When he died in a car crash this Spring, David Halberstam had just finished his 21st book, The Coldest Winter, an epic study of the Korean War. It's partly a work of military history, with combat narratives based on interviews with veterans of the conflict, but its greater value lies in the way Halberstam places the war in the context of the post-war world, of American and global politics and strategy.
It fills in yet another piece of the puzzle of America's mood after WWII -- dark, anxious, bewildered, unsure of its new role as a world superpower, veering between arrogance and lunatic paranoia.
There are many lessons for our own times to be learned from the book -- not least about the ways the Republican party managed to box the Democrats into policies they mistrusted under the threat of being labeled "soft on Communism". Substitute "terrorism" for "Communism" and you will see the same dynamic at work today.
The war in Korea all but wrecked Truman's presidency, but he was confident that history would judge him more kindly than his contemporaries, as indeed it has. Among the high-ranking soldiers and politicians, Matthew Ridgway and Truman emerge in Halberstam's book as the true heroes of the war. Ridgway learned how to fight the Chinese because he was willing to take them seriously, to respect them as soldiers, something the racist high command under MacArthur could not do. Truman was willing to buck popular sentiment and risk political ruin to oppose MacArthur, whose madness served the purposes of the right-wing Republicans in Washington but whose insubordination threatened the very core of the American system of government, the principle of civilian control of the military.
Among the boots on the ground, there were heroes by the thousands, though they got no glory out of it, or even much recognition from the folks at home. Korea was a war Americans wanted to forget, even while it was happening -- which is just the kind of war that needs to be remembered and studied with care. We're in one like it right now -- part of the price a nation pays for forgetting the grievous mistakes it has made in the past.