73 in a car accident in California on April 23, 2007, just after completing The Coldest Winter. Legendary for his work ethic, his kindness to young writers, and his unbending moral spine, Halberstam had friends and admirers throughout journalism, many of whom spoke at his memorial service and at readings across the country for the release of The Coldest Winter. We have included testimonials given at his memorial service by two writers who made their reputations at the same newspaper where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War reporting, The New York Times: Anna Quindlen ...David occupied a lot of space on the planet. Perhaps he felt the price he must pay for that big voice, that big reach, that big reputation, was that his generosity had to be just as large. Most of us, when we take to the road and meet admiring strangers, vow afterward to answer the note pressed into our hands or to pass along the speech we promised to the person whose daughter couldn't be there to hear it. But with the best will in the world we arrive home to deadlines, bills, kids, friends, all the demands of a busy life. We mean to be our best selves, but often we forget. David did it. He always did it. The note, the call, the book, the advice. When I mentioned this once he dug his hands deep intothe pockets of his grey flannels, set his mouth at the corners, looked down and rumbled, "Well, but it's so easy." That's nonsense. It's not easy. But it is important, and why he has been remembered with enormous affection by ordinary readers all over this country, and why each of us who live some sort of public life would do well, with all due respect to Jesus, to ask ourselves about those small encounters: what would David do? ... Read her full tributeDexter Filkins .

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Halberstam's Last Masterpiece

David Halberstam tragically died in a car accident mere days after completing the finishing touches on "The Coldest Winter," his mammoth analysis of the Korean War. He left us with an important book that sheds light on a forgotten conflict that should have taught America lessons that would have served us well during the decision to go to war in Iraq.

"The Coldest Winter" spends most of its time analyzing the reasons for the Korean conflict, bringing together such disparate players as Truman, MacArthur, Mao, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung into a coherent narrative. America was trying to return to normalcy after the upheaval of WWII. Uncomfortable with the empire it inherited at the end of WWII, we reduced our military strength to a shadow of its WWII heyday - even MacArthur said we had too many troops.

This drawdown in strength coincided with Mao's victory over Chiang Kai Shek in the Chinese Civil War, which enraged the China Lobby in the United States to go after Truman and the Democrats for "losing China." Halberstam carefully explains that these forces compelled Truman to "unleash" Douglas MacArthur when the North Koreans began to move south.

If you're a MacArthur fan, "The Coldest Winter" is going to be tough going, as MacArthur emerges as a vain, manipulative dinosaur who would even go so far as to manipulate intelligence to mislead Washington and get what he wanted. Accepting credit but never blame, MacArthur is an obvious parallel to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triumvirate that led us into so many mistakes in Iraq. Mercifully, Halberstam draws these parallels with a light touch (or else the book would be more about today than about the forgotten Korea and would lose its value as history).

Once the war breaks out, Halberstam focuses on the first winter where American/United Nations forces are completely overrun by Korean/Chinese soldiers through MacArthur's triumph at Inchon and subsequent mistakes, through the arrival of "salvation" in the form of General Ridgway. Halberstam largely skips over the WWI-esque "meat-grinder" stalemate of the last couple of years of the war, but makes insightful points regarding the aftermath of the Korean conflict.

This is an important book that should be read. This review does not do it justice, but no review really could, given the book's importance and the shocking death of its author so shortly after its completion. Any student of America and its role in the world simply must read this book - and will be glad to have done so.

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One of a kind

Great book--nested series of bios and accounts of political and military events leading up to and during the Korean War, with some treatment of how Right Wing politics then influenced Kennedy and Johnson Administrations to become involved in Vietnam. A lot of attention is devoted to the pernicious role of MacArthur, and how he got the country in trouble, and prolonged the war through his personality disorder. I learned an awful lot and enjoyed the instruction. All the people I knew as a child whined about how Truman had lost China and how great a man MacArthur was. Now we know better, but they are all dead. I kept wondering if anything would have convinced them otherwise, since their beliefs were so ill-founded. I didn't have any complaints about this book, except it got really painful reading about how disastrous Ned Almond was as a soldier and as a human being.

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The Coldest Winter

Accurate historic account of the Korean War. I remember the grueling hardships I endured to survive and this account was more accurate than most I've read.

A Good Solid Story of the Causes of the Korean war & Fall of MacArthur

While this is not a complete story about Americas Most Forgotten War- The Second Korean War. (We fought a brief Campaign in Korea during the Post Civil War Era of showing the Flag) It is however a brillantly written story of the fall of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and one of our greatest military defeats of the Cold War. (Korea has a lot to teach us about the way the world works if we were to take heed of its lessons offered.)
While it has been previously & rightfully pointed out in the other reviews, some minor errors of details in this book. None the less the Author (who will be sorely missed by this reader) creates an excellent overview of the causes of the war & the tragic fall of a great but in no way perfect American Icon. Altogether this book is well worth the time and coin to get and read if one is interested in this period of American History.
As an added plus two forgotten but excellent - Generals Walker & Ridgeway are brought back into the light. Walker being the fellow who with an ill trained, equipped, supported and poorly led Army fought the Ruthless North Korean Army to a Standstill at the Pusan Perimeter.
Ridgeway who later on took over the 8th Army after the death of Walker in a jeep accident. Proceeded to make it into one of Americas Premier Fighting Armies and gave the Communist a severe whipping on the field. Ridgeway also later on helped delay Americas entry into Vietnam for almost 10 years.

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A Powerful Indictment of MacArthur

Whew! This is some read - great writing, heroes and villains, fatal errors of judgment and wonderful heroism all encompassed in Halberstam's last book.

Most of the dominant players in the book are well known - Truman, MacArthur, Stalin, Mao, Marshall. The author paints good portraits of Truman and MacArthur and their intense dislike for each other.
As a keynote speaker on communications I find it intriguing that Douglas MacArthur's speech to Congress - Old Soldiers Never Die - is treated as being one of history's great speeches. The man was a megalomaniac whom Halberstam suggests cared for no one but himself. His speech to Congress (as we Irish like to say) full of blarney, but blarney that had cost the lives of many. The author records many instances to indict MacArthur, but the simplest and most basic one is this man did not spend one night in Korea during the war. That is just mind-boggling.

MacArthur was badly served by a bunch of sycophantic nincompoops, who not only kow-towed to his every wish but deliberately misled Washington about what was really happening in Korea. The biggest culprit here was MacArthur's intelligence chief Brigadier General Charles Willoughby whose deliberate manipulation of intelligence cost the lives of many American soldiers. If Willoughby was half as devious as Halberstam suggests, his actions were not far short of treason.

While MacArthur and his acolytes are the true villains on the American side, Harry Truman does not escape unscathed. In a country that admittedly was tired of war, Truman allowed defense spending to fall to unacceptable levels. Thus when the Korean War broke out, the US initially could only send a poorly trained, poorly equipped military. The initial problem with Korea was Harry Truman was "dealing with a war he did not want, in a part of the world his national security people had not thought important, relying from the start on a commander in the field whom he did not like, and who in turn did not respect him." - Apart from that everything else was fine.

Halberstam takes us through some of the key battles of the war - Unsan, the failure to anticipate the Chinese invasion, Inchon (where MacArthur's plan proved brilliantly successful and according to a TIME correspondent led to the deification of the general fueled his ego), the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir and many others. In describing these battles he profiles many brave soldiers and the horrible weather conditions they had to endure.

If I have one criticism of his profiles it is that the good guys are really good - brave, upstanding, honest, genuine etc. while the bad guys are really bad - incompetent, lying, devious. Maybe they were but the portraits tend to be very black and white.

The turning point in the war was the appointment of Matthew Ridgway to lead the US effort and the recall of MacArthur, something which proved to be a major political liability for Truman initially. To some extent, Halberstam skims over the period after MacArthur's removal which is probably why some might claim this is not a true history of the war.

Overall, this is a great read. It is very long and for a non-military person sometimes (but not often) tough going. Halberstam died shortly after finalizing this book. The man went out in style.

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