The Great Divide

Halberstam's final work, an incisive look at Korean War, again speaks truth to power

Duane Davis, Special to the Rocky

Published September 21, 2007 at midnight

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When he died last April in a car crash, David Halberstam was 73 years old and had long been considered one of America's premier journalists - though to call Halberstam a "journalist" is a little like calling Mount Everest a "mountain": technically accurate but not quite getting the scale of size and importance correct.

One thing is for sure: Halberstam had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, right from the get-go. Fresh out of Harvard in the mid '50s, he headed South and began reporting on the developing Civil Rights Movement. By 1960, he was with The New York Times, and, fatefully, was posted to South Vietnam in 1962. Two years later, he had a Pulitzer Prize for his analysis of the failures of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

He followed up this work in 1972 with a book, The Best and the Brightest, that remains one of the best nonfiction accounts of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Exhaustively detailed, intricately dovetailed with fact and personality, this examination of the ways intelligent men with the best of motives can make a hash of this nation's power and resources is without parallel.

In fact, when you see or hear the word "quagmire," in reference to a war, it's Halberstam you have to thank for this warning about the tendency of power and technology to bog down in the reality of field conditions in far- away wars.

At the time of his death, Halberstam had just completed what would be his last book: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. It's ironic that while North Korea is in the news of late (by virtue of Kim Jong-il and his on-again, off-again love affair with atomic bombs), few of us know why and how it is that there is a "North" and a "South" Korea, or, really, much about Korea at all.

Since we have to start somewhere, let's begin with Korea, 1950 to 1953. You may recall that America fought a war there: three years; 36,516 on our side killed; 58,127 South Korean soldiers killed; 215,000 North Korean soldiers killed; 114,000 Chinese soldiers killed; 315 Russian soldiers killed; Korean civilians killed - well, millions.

It was a cold, dirty, ugly, brutal little war that was not even called a "war" - Harry Truman called it a "police action" and a tradition was born that would flower again years later when the war in Vietnam was called a "conflict." Such lexical sleights-of-hand may be helpful in PR battles on the home front, but the guys killed in a "police action" are just as dead as the ones killed in a war.

It was, ultimately, a political war, a localized heating up to the boiling point of the Cold War: North Korea, Communist China and the USSR vs. South Korea, the U.N. and the United States. North Korea, supplied with arms and munitions by China and Russia, sent its army south across the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950, and, with the advantages of surprise and a remarkable unpreparedness by the South Korean forces and the U.S., rolled to victory after victory. By August, North Korea held most of the territory of the entire peninsula.

In a foretaste of the seesaw nature of the war, in mid-September U.S. forces made an extraordinary amphibious landing in rough seas and dangerous conditions behind enemy lines at Inchon. The enemy was rolled back and Seoul, the capital of South Korea, re-taken.

And so it went, back and forth, advance and retreat, a war of miles, yards, inches. Today, the names and places have faded from our national memory: the Yalu River, Pusan, Twin Tunnels, Spud Hill, Heartbreak Ridge, Triangle Hill, Pork Chop Hill, Sniper Ridge - taken, lost, re-taken.

It was a war with multiple and fast-changing fronts and rears, and I must admit that this reader was lost in the maze more than once. What holds the book together, though, is less the war and more its detailing of two U.S. generals: Douglas MacArthur and Matthew Ridgeway. At the outbreak of the conflict, MacArthur was overseeing the restructuring of Japan after WWII, a job he was doing brilliantly. In Korea though, as Halberstam sees it, MacArthur became the "architect of the disaster." He did this by setting his own course, in breathtaking defiance of his orders from Washington.

MacArthur wanted to carry the war into mainland China. He wanted, basically, to risk World War III. When he pushed the Army past the Yalu River, he triggered Mao's pushback with Communist Chinese Army units. From then on, while the U.S. could not be driven from the field, neither could we achieve a decisive win. General Ridgeway took over command of the military in Korea after MacArthur was pulled from duty by President Truman: "The collision between the general (MacArthur) and the president, which had been in the offing since the very beginning, was now about to take place, and at full force, and at a terrible moment."

Ridgeway, though, was equal to the task: tough, shrewd, an excellent tactician and brilliant leader. It was Ridgeway who would grind the enemy down, who, realizing there was no total victory in the offing, would inflict such terrible damage that, finally, an exhausted - though far from defeated - North Korea and Communist China would come to an uneasy stalemate. A stalemate at exactly the same place that the players had started: North Korea and South Korea divided by the 38th Parallel. As it was before the war, after the war and as it is today.

Halberstam's death is a great loss to this country, and this book is a fine example of why. You could say that his work habits were simple: interview everybody alive involved in the subject at hand; read everything available about those no longer alive; collate the data into hierarchies of significance while teasing out obscure patterns and hidden connections. And then beard the lion, speak truth to power.

We will miss this voice for a long time to come.

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

• By David Halberstam. Hyperion, $35.

• Grade: A

Friends indeed

In the wake of Halberstam's death, his influential friends will be helping promote the book around the country. They include: Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Anna Quindlen and Alex Kotlowitz.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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