Blogs > Cliopatria > Lloyd Billingsley: Review of David
Halberstam's: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
Oct 15, 2007 3:24 pm    In June, 1950, Syngman Rhee, the
militant leader of South Korea, and his imperialistic American
capitalist allies, decided to invade the peaceful socialist land
of North Korea. That's just about how it went down according to
I.F. Stone, author of Hidden History of the Korean War, still
taken seriously by people who read the Nation. How much of a
propaganda gambit that book actually was will emerge in The
Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam.
Korea gets billed as America's "first Vietnam," about which
Halberstam wrote about in The Best and the Brightest. The jacket
of Halberstam's current book calls the Korean conflict "another
dark corner in our history," the default position for any
American conflict against Communism. That will come as no
surprise in a publishing industry that can refer to George
Orwell as the author of Animal House. None o