The North Korean dictator who touched off the war, Kim Il Sung, was not an opponent but a product of colonialism. Unfortunately, in The Coldest Winter, Halberstam (who died at 73 in a traffic accident this spring, shortly after completing the book) simply cuts and pastes his analysis of Vietnam onto Korea: It was, he writes, simply one more chapter in a century-long series of American imperial adventures in Asia in which Washington mistook Third World communism that was merely “a convenient instrument of anticolonial forces” for a cat’s-paw of the Russians.īut that paradigm, which is at least arguable in the case of Vietnam (though judging from the number of desperate boat people who fled after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam sure must have had a large pro-colonial population), is simply nutty when applied to Korea. government’s “lying machine” with such ferocity that President Kennedy tried to get the New York Times to bring him home while at the same time screaming at his aides: “Why can I get this stuff from Halberstam when I can’t get it from my own people?” Later, he wrote two books, The Making of a Quagmire and The Best and the Brightest, documenting the missteps that ensnared Washington in the Southeastern Asia briar patch. Halberstam spent his formative years as a reporter in Saigon dissecting what he called the U.S. For if The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War proves anything, it’s that Halberstam’s own vision of history was hopelessly and permanently clouded by Vietnam. Despite its accuracy, there’s a deadly irony in David Halberstam’s new book when he scathingly observes that what little Americans think they know about the Korean War is mostly derived from the film and TV series M-A-S-H, both nominally set in Korea but actually thinly disguised parables of the Vietnam War.

The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam