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

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2007 by Barbara Demick

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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 speech in January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson described Korea as being "outside the U.S. security perimeter."

Acheson's remark would have the same repercussions as April Glaspie's insinuation to Saddam Hussein in 1990 that the United States would not be interested if Iraq crossed the border into Kuwait. North Korea's Kim Il Sung--as well as his backers, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin--understandably made the assumption that the United States would not intervene in a war between North and South Korea. But after Communist troops stormed across the border, the United States responded: a U.S.-led coalition was put together, under the United Nations flag. The Incheon landing was a spectacular success--the UN forces chased the North Koreans back across the thirty-eighth parallel, where they belonged--and by mid-October, UN troops occupied Pyongyang.

MacArthur, who was directing the show from Tokyo (where he was also supreme commander of U.S. Occupation forces in Japan), flew to Korea to take a bow. "Any celebrities here to greet me?" he asked as he stepped off the plane--adding, in a mocking reference to Kim II Sung, "Where is Kim Buck Tooth?"

MacArthur was a towering figure because of his World War II exploits; as supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific area, MacArthur had liberated not only the Philippines from the Japanese, but most of Southwest Asia and Australia as well. With the strategic use of air power to influence a land war, he effectively denied the Japanese access to both air and sea supply routes. The first victories in the Korean War reflected that earlier glory, and elevated his stature--as well as his ego--to new heights. ("A colossus bestriding Korea until the nemesis of his hubris overtook him," is how MacArthur's biographer William Manchester puts it.) MacArthur was utterly convinced that anti-Communist forces could capture the entire Korean peninsula if U.S. troops pushed all the way to the Yalu River, which forms the border between Korea and China. The United States haughtily rejected a peace proposal advanced by an Indian envoy to reestablish the border at the thirty-eighth parallel, and chose to fight on. Just as the Communists had assumed the United States would not intervene, MacArthur believed the Chinese would not enter the war.